We’re All Mexicans Now

For that we go back to 1861. See, Mexico won independence from Spain rather a while before this little shindig. (The official declaration was 16 September, 1810, but there was some disagreement on that point. The actual effective date was several bloody years later.) Throughout the 19th Century, Mexico had a series of civil wars, political uprisings, invasions, insurrections, and lots of general-purpose shootings-at and shootings-by. Plus there was that whole Santa Anna thing, where the the “Napoleon of the West” lost Texas and all the North American lands (well, all the lands North of the Rio Bravo – the Rio Grande to us) in a fairly major debacle that had economic and political repercussions for a while. As a result of all this, Mexico stayed more or less perpetually broke. They survived by borrowing money, which they sometimes did and sometimes didn’t manage to pay back on time.

By 1861, “not on time” had become dominant to the point where the British, the French, and the Spanish all sent negotiating teams, equipped with lots of guns and warships, to collect their debts. The three European powers joined forces and took over the Port of Veracruz, whereupon Mexico’s President Benito Juarez likewise sent a negotiating team to Veracruz. After talking things over the British and the Spaniards agreed to work out payment plans, but the French… well, Napoleon III (not to be confused with THE Napoleon) had grand dreams of re-establishing the French empire as a dominant force in the New World. He wanted to re-establish a monarchy in Mexico and put one of his shirttail relatives, Archduke Maxmilian of Austria, on the throne as a marionette with transAtlantic strings. That, he hoped, would let him bottle up and shut down US expansionism from the north and eventually expand the Franco-Mexican empire south to as much of Central and South America as the traffic would bear.

Now at this point the French army had been riding high in Europe; it had been several decades since they’d actually lost anything of significance, so it wasn’t quite as stupid an idea as it looks now. So towards the end of 1861 a fairly sizable contingent of French troops from Veracruz (quoted numbers vary from roughly two thousand to about six thousand) got orders to move inland and take over the country. The Mexicans, then as now, were a proud sort of people and didn’t take kindly to that idea. After a couple of minor skirmishes, 6500 French regulars marched into the city of Puebla de los Angeles, where they found waiting for them a rag-tag Mexican militia of about 4,000 or so men, commanded by General Ignacio Zaragoza (interestingly enough, a Texan – he was born in Goliad, where his birthplace is a State Historical Site and there’s a big statue of him a few hundred meters from the Presidio de la Bahia…).

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