A Ballad of Love and Glory(119)

I first began my research by googling the Saint Patrick’s Battalion. Then I read the books by Robert Ryal Miller, Michael Hogan, and Peter Stevens. From there, I bought as many books as I could find on the Mexican-American War—history books but also first-person accounts written by soldiers. I read books about the Irish famine and stories of the peasantry. I read books on curanderismo and herbal healing, on cockfighting, on the flora and fauna of northern Mexico (and what is now South Texas). I read books on the Texas Rebellion, on Santa Anna—including his memoirs. I read the memoirs of Juan Seguín and some books on Juan Cortina. I lost track as to how many books I read in total, but I would say about a hundred! I also visited the battle sites in Palo Alto (near Brownsville) and Port Isabel (what used to be El Frontón de Santa Isabel), and Churubusco and Chapultepec (in Mexico City). I visited Santa Anna’s hacienda in Veracruz, which is now a museum, and I went to John Riley’s hometown in Clifden, Ireland.

What was one of the more fascinating facts you learned from your research for this novel?

That the US deliberately provoked this war with Mexico by sending its troops to occupy Mexican lands, and the declaration of war against Mexico was based on a lie. I shouldn’t have been so surprised because the US has justified wars with other countries based on lies (e.g., Iraq). I was also fascinated (but again, not surprised) that the president of Mexico—Antonio López de Santa Anna—had made secret agreements with the US president at the time so he could restore him to power. The theme of divided loyalties fascinated me. I explored this theme with John Riley as well because back in Ireland he and other Irishmen joined the British Army, the very army that was oppressing his homeland. As a redcoat, he must have been seen as a traitor by his own people. In my novel, this is something that haunts Riley. I explored this theme of divided loyalties in the plight of the Tejanos—the native Mexicans who got caught up in the Texas Rebellion, many of whom allied themselves with the white insurgents to rebel against Mexico and who, after the rebellion, became second-class citizens in their own homeland. Tejanos like Juan Seguín betrayed the Mexican people only to discover that he was no longer welcome in the new Texas republic.

The story alternates between John’s and Ximena’s points of view. Did you prefer writing from one character’s perspective over another?

John Riley was very easy to write so, for the first couple years, I mostly wrote from his point of view. Because he is a real historical figure, I knew enough about his participation in the war to be able to track his timeline and figure out his plot points. I knew what he had done but not why. The challenge in rendering him onto the page as a three-dimensional character was figuring out his motivations, his dreams, his yearnings, and his psychological wounds. So, I had to dig really deep into his psyche to understand what drove him to desert and what kept him fighting. I had to draw from my own experience as well. Riley was a father (and maybe a husband) who had left his family behind in Ireland—a country ravaged by poverty and hunger. Similarly, my own father had left his wife and children in Mexico in extreme poverty. My father also fell in love with a nurse (a nurse assistant) when he was here in the US, and he ended up leaving my mother for this woman. I thought of my father when I wrote about John Riley.

John Riley was an actual figure in history, but Ximena was inspired by a John Greenleaf Whittier poem. How did you develop her character and the struggles she faced throughout the war?

Ximena was extremely challenging to write, and for the first few years of working on this novel I had nothing but blank pages in her chapters. Honestly, my manuscript had so many holes it looked like Swiss cheese. Because she was based on a short poem, I had to create her from scratch. It took me a long time to figure out her backstory—a Tejana who witnessed the Texas Rebellion; her grandmother being an Indigenous healer; her husband a ranch owner and horse trainer. Once I had enough pieces of her to guide me, she began to come alive. When I got to the part where she meets Santa Anna, she was a living, breathing person to me, and I was deeply invested in her character. It was so much easier for me to write Ximena’s chapters in part III because by then I knew who she was, I knew how she saw the world, and I had found her voice.

The Mexican setting often feels like another character in the story, the land itself as a living, breathing thing. What connections to this land do you hope readers come away with after reading?

I wanted to show the beauty of the Mexican landscape because that is something I deeply care about. The reader gets to see this beauty through Ximena’s eyes, especially of the Río Grande region where she lived. The loss of the land is even more heartbreaking considering what happened to this region after the war—a lot of this natural beauty is gone. The mesquite and huisache groves are mostly gone, the chaparral and the prairies were stripped away in favor of giant cattle ranches, farms, and cotton plantations. Not to mention a big, ugly border wall. The Río Grande is not what it used to be due to all the river dams, overuse of water, and pollution, which have weakened it so much it is no longer the fierce, beautiful river it once was. The land has seen its fair share of trauma, as have the Mexican people who live there.

I deeply enjoyed writing John Riley’s impressions of Mexico. Seeing my native country through his eyes made me so nostalgic for it! I really wanted Riley to engage deeply with the Mexican setting, so I made him very aware of it. He is actively noticing the differences and similarities to his homeland, including the Catholic religion. Riley falls in love with Mexico in a way I wanted the reader to fall in love with it as well.