La voz de Pancho Villa

[Tyrn]

Hi,

I've been reading It by Stephen King, in Spanish.

A snippet:


—Policías rurales, señorrr —respondió Richie,
con la voz de Pancho Villa, mientras se retorcía un
invisible bigote.




It makes me think, not for the first time, that there must be popular movies about Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution in general. It stands to reason. However, I did not manage to find any real classic with an original Spanish soundtrack. I must be missing something, surely.

[poli]

Before he was a legendary and controversial revolutionary leader, he was a bandito who got in trouble with the rural police in Northwestern Mexico and the police lost the fight. He was a stocky man with a curled up mustache, who wore a big sombrero and he supposedly howled in defiance.

[Tyrn]

So much I hear about . I'm just asking about movies about Mexican Revolution or earlier history, originally filmed in Spanish. Looks like there is not a lot them. Everybody is welcome: Emiliano Zapata, Porfirio Diaz, Benjamín Argumedo...

[poli]

"Viva Villa" was a very popular USA movie made in the early 1930's. I saw it. It is very good, but hyper-violent made before censorship was popular in Hollywood, I just checked on-line, and there are a lot of scenes dubbed in Spanish on Youtube. I saw a well produced Mexican documentary about him spoken in the finest Mexican Spanish.

[AngelicaDeAlquezar]

Adding to what Poli said:

Pancho Villa has his special place in American popular culture, since he was the only Mexican who "invaded" American territory. He became the most common portrait of "the Mexican". Speedy Gonzales and Panchito Pistoles (to name only the ones I remember since childhood) are stereotypes after Villa's persona. Also, for many foreigners, the most visible Mexican character in history is him, as the guy with a big moustache riding a horse, shooting his gun in the air and leading a noisy gang of guys ravaging the land they roamed.

Without any context, I assume the character in your book is simply doing the usual mockery of a Mexican accent (normally just characterized by stressing the "r" sound and probably a higher tone of voice) and he's mimicking a common gesture in many Mexican men with big moustaches that tend to continually touch and roll their facial hair.

Side note: The "Policía Rural" was originally a police force established to pacify the country, which had been quite unstable after the Independence war; it worked mostly along the roads communicating peasant communities and in their municipalities.
Porfirio Díaz used the police power to control uneasy communities and made it an instrument to extort rich businesspeople, to repress all kinds of movements questioning his power, and to murder anyone who would go against his will. Pancho Villa was one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution, which toppled Díaz' government, with the ideal of establishing a new more democratic political regime in favor of the poor peasants and workers.

Here's a popular Mexican movie celebrating the man. Pedro Armendáriz is the actor playing Pancho Villa; it must be his most celebrated character during his career.

[Tyrn]

I've heard that Porfirio Diaz had the industrialization of Mexico in mind, among other things. The Científicos, that sort of thing. One cannot extort rich businesspeople and do industrialization at the same time, probably.

[AngelicaDeAlquezar]

Porfirio Díaz was a war hero. He was a distinguished general during the French Invasion. He consolidated political stability by the end of the 1800s. He was a positivist and a progressive thinker, formed in an important freemason lodge; that's why he engaged positivists to design government policies.
He did attract a big amount of foreign investments and he was responsible for the economic growth of the country. But he also became a ruthless corrupt dictator who also benefited himself from selectively fighting crime. If an important manager from a foreign firm was kidnapped by a gang, he would negotiate the rescue, so the bandits would be executed, the manager would testify how great his government was and he would keep a part of the money. He prosecuted people who were not criminals, but exhibited them as such. He would send his military friends to regions that "needed to be pacified" to make temporary heroes to make the news and to drawn rebellions. The Mexican Revolution was not a gratuitous war. People rebelled against a cold-blooded autocrat who loved his country, but loved more his power.