San Patricio: The March of the Forgotten

Chieftains founder Paddy Moloney talks with Tara Dougherty about the group’s latest album, San Patricio.

In a moment that history books would rate as a minuscule act of defiance, famed Irish band the Chieftains found a measure of bravery and dedication they deemed worthy of a solemn memorial etched into song. Thus was born the idea for the group’s latest album, San Patricio.

“Twenty-five years ago I was researching music of the American Civil War and I came across this intriguing, fascinating, untold piece of history called the San Patricio Battalion,” Paddy Moloney explains in a telephone conversation from his home in Florida.

Irish soldiers, among them Sergeant John Riley, defected from their unit in the American Army to join forces with the Mexican side during the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848. They were mostly Irish immigrants escaping the Irish famine, and among the reasons put forth for their defection, gleaned from Riley’s letters, was mistreatment from their Protestant generals who refused to allow them to attend mass, and a shared religion and sympathy for the Mexican cause. The Battalion, under Riley, fought gallantly, but ultimately the alliance the San Patricios made with the Catholic Mexicans would prove to be their undoing. After their final stand against the American Army in 1847, many were captured, branded with the letter D on their faces and hanged.

“It’s amazing, all of Mexico knows about the San Patricios, while in the States [the San Patricios] are sort of forgotten, passed over. It’s a shameful thing, almost sort of a complex,” Moloney said.

Taken by this story, Moloney began to research the music of Mexico from the 19th century. Fusing the sounds of nine regions of the country along with the Chieftains’ own Irish flavor, Moloney recruited Ry Cooder, Los Tigres del Norte, Lila Down, Liam Neeson and dozens of other collaborators from Mexico, the States and Ireland to contribute to the album.

“As I would’ve with any project, I was living with it, entering into the whole feel of it and letting my mind run a little wild …Then on a trip to Mexico City, I started hearing the European influence in Mexican music of that period, the late 19th century.

“There’s this great fusion between Mexican music and the people and culture, and the Irish. A lot of the music is so similar to that in Ireland. I listened to hundreds of CDs and groups during my research and I’d be able to pick up pieces, like, ‘Oh, that’s a line from this jig.’ It’s fascinating the mixture of Irish instruments and Mexican instruments, they blend so well together and I think people enjoy that.”

At a museum in Churubusco, the site of the Battalion’s final stand, the San Patricio Pipe Band, dressed in the uniform of the San Patricios, march in and out of the museum every Sunday. Seeing this led Moloney to write his own march, which appears on the album.

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