Maybe you're waiting until Wednesday to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but they've already started the annual week-long party in San Patricio, Jalisco, on Mexico's Pacific coast. This year they may be listening to the new Chieftains album San Patricio, a fusion of Irish and Mexican music.
http://www.irishcentral.com/IrishAmerica/The-March-of-the-Forgotten-87237152.html?page=1
The visiting gringos are certainly drinking Jamieson's and getting misty-eyed as they retell the story of the brave Irish martyrs who fought with Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848. Like so much of conventional wisdom, quite a bit of it is wrong, or at least questionable.
“No, the San Patricio soldiers couldn't have settled in the town. None of them survived,” a Mexican scholar told me. But some did,escaping the fate of being hanged as deserters by the United States Army. There may have been only a handful, but a few of them accepted the Mexican government's offer of land grants and quietly settled into the country.
The popular story, as recounted in the movie One Man's Hero, is that when the Irish soldiers entered Mexico with the U.S. Army they found themselves fighting people just like themselves: Catholic villagers. And so they defected to the Mexican Army, which would be led by General Santa Anna, who had conquered the Alamo 10 years earlier.
And why were there Irish in the U.S. Army? They had come to America to escape famine at home, booking passage on a ship to New Orleans because the fare was cheaper than to other ports such as New York. There was little work available, and much resentment, and so they joined the Army in Texas.
The deserters weren't all Irish. The Saint Patrick's Battalion (Batallón de San Patricio) included Canadians, Scots, English and several European nationalities, as well as some African-Americans who had escaped slavery in the South; one of the issues in that war was the Texan desire to maintain slavery and the Mexican ban on it. Mexico offered more incentives than sentimental attachment to villages and religion – citizenship, higher pay and promises of land. There may have been as few as 175, or as many as several hundred. (There's that slippery history again.) Mexico has long honored the battalion in ceremonies in Mexico City's San Jacinto Plaza on September 12, the anniversary of the executions. In 1997 then-President Ernesto Zedillo commemorated the 150th anniversary of the executions.
Besides the truly awful One Man's Hero,there are a few other page and screen sources of this little-known chapter of history. Some claim the story was suppressed by the United States government,which may be true.
The Irish in America, a History Channel production available at Blockbuster and Amazon.
PBS also did a series called the Irish in America. Unfortunately, the site has been retired.
Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick's Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War, author Robert Ryal Miller, history.
50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know: by Mickey Z, political history.
Saint Patrick's Battalion, by Carl Krueger, historical novel.
The only San Patricio in Mexico (which tends to give many towns the same name), it's properly known as San Patricio-Melaque-Barra de Navidad. The three towns face the Bahia de Navidad and are deservedly popular as a destination for snowbirds and Mexican tourists, for their natural beauty and great variety of accommodations and restaurants.
Melaque also seems to be the only town of its name in the Republic. Some say it's a derivation of malarkey, slang for nonsense, probably a British origin. (And maybe it's from a pre-conquest indigenous language.) Some also say that gringo is derived from the song Green Grow the Rushes, O, by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, sung by the surviving soldiers as they marched along the beach. More on that theory at http://celtic-cadences.blog.co.uk/2009/07/17/green-grow-the-rashes-o-lyrics-robert-burns-texas-scotland-mexican-gringo-american-ancestry-genealogy-6535224/
A pretty story, isn't it?
If you're looking for more light-hearted Irish movies, check the January post Irish spring some surprises.
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