Conscripted by history
Reyna Grande never intended a war novel, but the Mexican-American conflict's people were too compelling
Reyna Grande didn't know about the St. Patrick's Battalion until someone at a book reading suggested she write about the group of European, primarily Irish, soldiers who fought for the Mexican army in the MexicanAmerican War.
“I hear that a lot from readers who give me ideas for books I should write, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to go do it,” the Woodland-based writer says by phone.
This time, though, she did. “A Ballad of Love and Glory” (Atria Books) is historical fiction that digs into the war and a blooming romance between the leader of the St. Patrick's Battalion and a young widow tasked with treating the wounded.
This was not a story that Grande, the award-winning author of “Across a Hundred Mountains” and “Dancing With Butterflies,” ever intended to write. “I never once thought that I would write a book about a war. I just didn't,” she says. “War. Battles. Military life. Politics. It never interested me.”
Still, she looked into the subject and the more she learned about the war and the soldiers who deserted the U.S. Army to join Mexico's ranks, the more she was intrigued and wanted to understand why they did it.
“They could be executed for deserting,” she says. “It came at big risk.”
The research became a way of learning about history that Grande wasn't taught in school. “I decided that maybe if I write a novel about it, it will be my way of teaching myself about this war and reclaiming this part of history that pertains to me as a Mexican living in California,” she says. “In a way, it was an act of empowerment to write this book because it allowed me to learn more about myself while I was writing.” Still, it wasn't an easy process.
“It intimidated me,” Grande admits. “It took me over seven years to write this book. I kept putting it away because I was so intimidated by it, and I kept thinking that I had bitten off more than I could chew and that I didn't have it in me to write this book. Once I finished the draft and the revising started, I started feeling more confident that I could do it.”
That revelation influenced Grande's approach to the novel, which incorporated her research into the events surrounding the war as well, like the Texas Revolution, the annexation of the state and deals between politician and general Antonio López de Santa Anna and the United States. “One of the things that I feel was really important was adding that complexity to the story so that you really get to see a lot of the gray areas,” she says. “That was really important in understanding the politics of the time.”
Catholicism also figures prominently in the novel, as the St. Patrick's Battalion soldiers were largely Catholics who faced religious discrimination in the U.S. but found a common faith in Mexico.
“What I find really interesting is that I'm not a practicing Catholic. I'm more of an atheist nowadays, but I was raised Catholic by a grandma who was very religious,” says Grande. “Every book I write, Catholicism is always there. It's so strong. It has such a strong presence in the story. I just can't get away from writing religious characters.”
The story at the center of the war is a romance between John Riley, who led the battalion, and Ximena, a Mexican woman who treats the wounded. Finding a balance between the war story and the love story was tricky. “I wanted the war to be a central character, as much as Ximena and John were,” she says. “I tried to incorporate all of these, my characters and the war, in a way that they did not overshadow one another.”
Another challenge was developing a relationship that blurs fact and fiction. Riley was a real historical figure. There are multiple books written about him, some of which Grande read in her research. “Military records place him at different battles. We know the exact date that he deserted,” she says. “I know things about him and his participation in the war, so it was easier to write about him and trace his journey within those two years.”
Meanwhile, Ximena was a character in the poem “The Angel of Buena Vista” by John Greenleaf Whittier.
“The poem is basically her out in the battlefield tending to the wounded from both sides. That's it,” Grande says. “So, I had to create everything about her: her backstory, her family, where she comes from, how she was living in that region, her husband. Everything about Ximena, I had to create from scratch.”
In bringing Ximena to life on the pages of “A Ballad of Love and Glory,” Grande pays tribute to another iconic group in Mexican history, the soldaderas.
“Usually, when we talking about the female soldiers, the soldaderas, we think of the Mexican Revolution because, by then, cameras were around. There's a lot of photographs of female soldiers during the Mexican Revolution and you see them wearing those bullet belts across their chest, holding their rifles,” Grande says.
In her research, though, she found documentation of women who traveled toward battlefields during both the Texas Revolution and Mexican-American War. “We know that there were a lot of female soldiers in the Mexican Revolution,” says Grande, “but they were actually in all the other wars or conflicts that Mexico had been in.”
Still, not all her research was as fruitful. Grande read two older romance novels set during the Mexican-American War that didn't delve into the war itself, which didn't help her.
“I thought, that's a real disservice to the war because it has been ignored for so long,” she says. “Why would you write a book about it — and then not really write about it?”
I decided that maybe if I write a novel about it,
it will be my way of teaching myself about this war and reclaiming this part of history that pertains to me as a Mexican living in California.
— Reyna Grande, author of “A Ballad of Love and Glory”