Burial-go-round

I’m way, way, way behind in a promised revision of Gods, Gachupines and Gringos… I know, I know.  Running into trivia like this isn’t all that useful, but it is fun, in a twisted way.

Emperor Maximilian was shot the 19th of June 1867, along with two of his surviving generals, Miguel Miramon and Tomás Meija.  Maximilian’s corpse was eventually shipped back to Austria (after a botched embalming, some diplomatic dithering, and a quicky paint job to cover up the greenish hue he’d acquired as a result of too much copper in the embalming fluid), and Mirimon was buried in Mexico City’s premier cemetery, San Fernando.  When Benito Juarez was buried in what was to have been Maximilan’s plot in San Fernando, Miramon’s family — appalled at the idea of their royalist relation spending eternity next to the Indian who’d had him executed, traded tombs with the family of Republican hero, Ignacio Zaragosa, who died soon after winning the Battle of Puebla, and was buried in that city.

Meija´s corpse had it’s own post-mortem travels.  The general’s widow intended to have her late husband buried back in his native Sierra Gorda region of Queretaro.  But, after paying for a (decent) embalming job, ran out of money.  With Royalists not wanting to come out openly to support the dead heroes of the lost cause,  the next best thing was to give them a chance to gaze once more on their leaders, and chip in to send him off to his final reward.

The widow Meija raised a tidy sum charging admission to see Tomas propped up in the living room,.  Not enough to ship him back to Queretaro, though enough to give him a nifty tomb in San Fernando, where the two Indian enemies lie a few meters from each other.