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2002 MLA
Globalization and the Image II: The Global Image

Abby Bender
Princeton University

 

"That glorious Emblem of native rights": The Cultural "Hybridity" of the San Patricio Battalion Flag

Do not cite without permission of the author.

In September 1997, in Aras an Uachtaran, the Irish President's official residence, then President of Ireland Mary Robinson looked on during the presentation of a reproduction military flag by the Clifden and Connemara Heritage Group. The flag, with its gold harp on a green field-the traditional flag of the United Irishmen and of 1798-signified the remarkable story of the San Patricio Battalion not through any cultural iconography, but only through the words "San Patricio," written in a vaguely Hibernicized script. The presentation ceremony honored Los San Patricios, also known as the Saint Patrick's Battalion, a group of mostly Irish soldiers who deserted from the United States army during the Mexican-American War to fight with their Catholic co-religionists in Mexico. Literal border-crossers, they most likely transferred their loyalty to Mexico after suffering anti-Catholic and anti-Irish abuse from their nativist officers in the American army; perhaps they were also influenced by the promise of free land in a Catholic country. The "Battalon de San Patricio," renowned for their bravery in the face of certain defeat, was led by the Irish-born John Riley. After the defeat of Mexico and the executions by the U.S. army of fifty of the "traitors" who comprised his battalion, Riley, who escaped the same death on a technicality, wrote to a friend in 1847, "In all my letter, I forgot to tell you under what banner we fought so bravely. It was that glorious Emblem of native rights, that being the banner which should have floated over our native Soil many years ago, it was St. Patrick, the Harp of Erin, the Shamrock upon a green field" (qtd. in Stevens 285).

The various icons of Irishness that Riley describes, not all of which survive in the Heritage Group's "replica," appear to represent the centuries-long struggle for Irish independence from British colonial rule, but not the Mexican cause the San Patricios were fighting for in a very literal sense. In all likelihood, however, both the flag Riley describes and the one presented by the Heritage Group give us an incomplete picture. George Kendall, an American journalist covering the war with Mexico, describes a more complex constellation of images:

The banner is of green silk, and on one side is a harp, surmounted by the Mexican coat of arms, with a scroll on which is painted "Libertad por la Republica Mexicana." Under the harp is the motto of "Erin go Bragh!" On the other side is a painting of a badly executed figure, made to represent St. Patrick, in his left hand a key and in his right a crook or staff resting upon a serpent. Underneath is painted "San Patricio."
(Kendall 350)

The Mexican elements described by Kendall have been excluded from both Riley's and the Heritage Group's versions of the flag, and over the course of this paper I will consider the ways in which images associated with the flag are reproduced, revised, and discarded. The larger question that motivates me, though, is this: Does the solidarity that exceeded national borders in nineteenth-century Mexico get overwritten here by an Irish nationalist iconography that aesthetically writes out that very encounter, and reverts to its most sectarian and narrow?

It is worth pausing here to think specifically about the Heritage Group flag. Kendall's account contains another detail that may have been unappealing to the organizers of the state ceremony that took place in 1997: "Under the harp is the motto of "Erin go Bragh!" If "Ireland forever!" seems a curious slogan for a group of mostly Irish soldiers who in 1847, the very year before Young Ireland's abortive rebellion, were flying their green flag not over "our native soil" but rather in Churubusco, Mexico, it was also perhaps easier for the Irish government in 1997, the year before the Good Friday Agreement, to leave off what could have been interpreted as radical rhetoric. In the midst of a season of famine memorials, such types of presentations were surely easily recognized for the politicized events they were.1 Other questions also arise in respect to this reproduction version of the battalion flag. If the Heritage Group is taking Riley's account as a model, why leave off Saint Patrick, whom he lists first among all of the images of "native rights"? If the Heritage Group leaves off Erin go Bragh as too political, perhaps Saint Patrick is not political enough-or more accurately, has too distinctly participated in what David Lloyd calls the "inevitable declension of the icons of authentic national culture into kitsch" (Ireland After History 89). Or, is Saint Patrick, like "Libertad por La Republica," too Mexican? Too closely linked to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who also graced national banners of liberation? Too evocative of Mexican folk traditions of votive painting? Furthermore, if "Erin go Bragh!" is traded out for "San Patricio," written in that script so familiar that the two phrases could almost be mistaken for each other, then the Heritage Society has managed to honor the San Patricio Battalion with an almost exact replica of the unofficial nationalist "green flag" of Ireland; in fact, this flag is less "hybrid" than even the tricolor that would, inspired by the tricolor of revolutionary France, eventually be adopted by Young Ireland, and then later by the Irish Republic.2

If we find in Kendall's version of the San Patricio flag a "hybrid"3 moment worthy of celebration, nevertheless the narrowly Irish interpretation by the Clifden and Connemara Heritage Group tells us that the celebration is premature. So then, how should the San Patricios be memorialized, and how can they be theorized? It is important to start with the simple observation that the cultural exchange articulated in the multiple iconographies of the flag is peculiar in that it takes place in an unusual "contact zone"-defined not by the meeting of colonizer and colonized, but in the space of solidarity between distant struggles for national independence: the resistance to British rule in Ireland, and Mexico's struggle against neo-colonialism in the form of American Manifest Destiny. What is most uncanny about the San Patricio Battalion flag is precisely that the translation of the two slogans occluded in the 1997 reproduction seems to coexist so unproblematically in the orginal: "Erin go Bragh!" and "Libertad por la Republica Mexicana" are expressive of same kind of nationalist gusto, and at least in Kendall's account, the Irish and Mexican images equitably share the space of representation. If, as David Lloyd argues in Ireland After History, cultural nationalism opposes all forms of cultural mixing between colonizer and colonized,4 then the question at stake in looking at the San Patricio flag is whether that same nationalism is equally resistant to mixing across horizontal, global boundaries-cultural mixing not in a context of hierarchy, but rather one of solidarity. Does the geographically displaced banner of rebellion and potential liberation from colonial authority translate as easily from Ireland, where it failed in 1798, to a hopeful second attempt at anti-imperialism of another sort, on another continent, with another people and in another language?

Two positions have been articulated in regard to the question above: on the one hand, academics who are interested in de-essentializing cultural identities offer a resounding "yes!," while on the other hand, some historians reject the very possibility of solidarity. I would like to offer an alternative, middle position, one that values the encounter of national struggles while also keeping in mind the problems that nationalism itself poses to the imagining of such allegiances, both as they are happening and as they are re-imagined later. A brief survey of some San Patricio historiography is useful here, particularly as academic interest in the story has been so limited.5 Whereas most recent scholarly and cultural accounts have recuperated the San Patricios as part of the nationalist struggle for Irish independence from Britain, the earliest histories of the battalion de-emphasized the group's Irishness, so as to refute any claim that Irish-Americans were traitors to their newly adopted country. This was, perhaps, a factor motivating Richard McCornack's unequivocal stand against solidarity in a 1951 article:

As a whole, the San Patricios appear to have been a group of bewildered and ignorant men, for the most part incapable of realizing, until faced with the prospect of expiating their crime with their lives, the enormity of the crime they committed when they donned enemy uniforms and took up arms against the forces from which they had deserted. That they fought under a shamrock banner and carried the name of St. Patrick was due to their commanding officer, Riley, and not to either the national origins or religious persuasion of more than a few of them. (255)

The first full-length scholarly book on the subject, written by Robert Ryal Miller in 1989, reproduces (in some places word for word) this de-politicizing of the San Patricios: "Based on testimony of the San Patricios, there seemed to be no basis of fraternal feeling with Mexicans, nor sympathy for their being invaded by a northern neighbor with a dominant Anglo-Saxon and Protestant culture. Except for John Riley, the Irish-Catholic connection was emphasized more by Mexicans than by the San Patricios themselves"6 (33-4). Miller's comparatively recent book seems to have validated McCornack, who, confident that his would be the last word on the subject, wrote that the story of the Saint Patrick's Battalion would "cease to be a subject of further controversy among Catholic and Protestant writers, and be relegated to its proper position as a footnote to American history" (255).7

The story can, I think, be read most productively not as a footnote, but rather as a case study in the history of transnational subaltern struggle (and here I position myself more or less in the contemporary critical camp). Meanwhile, at the far end of the spectrum from McCornack, David Lloyd describes the solidarity between the San Patricios and the Mexicans in terms that are, like McCornack's and Miller's, unambiguous. He writes of the San Patricios that, "their understanding of the links between English domination of Ireland and Yankee domination of Mexico was immediate" (IAH 104). For Lloyd, who uses the story in the epilogue of his book Ireland After History as a sort of model for future academic work, the value of retrieving occluded stories like that of the San Patricios is to "form a repertoire for what I would call the history of possibilities, thinking, once again, of the ways in which even the defeated struggles and gestures of the oppressed remain in memory to re-emerge as the impulse to form new forms of solidarity" (105). Indeed, the current theoretical trend in Irish Studies (and in postcolonial studies more generally) is to explore transnational intersections of colonial or otherwise oppressed cultures. Luke Gibbons has also motioned towards analysis that "[negotiates] identity through an exchange with the other. . . to make provision, not just for vertical mobility from the periphery to the centre, but for 'lateral' journeys along the margins which short-circuit the colonial divide" (180).8 I begin with this same gesture, but take caution from Lloyd's own warning about cultural nationalism's jealous hold on "purification and refinement. . . originality and authenticity" (IAH 89). In other words, I will also look at where the translation into contemporary solidarity fails or falls short.9 For example, the 1997 reproduction flag presented at Aras an Uachtaran surely failed as an aesthetic call for contemporary solidarity, an attempt to create awareness of struggles beyond Irish borders. Such projects, even well-meaning ones, also threaten to reinscribe the troubling discourses of essentialist nationalism. Other less well-intentioned contemporary "memorials" seem to revolve mundanely around the disingenuously posed question of whether the San Patricios were traitors or heroes (the feature film "One Man's Hero" starring Tom Berenger-and for good reason not available at most video rental stores-rather unsubtly points this out), but this gesture, even if mundane, is dangerous. The film, for example, is primarily a vehicle for every ethnic and national stereotype about both Irish and Mexican people.

***

Although the pictorial images on the San Patricio Battalion flag are my primary concern here, the textual rhetoric that formed a base for the solidarity between the San Patricios and the Mexicans is worth rehearsing as well. Perhaps the most remarkable articulations of solidarity are the pamphlets written by Mexican generals. An early one written by General Ampudia begins, "To the English and Irish under the Orders of the American General Taylor" and is dated April 2 1846:

Know ye: That the Government of the United States is committing repeated acts of barbarous aggression against the magnanimous Mexican Nation; that the Government which exists under "the flag of stars" is unworthy of the designation of Christian....

Recollect that you were born in Great Britain; that the American Government looks with coldness upon the powerful flag of St. George, and is provoking to a rupture the warlike people to whom it belongs" (qtd. in Miller 17)

Perhaps this early appeal missed the mark in casting too wide a net: the British flag of St. George wasn't likely to inspire feelings of solidarity in the badly treated Irish soldiers who were most likely to desert from the American army. Nevertheless, just days later, on April 12th, 1846, John Riley of County Galway, Ireland set out from Fort Texas to a Catholic Mass near Matamoros, Mexico; he did not return to his camp on that particular Sunday, but some weeks later was promoted from the rank of private to that of Lieutenant, his new commission from the Mexican army. Perhaps with Riley's help, by the next year the Mexican pamphleteers had focused their audience and mastered their history, as evidenced by this 1847 pamphlet, later reprinted in a New York newspaper:

Irishmen-Listen to the words of your brothers, hear the accents of a Catholic people.
Could Mexicans imagine that the sons of Ireland, that noble land of the religious and the brave, would be seen amongst their enemies?
Well known it is that Irishmen are a noble race; well known it is that in their own country many of them have not even bread to give up to their children.
These are the chief motives that induced Irishmen to abandon their beloved country and visit the shores of the new world.
But was it not natural to expect that the distressed Irishmen who fly from hunger would take refuge in this Catholic country, where they might have met with a hearty welcome and been looked upon as brothers had they not come as cruel and unjust invaders? (qtd. in Stevens 221-2)

The historical focus on Riley, specifically, and the later appropriation of the San Patricios and their flag as participating in a distinctly Irish nationalist project, suggest that the gesture of solidarity worked mainly in one direction, that of Irish solidarity with an embattled Mexico. However, as the passage above reveals, the pamphlets distributed by Mexican generals perform a transnational awareness that works equally in the opposite direction, revealing a sense of Irish colonial history and the realities of the anti-Catholic prejudice encountered by immigrants to the United States that is in itself a gesture of solidarity. "Irishmen-You were expected to be just, because you are the countrymen of that truly great and eloquent man, O'Connell, who had devoted his whole life to defend your rights, and finally, because you are said to be good and sincere Catholics" (qtd. in Stevens 221). These Mexican pamphlets, crossing the border into the American encampments, had begun to inundate American barracks even before war was officially declared, and continued throughout its duration. Meanwhile, many Irish, mostly Catholic, soldiers followed Riley's path in the other direction across the Rio Grande, crossing a border that would render them traitors in the eyes of the nation they left behind. But in the eyes of contemporary literary critics, these border-crossers seem to embody the site of the border itself.

As Guillermo Gomez-Pena writes, "symbols, aesthetic gestures, and metaphors are contextual, and when they cross a cultural border they either crack open, or metamorphosize into something else" (238). But have the Irish images of liberation in fact crossed a border, or opened a frontier, by sharing their "green field" with the Mexican coat of arms-and, perhaps more to the point, does this last image appear on the flag at all? It should be noted that the images depicted on the flag of the San Patricio Battalion are in no way established as "fact," since the accounts all vary substantially. The entry for the San Patricios in the Diccionario Porrúa de historia, biografía y geografía de México offers an alternative flag, one that does not even share the green field: "Tenian una insignia blanca, en la que se encontraban lost escudos de Irlanda y Mexico, y el nombre de su capitan, John O'Reilly bordado en verde." [They had a white flag, on which were found the shields of Ireland and Mexico, and the name of their captain, John O'Reilly embroidered in green] (3:3146). Perhaps the aesthetic balancing of two national coats of arms, and even more conspicuously the absence of the green field-that most potent signifier of Irish struggle as the struggle for land-allows this Mexican flag to bring the struggle back to the site, and the literal field, by all accounts more brown than green, on which it took place. Green, in Ireland, had become the color of rebellion, and was outlawed as a marker of political insurgency in 1797, inspiring the famous (and banned) song, "The Wearing of the Green" (McCartney and Bryson 36). We can only speculate as to whether the green field of the San Patricio flag represents an attempt to imaginatively substitute, and aesthetically replace, the Mexican struggle for the Irish one at home. Or, whether this truly represents an instance of subaltern solidarity. The sticking point is nationalism, and the question is this: Can nationalist struggles that encounter each other across a lateral divide support each other without participating in the troubling exclusions that seem always to surround nationalist discourses, whether iconographic, literary, or military? Why, in writing to his fellow expatriated Irishman, does Riley neglect to describe the Mexican symbols on the flag? If we are to take George Kendall, who offers what seems to be a more complete description of the flag, at his word-and he does seem to have been detail-oriented, trustworthy in fact if ugly in interpretation-then perhaps even more conspicuous an absence in Riley's description is the failure to note the Spanish phrase "Libertad por la Republica Mexicana." In 1848, when a destitute John Riley was pressed to appeal to the president of Mexico for wages owed him, he wrote "Since... I separated from the North American forces... I have served constantly under the Mexican flag" (qtd. in Miller 32). Is the hybrid flag of the San Patricios, described in yet another account as "a beautiful green silk banner... [on which] glittered a silver cross and a golden harp, embroidered by the hands of the fair nuns of San Luis Potosi" (Chamberlain 161), an Irish flag or a Mexican flag? Can two national struggles share a glorious Emblem of native rights?

Exchange "along the margins," to use Luke Gibbons's phrase, takes place at a sort of center when the contact zone is a flag, which is by definition a privileged signifier of national identity. The flag of the San Patricio Battalion illustrates icons under the pressure of their status as national symbols, making the possibilities for the celebration of Irish and Mexican solidarity somewhat less clear-cut. Another question arises now, for if nationalism is very much at work in this Irish-Mexican solidarity, then how can the profound privileging of Irish place be translated onto the battlefields of Churubusco? Even as place has become a critical factor in contemporary studies of nationalism, many studies are also fetishizing movement and mobility; in Hart and Negri's assessment, "circulation" of people beyond national borders is "the first ethical act of a counterimperial ontology" (364). Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, in their book The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, expose the occluded histories of solidarity between various oppressed, but also mobile, groups:

The hydra became a means of exploring multiplicity, movement, and connection, the long waves and planetary currents of humanity....The power of numbers was expanded by movement, as the hydra journeyed and voyaged or was banished or dispersed in diaspora, carried by the winds and the waves beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Sailors, pilots, felons, lovers, translators, musicians, mobile workers of all kinds made new and unexpected connections, which variously appeared to be accidental, contingent, transient, even miraculous. (6)

According to Linebaugh and Rediker, the pirates of the "revolutionary Atlantic" agreed with governments who told them that "they [had] no country": "when they hailed other vessels at sea, they emphasized their own rejection of nationality by announcing that they came 'From the Seas'" (165). Although it may be tempting to read the San Patricios as unanchored, nation-less pirates, this was not the case; they were engaged in a war of nations, not a mutiny. If the rejection of nationality itself is in evidence with the motley crew cited by Linebaugh and Rediker, the San Patricios must be excluded from their paradigm; and if nationality and place-even displaced place-were central to the iconography and rhetoric of their struggle, where do they fit in with current academic projects?10 To help answer this question, it is worth looking at the long tradition of Irish soldiering as nationalist activity in a field of global struggle, for these figures-not quite mercenaries, but fighting the battles of other nations nonetheless-have inspired a powerful cultural and literary tradition in Ireland.

From the seventeenth century through the twentieth, the figure of the Irish soldier in a foreign army has been inflected with political meaning, and the tradition of the "Wild Geese," as these soldiers were known, was from the start rhetorically linked to the politics of Irish struggle at home. The battlefield was figured as a place where, at least rhetorically, more than one conflict could be articulated at once. Other nations seemed aware of this powerful trope: just as Santa Anna and General Ampudia appealed in their pamphlets to the "countrymen of that truly great and eloquent man, O'Connell," a name sure to elicit the memory of the Irish struggle at home, a few years later military recruiters for the Union during the American Civil War exploited Irish nationalist sentiment in a poster exhorting potential Irish volunteers,

REMEMBER FONTENOY!
Irishmen, remember the City of the Violated Treaty
è IRISHMEN. You are now Training to meet your English Enemies!
(illustration in The Irish Sword 3:36)

The battle of Fontenoy took place in 1745 in France, where a renowned Irish regiment of the French army routed the English forces. Perhaps the event is best known from Thomas Davis's eponymous ballad, in which the Irish soldiers take revenge against the British for their failure to honor the Treaty of Limerick: "Like lions leaping at a fold, when mad with hunger's pang, / Right up against the English line the Irish exiles sprang" (Hoagland 478). The poem closes in an exclamatory gesture of victory, perhaps overdoing the amount of glory that could be palatably consumed by Davis's still very much oppressed reading public at home: "On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, like eagles in the sun, / With bloody plumes the Irish stand-the field is fought and won!" The fields of Ireland were far from won, though, in the 1840s when Davis's ballad of displaced Irish victory was published in The Nation. Perhaps it was only timing-specifically, the contemporaneity with the worst year of the famine-that prevented the San Patricios from inhabiting a similar literary memorial. Peter Stevens suggests that the Young Irelanders "would probably have seized upon the executions of Irish soldiers in Mexico as yet another Anglo-Saxon atrocity. But the fate of the St. Patrick's Battalion, an ocean and a continent away, never reached the ears of Young Ireland"(279).

The linking of twentieth-century "Wild Geese" with the Irish struggle for independence is made possible through the literary revival's most potent imaginative figure: the old woman who stands as the embodiment of Ireland, Kathleen Ni Houlihan. In an anecdote published in the military journal The Irish Sword, Joyce Kilmer wrote:

It is a matter of no military importance but of deep interest to everyone who sympathizes with the 69th Regiment and knows its history and traditions, that when the raiding party marched up past Regimental Headquarters on their way to the trenches, there fluttered from the bayonet of one of the men a flag-a green flag marked in gold with the harp that has for centuries been Ireland's emblem-the harp without the crown-and inscribed 'Erin Go Bragh!' This flag had been given... by a stranger-an old woman who burst through the great crowd that lined the streets.... Who the woman was who gave the Regiment this appropriate tribute is unknown. Perhaps it was Kathleen Ni Houlihan herself. (3:202)

The narrative describes Irish troops in an American army marching to battle in France during the Great War. And yet, the flag, "Ireland's emblem," and its provenance with Kathleen, who is Ireland itself, mark an alternative meaning to the struggle. So that even in World War I, Irish participation in battle-a battle in which Irish-Americans fought in an American army, and alongside Britain-can be coded to signify Irish anti-colonial struggle. Again, we have the familiar iconography: a green flag, a gold harp, and "Erin go Bragh."

As one might suspect, however, the "Wild Geese" would not always be read as displaced Irish nationalist warriors. At a certain point Irish soldiers began to fight in British armies (as a result of anti-clericalism during the French Revolution and a consequent disdain for the French, and later as a function of Irish famine and poverty, and a lack of other alternatives for subsistence). And particularly, the Irish participation in British colonial ventures (Irish soldiers making up nearly half of colonial forces in India, for example) could hardly be articulated as anti-colonial work on behalf of Irish independence. The unsentimental words of James Connolly dismantle the romanticized version of "Wild Geese" who supposedly fight Ireland's struggle elsewhere:

We are a fighting race, we are told, and every Irishman is always proud to hear our politicians and journalists tell of our exploits in the fighting line - in other countries, in other climes and in other times. Yes, we are a fighting race. Whether it is under the Stars and Stripes or under the Union Jack; planting the flag of America over the walls of Santiago or helping our own oppressors to extend their hated rule over other unfortunate nations our brave Irish boys are ever to the front. When the Boer has to be robbed of his freedom, the Egyptian has to be hurled back under the heel of his taskmaster, the Zulu to be dynamited in his caves, the Matabele slaughtered beside the ruins of his smoking village or Afridi to be hunted from his desolated homestead, wheresoever, in short, the bloody standard of the oppressors of Ireland is to be found over some unusually atrocious piece of scoundrelism, look then for the sons of our Emerald Isle, and under the red coats of the hired assassin army you will find them.
Yes, we are a fighting race. In Africa, India or America, wherever blood is to be spilt, there you will find Irishmen, eager and anxious for a fight, under any flag, in anybody's quarrel, in any cause - except their own.

Connolly mocks the disingenuous rhetoric that would allow a nationalistic piety about liberation to coexist alongside Irish participation in colonial horrors. Such irony is also at play in the construction of Irish regiments in Rudyard Kipling's fiction: if the Irish colonial enforcers seem to contain the potential of subversive solidarity with their Indian co-colonial subjects by virtue of their own oppression at home, in fact they are rendered as ridiculous, drunk, and battle-hungry.11 In Kipling's 1901 novel Kim, the Irish regiment raucously toasts their banner, "the great Red Bull on a background of Irish green," (132) but the "Irish" flag in which their communal identity supposedly inheres is completely divorced from the politics of Ireland.

Unlike Kipling's Irish regiments, the San Patricios were clearly fighting for a cause they believed in, even if that cause cannot be precisely defined as "Irish" or "Mexican." In 1847, one year before Young Ireland reproduced the tragic defeat of 1798, the embattled San Patricios refused surrender at Churubusco: according to one account, "These men fought most desperately, and are said not only to have shot down several of our officers whom they knew, but to have pulled down the white flag of surrender no less than three times." (The Mexican War and its Heroes 2:45). This often-repeated anecdote of the Irish soldiers refusing surrender even when the Mexicans concede victory contains within it a much darker version: according to one Private Ballantine, "two or three attempts of the Mexicans to hoist a white flag have been frustrated by some of [the San Patricios], who killed the Mexicans attempting to display it" (Meltzer 197). The white flag of surrender is subsumed by the banner of the San Patricios; the Mexicans fighting for their homeland are displaced by the Irish Battalion; everything, in this narrative, is subsumed by the aura of that banner. It is at this point that it becomes important to step back from the celebration of the San Patricios as a model for solidarity; in other words, the recuperation of the San Patricios in the name of a sympathetic, multicultural, transnational nationalism doesn't always work as we hope it will.

Many theorists of postcolonialism have concurred that celebrating hybridity when it comes in the context of the colonial encounter is dangerous; hierarchies inevitably problematize the encounter of cultures and peoples. The lateral model of cultural meeting across, rather than within, the hierarchies of colonialism presents a potentially less vexed model for looking at history. However, the San Patricios, or at least the traditions of history and memory that have told their story, suggest that even these solidarities must be approached responsibly. But even as their part in the Mexican-American War has been recuperated within a narrative of strategic (if geographically displaced) Irish nationalism that often works to diminish the very field of cooperation on which the battles of their struggle actually took place, the story of the San Patricios still offers a model of solidarity that can speak to contemporary struggles. If the Clifden and Connemmara Heritage Society version of memorial, in which the traditional marker of national identity-the flag-occludes Mexico from the field of images, then perhaps a better place to look at the San Patricios today is at the unfixable site that perhaps most threatens all nationalism: the internet. On a recent March 17th-Saint Patrick's Day-Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico wrote an open letter in which he remarks on the contemporary impact of the San Patricio Battalion:

When Mexico was fighting, in the last century, against the empire of the bars and crooked stars, there was a group of soldiers who fought on the side of the Mexicans and this group was called 'St. Patrick's Battalion'. And so I am writing you in the name of all of my companeros and companeras, because just as with the 'Saint Patrick's Battalion', we now see clearly that there are foreigners who love Mexico more than some natives who are now in the government. And we hear that there were marches and songs and movies and other events so that there would not be war in Chiapas, which is the part of Mexico where we live and die. When you are old, then you will be able to say to the children and young people of your country that, 'I struggled for Mexico at the end of the 20th century, and from over here I was there with them and I only know that they wanted what all human beings want, for it not to be forgotten that they are human beings and for it to be remembered what democracy, liberty and justice are, and I did not know their faces but I did know their hearts and they were the same as ours.' Good-bye.. Health and a promised flower: a green stem, a white flower, red leaves, and don't worry about the serpent, that flapping of wings is an eagle which will take care of it , you will see...12

If this "pamphlet" comes via the internet, it nonetheless repeats Santa Anna's 1847 call for solidarity: "May Mexicans and Irishmen, united by the sacred tie of religion and benevolence, form only one people" (qtd. in Stevens 222). If the image of the San Patricio flag can create possibilities for solidarity on a global scale, then surely it is here, in Marcos's Saint Patrick's Day communiqué, that such globalization begins.

Works Cited

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Connolly, James. Collected Works. Dublin: New Books, 1987.
Foster, Roy. The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
Gibbons, Luke. Transformations in Irish Culture. Cork: Cork UP in association with Field Day, 1996.
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. Dangerous Border Crossers : The Artist Talks Back. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Hart, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
Hoagland, Kathleen, ed. 1000 Years of Irish Poetry. Old Saybrook: Konecky & Konecky, 1975.
Kilmer, Joyce. "Kathleen Ni Houlihan." The Irish Sword. Vol. 3. Dublin: 1958.
Kendall, George Wilkins and Lawrence Delbert Cress. Dispatches from the Mexican War. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1999.
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. New York: Penguin, 1989.
Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
Lipsitz, George. "Frantic to Join...the Japanese Army": The Asia Pacific War in the Lives of African American Soldiers and Civilians." The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Eds. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
Lloyd, David. Ireland After History. Cork: Cork UP in association with Field Day, 1999.
Lowe, Lisa and David Lloyd, eds. The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
McCartney, Clem and Lucy Bryson, A Report on the Use of Flags, Anthems, and Other National Symbols in Northern Ireland. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies Queen's U Belfast, 1994.
McCornack, Richard. "The San Patricio Deserters in the Mexican War, 1847" The Irish Sword. Volume 3, 1958.
Meagher, Thomas Francis. Meagher of the Sword: Speeches in Ireland, 1846-1848. Ed. Arthur Griffith. Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1916.
Meltzer, Milton. Bound for the Rio Grande; the Mexican Struggle, 1845-1850. New York: Knopf, 1974.
Miller, Robert Ryal. Shamrock and Sword : The Saint Patrick's Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1989.
Stevens, Peter. The Rogue's March: John Riley and the St. Patrick's Battalion. Washington, DC: Brassey's, 1999.
The Mexican War and Its Heroes; Being a Complete History of the Mexican War, Embracing All the Operations under Generals Taylor and Scott, with a Biography of the Officers. Also, an Account of the Conquests of California and New Mexico ... Illustrated with Accurate Portraits and Other Beautiful Engravings. Philadelphia: Lippincott Grambo, 1850.

Notes

1 See the chapter on "Theme-Parks and Histories" in Roy Foster's new book, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) pp. 23-36.
2 Thomas Francis Meagher presented the tricolor-a gift from France-in Dublin in 1848, noting its symbolic gesture of Irish unity: "The white in the centre signifies a lasting truce between the 'Orange' and the 'Green', and I trust that beneath its folds the hands of the Irish Protestant and the Irish Catholic may be clasped in generous and heroic brotherhood." Arthur Griffith, ed. Meagher of the Sword: Speeches of Thomas Francis Meagher in Ireland, 1846-1848 (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1916).
3 The word "hybrid" is currently a vexed term, and I use it with a certain hesitation about whether or not it can still be useful for postcolonial theory, cultural studies, etc.... I hope that some of my specific concerns about the term will come out in the course of the paper.
4 David Lloyd's point about the recalcitrance of nationalism to forms of cultural mixing is central to my argument. He writes that cultural nationalism wants "to reroot the cultural forms that have survived colonization in the deep history of a people, and to oppose them to the hybrid and grafted forms that have emerged in the forced mixing of cultures that colonization entails" (89).
5 Three books are devoted to the story of John Riley and the San Patricio Battalion; there is scant other academic work that even mentions them. See Robert Ryal Miller, Shamrock and Sword : The Saint Patrick's Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); Michael Hogan, The Irish Soldiers of Mexico (Guadalajara, Mexico: Fondo Editorial Universitario, 1997); Peter F. Stevens, The Rogue's March : John Riley and the St. Patrick's Battalion (Washington, DC: Brassey's, 1999). There is also a documentary, "The San Patricios," by filmmaker Mark Day.
6 Strictly speaking Miller is accurate in saying that the San Patricios did not choose to describe their desertions as political or ideological in the only record that survives, the transcript of their court martial. But this is beside the point, as it seems clear that most of them claimed that they were drunk and as a result forced into Mexican service because this was the only possible narrative that might have spared their lives. And unlike Riley, these men were unable to speak of their motivations after their courts martial, because they were dead.
7 A brief note in an Irish military journal's "publications" section offers us another view of how mid-twentieth-century American scholarship on the San Patricios may have tried to occlude the religious solidarity of the Irish soldiers with Mexican Catholics. The note, which is more or less just an abstract of an article ("The Battalion of St. Patrick in the Mexican War") that appeared in an American military journal in 1950, is without much comment, other than the following: "The [American] article shows a curious misunderstanding of the significance of 'a gamecock, a pair of dice, and a skull and crossbones' carved on a wooden cross erected outside Mexico City to commemorate the Battalion. These are not symbols which show that 'these unfortunate men were brave and fought, gambled, and lost,' but centuries old symbolic motives associated with representations of the Crucifixion" (The Irish Sword, 1:248). Here we have an attempt, by an Irish writer (one of the rare Irish comments on the event until the critical interest of the past ten years or so), to reinstate the symbolic meaning of a Mexican memorial presumbably denoting the religious solidarity with which the San Patricios fought in the war against the United States. The American voice, in reading the commemorative cross as emptied of any religious significance, tries to occlude the implicit solidarity of the memorial's seemingly mysterious symbolism.
8 Luke Gibbons has since used this model to investigate Irish and Native American connections, while Kevin Whelan has explored related territory, specifically the connections between the Irish in America and African-Americans, in his current work on "The Green Atlantic."
9 My scepticism does not go so far as Roy Foster's, however. He is unmoved by "so many untested generalizations about the Platonic solidarity between struggling Irish nationalists and their supposedly analogous fellow victims elsewhere" (The Irish Story xiv). At any rate, I do not think that either my own essay or those he refers to can necessarily by dismissed as "generalizations"; Foster's call for "focusing on the local" is, I think, precisely what many of these studies are most interested in doing.
10 In their introduction to The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd write that their collection is invested in recovering and documenting "the linking of such forms 'below' the level of the nation, and across national sites" (26 emphasis mine). One particularly intriguing essay in their collection that engages with issues of solidarity at the very level of nation is George Lipsitz's essay, "Frantic to Join...the Japanese Army": The Asia Pacific War in the Lives of African American Soldiers and Civilians." The essay takes into consideration Malcolm X's insistence that he was "frantic to join... the Japanese army," and the ways in which African-American engagement with Japan could offer a "detour through a symbolic terrain" (327).
11 See Kipling's short story "The Mutiny of the Mavericks" in War Stories and Poems, ed. Andrew Rutherford (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990) pp. 70-88.
12 From the website http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/img/stpat.html.