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Entre las naciones como entre los amantes
Like the Spaniards before them, the Americans landed in Veracruz and marched west, away from the malarial fevers of the Tierra Caliente and up the jagged slopes of the Sierra Madre, past taciturn agaves and stern oyameles and the blinding snowcaps of half-asleep volcanoes, until they reached the high valley where the air was thin and clear and the white light of the autumn sun fell vertical and merciless on the ill-defended capital, casting angular shadows on the barricades where the remnants of an army of barefoot conscripts whiled away their final moments, dulling terror with liquor and gambling, gathering stones to throw when their obsolete muskets ran out of ammunition, not so much resolved as resigned to die in a futile stand against an enemy destined to rule the continent.
The truth, however, is that none of it was fated. At the start of the nineteenth century, conflict between Mexico and America was likely but not inevitable. The war that transformed the United States from an uneasy federation of small Atlantic republics into a global empire was but one of infinite possible outcomes: trusting coexistence grounded on commerce, friendship born from shared commitments to self-determination, even a gradual blurring of the lines that in due time could have brought about the death of two nation-states founded on genocide and slavery—and given birth to a North American Commune.
But history is the transmutation of contingency into necessity, and what need not happen did. In the cool hours before dawn on September 12, 1847, the artillerymen of the United States Army trained their howitzers on the last significant fortification between them and Mexico City: Chapultepec Castle, a stone complex atop a steep hill, built as a manor, that now housed a military academy. Sixteen-inch rounds began falling on walls adorned with ornate masonry but offering scant cover. The thousand men of the garrison—among them cadets as young as thirteen—had no choice but to stand under fire for twelve hours, watching shrapnel tear and shred their friends.
The following day, hundreds of US marines charged up the hill, taking cover behind venerable cypresses decorated with long hanging moss, dear alike to Cortés and Moctezuma. When they reached the parapet, they leaned siege ladders against the walls and began to climb in a swarm. At first the marines died in scores, their bodies tumbling on their brothers and dragging them to their deaths. But they were many and their adversaries were few. By midmorning the defenders had been overrun.
In the years after the battle-dust settled, the Mexican republic would try to make sense of the humiliation it had suffered. The future had looked so promising just decades earlier, when New Spain broke free from its hemophiliac metropole to become one of the largest countries in the world: a vast realm, rich in silver and in people, that stretched from the forests of Oregon to the jungles of Darién. Now, however, Mexico City had been conquered a second time. How to look in the mirror? What to tell the young?
The factual record offered no answers. And so the nation’s patriotic scribes reached for myth, or rather for epic: a form where the beauty of heroism is enough to redeem defeat. The scribblers set out to find Hectors for their North American Troy—and found them in the cadets of Chapultepec. Over the course of countless retellings, the memory of the child-soldiers underwent a process not unlike the one Freud describes in The Interpretation of Dreams. Truths too painful to contemplate became half-truths, which in turn became wish-fulfilling fantasies, which were then passed off as truths.
The logic of literature replaced that of history. Nonfiction became fiction. Soon the central story Mexicans told about the war was the tale of a handful of boys who’d fought to the end, long after all hope was lost, retreating to the highest tower rather than surrendering with their older comrades. When the Marines reached the platform, the last surviving cadet tore the Mexican flag from its pole, wrapped it around his adolescent body, and leaped off the cliff.
The dreamwork allowed Mexicans to convince themselves that the Americans had defeated them not because they were worthier but merely because they were stronger. But to believe one’s fantasies is the definition of madness. And so perhaps it would behoove us to counter the epic of the Heroic Children with another tale—one taken from history rather than from dreams. A few weeks before the cadets of Chapultepec committed ritual suicide, a very different young Mexican arrived in Washington for a secret audience with the secretary of state, James Buchanan, who would later become president. His mission was simple if not easy: negotiate an informal agreement that would protect the interests of the Mexican aristocracy.
The secret agent, don Luciano Fernando Arteaga y Salazar, was the scion of an old family from Durango, a horse-breeding clan whose founder had received his hacienda in recognition of his services to Cortés. He’d been sent to England at a young age to receive a proper education, then travelled the continent armed with letters of recommendation that introduced him to the best minds of the age. By the time he returned to Mexico, he’d become something rarer and more dangerous than a cosmopolite: a translator.
When it became obvious that the war was lost, the notables of Mexico City summoned Arteaga y Salazar to a private meeting at the country estate of the archbishop’s illegitimate son. They explained that, while patriotic honor demanded that they continue to publicly support the war effort, their responsibility as unacknowledged stewards of the nation compelled them to look at things unsentimentally. The countless revolutions and counterrevolutions that had kept the country on fire ever since independence suggested that the people of Mexico were simply incapable of pursuing their own best interests. Reunion with Spain was not only impossible but also undesirable—the notables remembered the condescension with which their peninsular cousins had treated them. But the American invasion, perfidious as it was, offered an unexpected opportunity. And so Arteaga y Salazar assumed a false name and sailed from Campeche to Philadelphia, where he made contact with American agents.
On that day in September, however, almost nobody in Mexico City knew of the young translator and his secret mission. After the fall of Chapultepec, the surviving Mexican forces fought on throughout the day, putting up fierce resistance near San Cosme. But then, at nightfall, the Americans fired artillery shells on the crowded city center. The Mexican commander-in-chief, don Antonio López de Santa Anna, that one-legged Simón Bolívar impersonator, gathered the dregs of his army and quietly abandoned the capital, declaring that he hoped to spare its inhabitants a week of house-to-house butchery followed by nights of looting and rape. It was only much later that the people of Mexico learned that Santa Anna’s retreat had nothing to do with protecting the innocent—and everything to do with the agreement Arteaga y Salazar had brokered in Washington.
At dawn on September 14, the Americans marched into Mexico City. Terrified of ambushes, they advanced in perfect silence, surprised to encounter no resistance. As rumors spread, crowds gathered on rooftops to watch the ghostly procession of the conquerors. Once his troops had secured the central plaza, the Zócalo, General Winfield Scott, known to favor fuss and feathers, dressed in parade uniform and mounted a handsome white horse, hoping to cut a fine stamp on his entrada. He rode onto the square, where he supervised the raising of the Stars and Stripes and reviewed his triumphant ranks as they broke into a spontaneous rendition of “Yankee Doodle.”
The corpulent general took possession of the National Palace and climbed to the balcony to address his troops and the people they’d conquered. He’d just begun a pompous speech when a group of women who’d gathered in the plaza interrupted him with heckles: “¡Cállate, puerco!” Then a shot went off from some high window, wounding a US officer in the leg. The Americans turned their cannon on the crowd and opened fire with grapeshot munitions.
When news of the victory reached Washington, the American republic debated just how much land to annex. Some rallied behind the cry of ALL OF MEXICO, arguing with the governor of Virginia that SLAVERY SHOULD POUR ITSELF ABROAD WITHOUT RESTRAINT AND FIND NO LIMIT BUT THE SOUTHERN OCEAN. But in the end the rulers of the newborn empire decided to keep only the northern half of the country they’d defeated. The reasons, in the words of one Senator Calhoun, Democrat of South Carolina, were straightforward:
To incorporate Mexico would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians . . . I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race. The great misfortunes of Spanish America are to be traced to the fatal error of placing these colored races on an equality with the white race.
The dream of a united North America was forever lost. The two nations were never joined, neither in marriage nor by conquest, and instead remained divided by a line—so thin as to be invisible, so stark as to be impassable—that cut not just across the land, but also through the heart. It should come as no surprise that love between their children became impossible.
