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The General and
the Jaguar (Little, Brown and
Company), by Eileen Welsome, is a historical account
of General John Pershing's pursuit of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, after the latter's attack on Columbus, New
Mexico in March of 1916. The book is a
lively, highly readable history of this episode, and its aftermath, but
ultimately, and unfortunately, it does not give a balanced view of its main
characters, particularly Villa.
Welsome's view of history is to focus on the details, which is
fortunate for the casual reader who wants to be entranced by a good story and
fascinating characters. The author does
briefly turn her attention to some of the systemic causes of the Mexican
Revolution- the land concentration among the Mexican elite during the Porfiriato, the blatant and brutal usurpation of village
communal lands, and the rampant political corruption of the Mexican
regime. But the author truly lingers on
the personal passions, and even savagery, of Villa, what he wore the night
before the attack, and the minute-by-minute rendering of the action as Villa
brazenly invades the
Villa's attack is
primarily, according to Welsome, a vengeful act to
repay the
But placing Villa's
reasons for revolution and his subsequent raid on
What becomes a
critical problem for The General and the Jaguar, however, is what we
might call the 'morality of description.'
What we focus on or how we focus on it, whether we are fiction or
nonfiction writers, gives it importance, or takes it away from something
else. In Welsome's
book, the murdered American citizens are named, and given personal histories,
and described in loving detail. But the
one hundred Mexicans who die in the raid are, well, just formless
'Mexicans.' They die, but no reader
feels their pain, nor knows them as full characters, nor why they died. And so it goes for much of the picture of
Villa, the raid, General Pershing's
punitive expedition, and the ensuing border drama: the perspective is
primarily from American and British historical sources, like military documents
and newspapers, and it's a limited one.
Too often, Welsome simply repeats the stereotypes from these sources:
Mexicans are 'treacherous,' while American soldiers are 'professional' and
'magnificent.' When General Hugh Scott
meets with General Alvaro Obregón in
A careful reader of
this book might uncover the basic reason for Welsome's
limitations: Pulitzer-Prize winning author Welsome
does not know Spanish, or at least not very well. The first clues are grammatical mistakes in
the Spanish used in The General and the Jaguar. Another clue is Welsome's
thanking a colleague, in her Acknowledgements, for reviewing the Spanish
portions of her text. Finally, in her
Selected Bibliography, only two of 385 sources cited are in Spanish. Unfortunately, this language deficiency
distorts the often captivating character portraits and scenes in her history
book.
As readers we are
left only with what could have been: a picture of Villa and his men through
their own eyes, a perspective of what Villa really meant to the poor people of
Chihuahua and beyond, a view of Pershing and his men not only from the
military's point of view but also from the perspective of Mexicanos
who saw American soldiers hunting for Villa in their country, and imagined,
correctly as it turns out, that powerful figures in the American establishment
contemplated taking over Mexico permanently.
The General and the Jaguar is an easy read, and that in turn is
its greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness.
This book review
appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of the Multicultural
Review.