DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

Untilled Fields of Irish History
By Peter Berresford Ellis

The Roman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, once wrote that to be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. I continually feel like a child, for I have discovered, in the maturity of my years, that the more I discover about Irish history the less I appear to know. The discovery of a gem here and another there leads one into all sorts of historical wonderlands.

I was amazed back in 1967 when I learned, following the murder of ‘Che’ Guevara in Bolivia, that his full name was Ernesto Guevara Lynch, ‘Che’ being a nickname for an Argentinean. Later I came in contact with Che’s father, Ernest Lynch, and found that Che had not only been aware of his County Cork family background but he was deeply fascinated by the history of Ireland.

That discovery sparked off an interest in what I feel is a very neglected area of Irish studies in the Americas. Che was but one of the descendants of the Irish Diaspora in Latin America who played leading roles in the development of their countries. We all know of Bernardo O’Higgins in Chile. But in 1920, we find that the first Socialist President of Mexico to emerge from the Mexican Revolutionary period, was Miguel Obregon. When we look closer we find his father was Michael O’Brien. Who was the president of Argentina who managed to prevent the right wing from declaring war in support of Germany in 1944? Well, his father was Eamon O’Farrell, but he used the form Edelmiro Farrell.

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Republican and socialist as we are, we should not subscribe to a false history merely because it is not what we feel to be ‘politically correct’.
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Irish-American history has come to us from a United States English-speaking perspective. Yet there is another history to be found in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Americas. It was regiments of the Irish Brigade of Spain, particularly the Hibernia and Irlanda regiments, who were active in Spain’s American empire in the 18th Century. And it was the veterans of these regiments who formed a large percentage of colonists, paid in land rather in money, particularly in New Spain, which became Mexico, and by Mexico I also mean the Mexican territories prior to the United States ‘Land Grab’ of the 1840s.

From the Mexican-Irish perspective, we find that the ‘Alamo’ as an American symbol of the fight for liberation, is slightly different. That many of the defenders of the Alamo were certainly Irish is true - but they were mainly of Ulster Protestant and slave-owning backgrounds. Many of the Mexican besiegers were Irish Catholics or of Irish Catholic decent. The president of Mexico just before the Texan breakaway was one Michael Berrigan (he used the Spanish form ‘Miguel Barragan’) He had been an officer in Spain’s Irish Brigade. He was a radical republican. The misfortune of Mexico was that he died of typhus in 1835 after his first year in office and this allowed the right wing Santa Anna, the most incompetent ruler and general ever, according to one book, to succeed him in office.

One irony of the Alamo is that the foundation stone of the building was actually laid by a Dubliner named Hugh O’Connor, who was the Mexican Governor of Texas.

By the way, that last Spanish viceroy was a talented diplomat as well as soldier and took it on himself to develop the ‘Plan de Iguala’ which gave Mexico and the other Spanish territories independence. The viceroy’s name was Generalissimo Juan O’Donoju (O’Donoghue), a graduate of the Irish Brigade. His chaplain, Father Miguel Muldoon, records the agreement reached with Juan Augustus Magee, from County Down, who was leading the Texan-Irish in the colonial war against Spain. Once Mexico received independence, Magee found that he was having to fight attempts by the United States to move settlers into the Texas province, led by Austin and Houston, who wanted to make it a slave state. It was the Irish-Mexicans who lost land, rights and their standard of living when the Texas Republic came into being.

Knowing this makes more sense of the story of the Los Patricios who fought for Mexico against the United States during the land-grabbing wars a decade or so later. U.S. histories would have us believe that this Irish unit of the Mexican army was simply a collection of Irish deserters.

People seem to prefer to believe in myths than reality.

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