These "rabble" in Washington...see how much crime the people will bear, and they proceed from step to step...My friend Mr. Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. (for the war just declared with Mexico)...no act of honour or benevolence or justice is to be expected from the American government..(in) the Texan and Mexican plunder...I feel...that those who succeed in life, in civilized society, are beasts of prey.

- excerpts from Ralph Waldo Emerson's journals,
1846 - 1847

The Irish came from famine with nothing to lose,
soldiering for the U.S. Army their only chance.
Cruelly treated in a corps biased against Irish
and Catholics both, they found themselves
sent by Polk to invade Mexico
because we had that manifest real estate itch,
the greedy need to fill in the sea to shining sea concept,
and Mexico, of all the gall, had refused to sell.
Who remembers this?

John Riley, born in County Galway,
saw the unfairness of that fight
and some last straw - Texas Rangers
burning a Catholic church, raping Mexican women,
perhaps, some final outrage, was more
than a principled man could take,
sent him and hundreds after him
to defend what they must have known
was a lost cause, but then the Irish
were already champions of lost causes.
Who remembers this?

The San Patricio battalion had its own banner,
green silk with St. Patrick on one side,
a harp and shamrock on the other, a banner
which flew at major battles of the war
including that at the convent of Churubusco,
where San Patricios tore down a white flag
and kept fighting, though ammunition was spent.
As the U.S. dispatched the last of the military
school cadets defending Chapultepec,
the U.S. command had the faces of San Patricios
branded with a red-hot D (though many had not
been in the U.S. Army to begin with)
and hanged fifty of them in the Plaza San Jacinto.
Who remembers this?

Today the Marines wear a red stripe
on their pants from the halls
of Montezuma, but not for the blood of the Irish,
or of the children who died where today
in Chapultepec Park a memorial
to los ninos heroes stands.
In Mexico, el dia de los soldados
irlandeses del heroico batalion de San Patricio
is September 12 and people gather in the Plaza San Jacinto
on that day when, in 1847, for the first group
of the San Patricios was hanged.
The memorial plaque lists more than
seventy of their names:
John Riley, Abraham Fitzpatrick, James Kelly,
Patrick Casey, John Murphy...every fifth among them
a Herman Schmidt or Henry Octker.

The plaque lists those "que dieron su vida por la causa
de Mexico durante la injusta invasion
norteamericana de 1847"
those who gave their lives for Mexico
during the unjust U.S. invasion of 1847.
And who here remembers this?

Sources:

Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire: Faces & Masks, 1987

Michael Hogan. The Irish Soldiers of Mexico. Fondo Editorial Universitario, 1999

www.connemara.net/history/sanpatricios

The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ed. Robert Linscott, Modern Library

© Copyright 2005 by AxisofLogic.com

Patricia Dubrava writes: "I think poets and writers everywhere should take up this cause, write their own poems called "Who Remembers This?" on their own fogotten history topic, so we can have hundreds of reminders, reality checks, to help us get a more accurate view, a clearer vision of who we are, where we've been and what we've become, what we're doing in the world right now."

Patricia Dubrava's second book of poems is Holding the Light. She translated a collection of stories by Uruguayan writer Rafael Courtoisie, The Red Sea, which was published in 2004. Dubrava has an abiding interest in good writing of all kinds, the Spanish language, Mexico and the way we keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Contact Patricia Dubrava.