The American invasion, and what remains…

Luis Antonio Rojas for The Washington Post

My neighborhood is considered the “old city” althogh old is a relative concept, having been platted in 1890, almost yesterday in a city going back about 650 years. Along the way Cortés and company marched down the main street (and ran back up the street when angy Aztecs chased them out the first of July in 1520. The the regret of the Aztecs, he said, “I’ll be back”… and was.

So too, were the gringos, in 1846. from a couple different directions on 11 -12 Septermber 1847. Not a major engagment up at the Garita de San Cosme (although among the combattants was a young Lieutenant named Ulysses S. Grant) but … what was important at the time, is that there was a Protestant Church there.. which included a Protestant churchyard. which is why so many of the US casualties were buried in what was then the edge of town.

Given growth in the 20th century, a central ring road built in the early 1960s, and a major theater taking about half the original space, the graves were moved to niches along the walls of a one-acre plot… most victims of the “Unjust Invasion”, but also a number of later arrivals, including a couple deluded Confederate generals who somehow thought they could carry on the “great cause” under the Emmperor Maximiliano

Visiting it is somewhat hit or miss. It was opened for US Memorial Day, and if the caretaker is around, he can let you in.

I started to write this the other day, but we had a power outage, and I just never got back to this.