Author: Mark Cronlund Anderson

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780806131726

This colorful history of Pancho Villa as a propagandist tells how the legendary guerrilla waged war not only on the battlefield but also in the mass media, where he promoted his foreign policy of friendship with the United States in a bid to gain American backing for the Mexican Revolution between 1913 and 1915. Mark Cronlund Anderson explores issues of race, identity, and the power of the mass media to explain how Villa dueled with his archrivals, Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta and Villa's ostensible colleague-in-arms, Venustiano Carranza, using a sophisticated public-relations machine. Villa ultimately lost the military struggle but won the propaganda war by successfully casting himself as stereotypically "American" -- clever, fearless, modest, humble, self-reliant, and a champion of the downtrodden -- while representing his rivals as backward, racially inferior, and morally impaired. Examining the diplomatic correspondence, news reports, and even the political cartoons of the time, Anderson reveals how Villa set America's media agendas and influenced U.S. foreign policy -- all the way to the Woodrow Wilson White House.