Where Renegades Become Saints

I grew up not far from Churubusco in Coyoacán, a borough in the southern part of Mexico City. In my childhood, it still housed a movie studio where some of the Golden Age movies of Mexican cinema with Jorge Negrete, Pedro Infante, and Sara García were produced. The studio was eventually turned into the Cineteca Nacional, a film club where I saw a slew of superb foreign movies by Bergman, Antonioni, and Truffaut. The club was also a depository of archival material.

In 1982, the club was destroyed by a tragic explosion: the screen bursts into flames as The Promised Land (1974), a movie by Polish director Andrzej Wajda, was projected. Around 2,000 screenplays went up in flames, as did 9,000 books, paintings by Diego Rivera, and original footage from masters like Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Juan Orol. (I know this because I was supposed to be at the screening. I never made it because I was caught in traffic. Several acquaintances of mine worked at the archives—one of them died.)

Maybe this explains why, in part, Churubusco feels like a battlefield. Of course, this piece of land is actually where, on August 20, 1847, the legendary Battle of Churubusco was fought by Mexican soldiers and their supporters against the invading US army in what eventually became a crux in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. Mexico didn’t just lose the war; it also lost a generous portion of its territory—what today constitutes the “Southwest,” e.g., Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming.

These lands, along with the population in them, were “sold” for $15,000,000 to the Americans. It was a steal whose echoes reverberate across time and have inspired, among others, the Chicano struggle for self-determination as part of the Civil Rights era.

What makes the battle poignant is that a number of foreign nationals, including Irish, Italians, and former African-American slaves, switched sides to join the Mexican army against the American invaders. They were part of what came to be known as the San Patricio Battalion. Like the Spanish Civil War almost a century later, when figures like George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Neruda, and others joined forces with the rebellion, the Mexican-American War attracted immense international attention.

While the names aren’t as famous—a plaque hangs in the Plaza de San Jacinto, in Mexico City’s San Angel neighborhood, commemorating those soldiers of Irish descent who absconded—many also believed at the time that the fate of humankind as a whole, or at least of neighborly relations in the Americas, was at stake and that they needed to pledge alliance to the weak side in order to push history in what they thought was the right direction.

The graphic novel The Battle of Churubusco: American Rebels in the Mexican-American War wants to memorialize its martyrs. It is ambitious in scope and cinematic in execution. Unfortunately, it isn’t very good. Its author, Andrea Ferraris, is an Italian artist who lives in Paris. According to a publisher’s note, she has worked for Disney for a couple of decades and draws Donald Duck for the Danish publisher Egmont. Her affinity for cartoonish characters is clear in these pages.

In her style, Ferraris pays homage to Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco, a Diego Rivera colleague—and sometimes nemesis—whose art decorated a number of important Mexico City buildings and a few more in the United States. Orozco’s depiction of soldiers, priests, merchants, and other revolutionary figures had a pathetic quality to it. He was a committed Communist who campaigned against Mexico’s willingness to welcome Leon Trotsky as he feuded with Joseph Stalin and went into exile. Ferraris’ illustrations, mostly in black and white with an occasional sepia insertion to denote a dreamlike sequence, at times even copy Orozco’s canonical images.

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