Three years after Villa’s death, his grave was exhumed and his body decapitated. No one knows who did this. The only suspect was Emil Holmdahl, who was arrested and then released for lack of evidence—or, some say, due to political pressure from the north. Holmdahl was an American, a soldier of fortune who had fought in several wars and served under the American general who went looking for Villa in a campaign called the Punitive Expedition. Holmdahl, however, did not have Villa’s head in his possession.
A hundred years later, the only working theory is that Holmdahl sold Villa’s head to a powerful and influential person in the north. Then the trail falls into legend: that it perhaps ended up in the hands of Prescott Bush, who was a member of the Order of the Skull and Bones at Yale University, a secret society that has had several US presidents as members (including Prescott’s son, George H. W. Bush, and grandson, George W. Bush). Skull and Bones denies that it has the skull, though it was known in the 20th century to possess other such “trophies.” However great the story is, the connection between Villa’s head and the secret society is dubious, with very few historical facts to back it up.
But the reason the story sticks is maybe the same reason that Josefina asked me if I knew where the head was: the missing head of Pancho Villa has a lot to say about the Mexican-American border, the secrets of American empire, and even the way that those things are evolving during the Trump administration. Maybe Josefina thought that the location of Villa’s head is something that all White Americans know, hiding it from their Mexican neighbors in some 100-year-old act of revenge.
While I couldn’t exactly go in search of the head—others far more qualified have tried—I decided to go in search of the story. I wanted to understand what it has to do with Josefina and me, living as we do in Colorado, just inside the northernmost border between Mexico and the United States—the border that existed before Mexico ceded some of Colorado and Wyoming and all of Arizona, California, Nevada, and New Mexico to the United States under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, at the end of the Mexican-American War.