My family is historically uneventful, even when there have been close brushes with fame. Unlike Bondurant, I don’t even have odd bits of family lore that could be reimagined into an action-packed thriller—to me, the fascinating thing about my grandparents is that they managed to survive and lead relatively ordinary lives.

            On my Puerto Rican side, my grandfather is the oldest of nine siblings, and my grandmother somewhere in the middle of fourteen siblings. They both grew up in dirt-poor farming communities, and my grandpa managed to scrape his way through medical school. My grandmother was on her way to becoming a nun when she met my grandpa and had a change of plans. Maybe there’s some sexy tidbit there about nuns turning naughty, but my extremely Catholic grandma wouldn’t hear of it.

            On my Mexican side, legend has it that my dad’s grandmother once turned down Pancho Villa himself. If you don’t know who Francisco “Pancho” Villa is, just imagine a badass in a sombrero riding a horse, wielding a shotgun, outrunning the top general of the U.S. Army sent to chase him around for nine months. He’s considered, along with Zapata, the Mexican Robin Hood, so to speak. I was fairly young when this was mentioned to me, the brutalities of the Mexican Revolution hidden for my own sanity, and the sexual implications of a general requesting lodgings for his troops did not occur to me.

            It’s only an anecdote, really, but everything suggested by its simplicity makes me want to know more. All my dad told me was this: Villa was riding through town with his men. He spotted his grandmother, then a young single woman, and decided that he fancied her. “Excuse me, miss, I was wondering if you might be of assistance. My men are tired, hungry, they want somewhere to rest their weary heads…” But she wouldn’t let him finish. Her answer was an effective nope and she scrammed.

            Since then, I’ve read a bit of literature from the Mexican Revolution era, and the images aren’t pretty. My grandma was incredibly lucky to only have the general ask, politely (assuming this is the case), rather than have her troops simply march into town and take what they believed to be their rightful reward for surviving to another town. Another oddity is that my dad’s family is from Chihuahua—and so was Pancho Villa; in fact, he served as the state’s governor from 1913 to 1914. But he has darker origins, and I could imagine a much more interesting story arising, drawing from the badass facts and embellishing with fiction.

            Villa was born a peasant, and after a brief stint as a bandit, he was arrested and conscripted into the army. He deserted, fled to Chihuahua, and made a name for himself by killing an army officer and stealing his horse. Some more years of general outlaw badassery ensued, but around the beginning of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Villa decided to use his cunning and firepower for good, turning his criminal activity against the landowners for the benefit of the peasants. This could make for a good story somehow—who was the army officer he killed? Was he related to my great-grandmother? Did Villa approach her when he was still a mercenary, or did she harness his passion, did she convince him to fight for good? Maybe when she turned him down, it wasn’t out of spite, but merely an acknowledgement that he was bound for a blaze of glory, while she just wanted the fighting to be over, and she knew their paths should not cross again.

            I’d read that story.