Villa’s <i> Compadre</i> Rides Again : He Saddled Up in Pancho’s Revolt; Now, at 96, He Takes Bus

He’s vague about dates and places now, but with a little prompting from his children, Teodoro Sanabria can still conjure up some stark scenes of revolutionary retribution.

“Tell about when Pancho Villa killed his compadre ,” says Sanabria’s son, Louis, leaning forward to hear once more the story that has so often been told to family members.

“This compadre was stealing money from Pancho Villa,” says Sanabria, who turned 96 on Saturday. “We went to his house at midnight, and he was home. He jumped out the window. He thought we’d be in the front of the house, so he went out through the back yard. But we were waiting there for him.”

Sanabria, a thin man with humor-filled gray eyes and an appearance of fragility in the soft cushions of his son’s couch, waves his hand in a dismissive gesture.

“They shot him right there,” he says.

Such was justice under the imperious Mexican revolutionary Gen. Pancho Villa, when even compadres-- those who had become part of Villa’s own extended family through the complex web of godfather and godmother relationships--could be executed in cold blood.

But that was war, says Sanabria, who is apparently one of the last surviving members of Villa’s guerrilla army. Everyone in Mexico seemed to be swept up in it in those days.

For Sanabria, it was as a teen-ager that he joined the movement. Like Villa, he was born in the Mexican state of Durango. “We were neighbors,” Sanabria says. He signed up with Villa in 1910, he says, a slim young man whom the general always addressed as muchachito because of his boyish appearance.

He stayed with Villa for five years as a bookkeeper, he says, witnessing some of the bloodiest battles of the northern campaign, including the infamous Villista raid into Columbus, N.M., that left 20 Americans dead.

A retired chef with 10 great-grandchildren, Sanabria now spends his days in an unvaried routine. Each day the old man, who lives with his son in La Puente, travels on RTD buses to downtown Los Angeles, where he lunches at Clifton’s Cafeteria on Broadway.

The RTD has turned Sanabria into something of a celebrity in a series of newspaper advertisements to promote bus ridership. “At 17, I rode with Pancho Villa,” one ad says. “At 96, I ride the RTD.”

“Once in a while somebody on the bus asks me what it’s about,” he says, with that dismissive wave of the hand. “I tell them it’s my picture, that’s all.”

Authorities on the Mexican Revolution say that it is impossible to verify Sanabria’s role in the war. “There’s no national registry of names,” said Manuel Urbina, a history professor at the College of the Mainland in Texas City, Texas, who is conducting an oral history project on the revolution.

Sanabria has no old pictures or corroborating documents, just a prized autograph from Villa’s widow, Luz Corral de Villa, who visited the Sanabria family occasionally during the 1950s.

But Urbina, who has identified seven other living members of Villa’s army, said that Sanabria’s accounts agree with historical fact. “He sounds very credible to me,” Urbina said.

The authenticating details include Sanabria’s account of the New Mexico raid. “An American had sold us some ammunition that was no good,” he says. “It was just fire and smoke coming out of the gun and nothing else.” Villa himself led a party of several hundred against the swindler, who escaped, Sanabria says. But an American Army detachment garrisoned there engaged the Mexican raiders in battle.

“We fought them, wiped them out,” Sanabria says.

Historical accounts confirm that the incident was probably prompted by the chicanery of New Mexico arms dealer Sam Rabel, whose property was shot up in the raid by the Villistas. The incident prompted a punitive expedition led by Gen. John Pershing, who vainly chased Villa across the Chihuahua landscape.

Sanabria says he remembers seeing Pershing, a pale figure in a campaign hat, leading the American expeditionary force. “He gets teary-eyed about it sometimes,” says Sanabria’s daughter, Olivia Ekizian, a secretary who lives in La Verne. “He still remembers that they once called Pancho Villa a bandit, and he was fighting against this famous general who was known all over the world.”

After that, Sanabria moved to Ciudad Juarez, where he worked for a time for Villa’s brother, Hipolito, a retail merchant (and according to some accounts, the city’s gambling boss).

He couldn’t return to Durango, he says, because of grudges left over from the war. “I had enemies in Durango,” he says. “There was a big general with whom I had a fight.”

Urbina says that many of the Villistas had to flee their hometowns because of left-over grudges. “In war, you kill people, and sometimes the families of those that died realize who it was on the other side,” he says. “There’s one old man I know who was with both Villa and Zapata. He doesn’t want me to publish the battles he fought in, because he’s still afraid they’ll come after him.”

Sanabria ended up in Los Angeles, where he landed jobs in Beverly Hills restaurants, working his way up from salad man to chef. He met his wife, Jessie, one afternoon in MacArthur Park, and they subsequently had five children. His oldest, Robert, 65, a retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, himself rides RTD buses with a senior citizen’s pass.

Sanabria moved to La Puente nine years ago, after the death of his wife. “He still goes every Thursday to the cemetery in East Los Angeles to take flowers to the grave,” said Louis Sanabria, a warehouse foreman in a Los Angeles dairy.

The daily routine starts at 5 a.m., when Sanabria gets out of bed and makes coffee and two pieces of toast. He waters some flowers in the yard, smokes a cigarette, reads the newspaper, then prepares for his trip into Los Angeles. By 8:45, Sanabria is strolling to the bus stop, unhurried, slightly stooped, chatting with neighbors along the way.

Sanabria’s independence has served to keep him healthy and alert, his children say. “The last time he went to the doctor was 15 years ago, when he had the flu,” Louis Sanabria said.

“Doctors,” says the father scornfully. “I know what they’re talking about.” He rubs forefinger and thumb together in the age-old gesture for money.

Ninety minutes after he leaves the house, after switching buses at El Monte RTD terminal and walking from Hill Street to Broadway, Sanabria is at Clifton’s, carefully selecting his lunch. “I get the best,” he says. “A $5 lunch.”

He’s a solitary figure in the busy cafeteria, a slight man in a fedora and tweed sports jacket, sitting at a table by himself. Someone asks him about Villa.

“He was a good man,” says Sanabria. “He was for the poor people.”

A man at an adjoining table looks up in astonishment. “Y’all are talkin’ about some old times,” he says.

After lunch, Sanabria walks across 7th Street to the Broadway Plaza mall, where he usually finds some elderly friends. But it’s chilly today, and his friends are not there. “They’re too old,” he says, sitting by himself and lighting a cigarette. “They’re younger than me, but they’re too old.”