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had posed for Otis Aultman’s camera anyway, sitting

stiffly next to each other. Pancho, famous for his

sweet tooth, had ordered the Elite Baseball, a scoop

of chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream, for ten cents.

Pascual didn’t want anything.

I walked two blocks down from the Elite

Confectionary to the First National Bank Building on

the corner of Oregon and San Antonio. In 1914, Villa

had his Consulado de Mexico there. El Paso Detective

Fred Delgado, who moonlighted as Villa’s secret

agent, worked out of Room 418. When the U.S. rec-

ognized Venustiano Carranza in 1915, Pancho Villa

shut the consulate down. I looked around the place,

maybe something had been left behind. Villa’s offices

were empty. The whole building was empty. No one

had even bothered to at least put up a little sign read-

ing, “Pancho Villa was here.”

Pancho Villa had been across the street at the El

Paso del Norte Hotel as well. That’s where my Latin

Jazz band, Fronteras No Más, used to play at the

hotel’s Dome Bar every Saturday night for tourists and

hip Latinos. Villa didn’t like that place too much

though. He thought too many perfumados—sweet

smelling dandies—stayed there, like the Guggenheims

(who owned one of the ASARCO smelters Villa threat-

ened to confiscate in Chihuahua), General Pershing,

Alvaro Obregón and the Terrazas clan.

He preferred to lodge at the Roma Hotel, on the

corner of Paisano and El Paso Street, during his

American exile in 1913. It was a more down-to-earth

place. Villa and his number one wife Luz Corral

stayed there after he escaped from a Mexico City

prison. She had a soft spot for El Paso too. Pancho

would walk around coddling pigeons in his arms.

People thought he was a little eccentric but he told

them pigeons were the only thing he could eat, on

account of his delicate stomach. The truth was he was

using them as homing pigeons, to send messages to

his rebel friends in Chihuahua.

Almost every evening, Pancho Villa would walk

downstairs to the Emporium Bar, which was also a lit-

tle strange since Pancho was a teetotaler. In 1914,

Emiliano Zapata insisted that they toast to their tri-

umphal entry into Mexico City with a sip of cognac

and Villa almost choked on it. At the Emporium Bar,

Villa would order nothing but strawberry soda pop,

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Triumphal entry of the Maderistas after defeating the federals, 1911. Photo by David Hoffman.

(Rio Grande Historical Collections, Archives and Special Collections Department, NMSU.)