Villa told a number of conflicting stories about his early life, and his "early life remains shrouded in mystery." According to most sources, he was born on 5 June 1878, and named Jose Doroteo Arango Arambula at birth. His father was a sharecropper named Agustin Arango, and his mother was Micaela Arambula. He grew up at the Rancho de la Coyotada, one of the largest haciendas in the state of Durango.

Villa was famous during the Revolution and has remained so, holding a fairly mythical reputation in Mexican consciousness, but not officially recognized in Mexico until long after his death. As the "Centaur from the North" he was considered a threat to property and order on both sides of the border, feared, and revered, as a modern Robin Hood.  In Mariano Azuela's novel The Underdogs, anti-federal soldiers talk about him as an archetype of an anti-authoritarian bandit: "Villa, indomitable lord of the sierra, the eternal victim of all governments... Villa tracked, hunted down like a wild beast... Villa the reincarnation of the old legend; Villa as Providence, the bandit, that passes through the world armed with the blazing torch of an ideal: to rob the rich and give to the poor. It was the poor who built up and imposed a legend about him which Time itself was to increase and embellish as a shining example from generation to generation." However, a little later, one character distrusts the rumors: "Anastasio Montanez questioned the speaker more particularly. It was not long before he realized that all this high praise was hearsay and that not a single man in Natera's army had ever laid eyes on Villa."  Whatever the reality behind the legends, even after his defeat Villa remained a powerful character still lurking in the Mexican mind; in 1950 Octavio Paz wrote, in his morose but thoughtful book on the Mexican soul, The Labyrinth of Solitude, "The brutality and uncouthness of many of the revolutionary leaders has not prevented them from becoming popular myths. Villa still gallops through the north, in songs and ballads; Zapata dies at every popular fair. ... It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death."  Pancho Villa remains a controversial figure in the United States. USA Today reported, "A terrorist in 1916, a tourist attraction in 2011. ... On Jan. 8, 1916, 18 U.S. businessmen were massacred by Villa's men in a train robbery in northern Mexico. It was not the first or last of Villa's atrocities; he personally shot a priest who begged for clemency for his villagers, as well as a woman who blamed him for her husband's death."

Using a quote from the above article, answer the following question: how was he like robin hood?
Villa tracked, hunted down like a wild beast...