How El Pasoans in 1911 climbed onto their rooftops to watch Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution storm the city of Juárez, right across the river — a war for a front-row audience, and stray bullets that reached the American side.
Here's a piece of true history so cinematic you'd think I was making it up — but I'm not. Just over a hundred years ago, the people of El Paso watched a revolution unfold, live, from their own rooftops. Let me tell you.
The year is nineteen eleven, and Mexico is erupting in revolution — the great Mexican Revolution, the uprising that would topple a dictator and remake the nation. And one of its most famous, most dashing, most dangerous leaders is a former bandit turned revolutionary general named Pancho Villa. And in May of that year, Villa and another rebel commander decide to seize a great prize: Ciudad Juárez, the city right across the river from El Paso — the very city you saw from the overlook.
Now think about the geography. Juárez and El Paso are twins, separated only by the narrow Rio Grande. So when Villa's rebels attacked Juárez — the gunfire, the cavalry charges, the artillery, house-to-house fighting through the streets — it was all happening a stone's throw away, right across the water, in plain view of El Paso. And the El Pasoans did exactly what you or I would probably do: they went up on their roofs to watch. They climbed onto the tops of buildings, up to the roof of the grand old Hotel Paso del Norte downtown, and they lined up like it was a ball game — Americans in their Sunday clothes, watching a real war being fought a few hundred yards away, across an international border. A revolution, with a rooftop audience.
But war doesn't respect a property line, and here's the sobering turn. The bullets didn't all stay in Mexico. Stray rounds from the battle came whizzing across the river into El Paso — and they found people. Several El Pasoans, watching from the American side, were struck; some were killed, several more wounded, just standing on their own soil, watching. And the mayor had to order everyone down off the rooftops for their own safety. Villa took Juárez — a huge victory that helped bring down the dictator within days. And El Paso had witnessed the whole thing, up close, and paid a little of the price. Two cities, one river, one history — bound so tight that when the revolution came to one, the other watched it from the roof, and bled a little too. Look across that river as you drive, and remember: it has seen a great deal. Roll on.
Photo: D.W. Hoffman, an El Paso photographer · Public domain
