St. Patrick’s Day is typically a time in which “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” buttons and green beer are as prolific as sunglasses and flip flops in San Diego.
But there is more to St. Patrick’s Day than simply celebrating real or imagined Irish heritage. In Mexico, it’s also a commemoration of friendship and shared history that dates back more than a century and a half.
It started in the mid-1800s. Ireland’s Great Famine, also called the Potato Famine because of a blight that took out a majority of its potato crop, changed the face of the country. Hundreds of thousands of people died, either of starvation and malnutrition or disease, and at least a million left Ireland. Most went to the United States.
At the time, anti-Irish bias ran high in the United States. People from Ireland were stereotyped as being violent alcoholics. Worse, in the eyes of the United States’ Protestant majority, they were regarded as deeply suspicious for being Catholic, a hostility that had arrived in the New World with the original pilgrims.
Immigrants had little chance against such rhetoric. It was difficult enough to get a job among the influx of immigration, but the bias against the Irish in particular was embedded enough in the United States’ national psyche that it was memorialized in at least one popular 19th century song called “No Irish Need Apply.”
There was one way that new immigrants could get land and citizenship however: going west to fight for the United States in the Mexican-American war.
Not all the Irish stayed in the United States; in 1845 reports surfaced of a group of expatriates, immigrants and escaped slaves, all of whom had switched sides and were now fighting for the Mexican Army. Why they decided to switch is still a matter of debate. Some historians say they were lured over by the promise of more land in Mexico.
Others contend, more romantically, that Irish fighters bonded with Mexicans in some dusty outpost saloon and refused to shoot any fellow Catholics.
However it happened, El Batallón de San Patricios, or the St. Patrick’s Battalion, quickly gained notoriety for its fierce members. The battalion, headed by an Irish artilleryman named John Riley, fought under a banner of green silk prominently displaying an Irish harp.
Its members are still regarded as heroes in Mexico, although the San Patricios who were caught by the United States were tried as traitors and deserters. By 1847 many had been hanged and still more — including John Riley, who by now went by Juan Reley — were sentenced to lashings and iron yokes.
But the friendship between Ireland and Mexico endures. Every year, Mexico celebrates St. Patrick’s Day to honor the Irishmen who fought for them. Thousands of miles away in western Ireland, the town of Clifden flies a Mexican flag to commemorate the life of John Riley.
