Women and children trailed the fighting battalions. Women were determined to prove themselves as resourceful as the men: They were out to avenge years of maltreatment. They robbed stores in towns and sacked hacienda wardrobes. They strutted in Parisian finery, wore silk hosiery, and elegant shawls. Women became terrorists in some regions.
Thieves' markets cropped up in León, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Morelia. Women traded silverware for food, a blouse, a shirt, cigarettes. They traded Sevreware for ammunition and shoes for pistols.
The women dynamited bank vaults and shared the money—government and counterfeit. They rifled safes and destroyed documents at haciendas—land grants, deeds, notarizations. They roared into a village, waving flimsy flags, encountering dogs barking and howling. They fired their rifles and pistols; they caroused and conscripted fighters.
The horde fought, retreated, lost, and fought again, seldom aware of a victory.
When their dead piled up in cornfields and fields of maguey, too numerous to bury, they left them to be eaten by coyotes, dogs, buzzards. They learned to live as much life as possible between sunup and sundown. They copulated in the fields. They promised one another fidelity, they lost one another, they found someone else. Children, born in the field, were bundled into rebozos and lugged to the next encampment
Again and again, they robbed the government troops of ammunition, rifles, revolvers, and machineguns. It was steal or quit fighting. They perpetrated more and more dangerous raids: They spied; they used a hot-air balloon; they filtered through troop concentrations; they passed themselves off as scouts; faithfully, they followed Pancho Villa and his henchmen and they vulturized the dead in the barrancas, on the haciendas, in the towns.