One Friday, as I sat down at a table at the community meal my church hosts, Josefina and Nora were talking about the head of Pancho Villa. “Amy,” Josefina asked me, with just enough slyness that I couldn’t be sure if she was joking or serious, “do you know where the head of Pancho Villa is?”
“The head of Pancho Villa is missing?” I replied innocently.
In truth I knew nothing about Villa, and I did not know about the mystery of his head. Villa’s history had never been told to me, or I hadn’t listened. When I sang “La Cucaracha” as a fifth grader in South Dakota, no one mentioned that it was used as a fight song for Villa’s army. I had only a feeling, the sediment of the song’s mockery but not its content. And I had no idea why this might be coming up during an ordinary lunch on an ordinary day in 2024, a few months before the reelection of Donald Trump.
