Eyewitness : Veteran of Pancho Villa’s Army Adds Life to History Lessons

A classroom full of 10-year-olds peered deep into the past this week, when a 98-year-old veteran of the Mexican Revolution spent an hour talking to them about Mexico during the 1910 upheaval and his life as an immigrant in the United States.

The children, members of Patricia McGinty’s fifth-grade class at Our Lady of the Assumption School, wanted to know all the important things: What was Pancho Villa really like? Was there indoor plumbing in those days?

“Villa was for the poor,” said Teodoro Sanabria, one of half a dozen or so living veterans of Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army and a native of Durango, Mexico. “The rich were for themselves.”

In the cities, there was plumbing. “But on the ranch, you went to the river,” said Sanabria, a frail-looking man who was there at the request of his 10-year-old grandson, Alex Ekizian.

“My grandfather has lived a very exciting life, just like Indiana Jones,” said Alex, introducing Sanabria.

It was all part of a series of events relating to immigration, McGinty explained. “I wanted them to realize that what’s in their history books is part of everyday life,” McGinty said after the class.

So far, the fifth-graders have learned about inventions and artistic contributions by immigrants and about ethnic foods. “We made tortillas in the classroom and we’re having an international food day,” McGinty said.

Alex and his classmates were each assigned to write a paper about an immigrant. Alex carried it a step further, bringing in his grandfather, who came to the United States more than 60 years ago, in the flesh.

Also joining the class on Tuesday was Richard Santillan, professor of ethnic and women’s studies at Cal Poly Pomona, who challenged the students to find out more about their family histories. “There are students, 18, 19 and 20 years old, who come to college and don’t know anything about who they are,” Santillan said.

Then he asked the class about the national origins of their parents. They ranged from China, Mexico and Africa to Italy, France and, according to one girl, Oklahoma. About half of the class of 29 were the children of immigrants.

Sanabria was a willing storyteller, though he was a little fuzzy at times on the details. He couldn’t remember what early telephones looked like or what kinds of diseases Mexicans suffered from in the early 20th Century.

But he remembered his beloved Pancho Villa, a fellow native of Durango, whom Sanabria joined as a 14-year-old bookkeeper.

Villa’s real name was Doroteo Arango, and he always called Sanabria “Muchachito,” or little boy, because of Teodoro’s youth.

“But he gave me orders . . . orders to fight,” Sanabria said. “I wasn’t afraid of anything.”

There were some hard times galloping on horseback across northern Mexico. Sometimes there was no food or water. “Then you got some cows or tortillas or water,” Sanabria said. “We were hungry many times. Nobody got sick. We were young and strong. . . . I was happy. Really I was.”

How did Villa die? “They shot him,” said Sanabria, recounting the tale of Villa’s assassination in 1923. “There were three of them and he was in a car. In Chihuahua. I found out when they buried him, his head was not there. Nobody knows where the head is.”

Sanabria went to Texas shortly after the revolution and eventually made his way to Los Angeles. He had none of the problems that most immigrants had. He was ushered across the Mexican border without questions.

Did anybody try to stop him? “No, not in those days.”

In America, he always found jobs in restaurants, even during the Great Depression. He worked his way up from salad man to chef, at restaurants like Ciro’s and the Mocambo, where movie stars used to come into the kitchen to shake hands with him. It was a good life.

But Mexican immigrants had little choice in the matter, he acknowledged. “That was all we could do,” he said. “We all had to work in restaurants.”

Sanabria, who has lived in La Puente with his son Louis for the past 11 years, has five children, 16 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren. He rarely thinks about his native country now.

What does he miss most about Mexico, one boy asked.

“I don’t miss nothing from Mexico,” Sanabria said. “Everything is here.”