Los San Patricio’s: The Irish Mexican Battalion That Fought For Freedom

Every St. Patrick's Day, people pack El Paso's Cathedral of St. Patrick for Mass. That cathedral is one of only about 8 in the whole United States named after Ireland's patron saint, and one of only 2 in the state of Texas. And it sits in a city that is mostly Mexican and Mexican-American. The story of why is both brutal and true. There is a real reason the Irish and Mexican people have always had a soft spot for each other, and it goes way deeper than just both being Catholic.

These two groups know what it feels like to have their land stolen, their language treated like trash, and their suffering ignored by people in power. That shared pain built a bond that shows up in El Paso every single day, whether people realize it or not.

To understand where it all started, you have to go back to the 1840s, one of the worst decades in the history of both nations.

The Hunger and the Invasion Arrive at the Same Time

In 1845, a plant disease wiped out Ireland's potato crops. Potatoes were what most poor Irish families lived on. When the crops died, people had nothing to eat. About one million Irish people starved to death, and another one to two million packed up and left the country just to survive.

But here is the part that makes your blood boil. While Irish people were dying of hunger, ships full of food kept sailing out of Ireland to England, guarded by soldiers. Butter. Grain. Salmon. All of it sent to England while Irish kids went to bed starving. Ireland was a British colony, and Britain kept taking the food anyway.

And it had been like that for a long time. Irish Catholics were not even allowed to own land under British rule. They farmed land that belonged to wealthy English landlords, paid rent just to stay on it, and had almost no rights. Sound familiar?

At the exact same time Ireland was starving, the United States invaded Mexico. The Mexican-American War ran from 1846 to 1848, and when it was over, Mexico had lost more than half of its land. California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, all of it became part of the United States. The Rio Grande became the border. El Paso, which had always been a Mexican city, was suddenly American.

Two land grabs. Same decade. Different empires, same playbook.

The San Patricios: "Come Over to Us"

Here is where the story gets really good.

Back then, about 40 percent of the U.S. Army was made up of immigrants, a lot of them Irish Catholics who had just survived the famine. They joined the military because nobody else would hire them. Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feelings in the United States were ugly and open. Protestant officers would not let Catholic soldiers go to Mass. Some forced them to sit through Protestant church services instead. And now those same officers were telling them to go fight a war against a Catholic country.

Mexico's general, Santa Anna, saw an opening. He sent out flyers to the Irish soldiers with a simple message. "Come over to us," the flyers said, "you will be welcomed with the hospitality that Irish guests deserve from a Catholic nation."

Some of them went.

A man named John Riley, a 30-year-old soldier from Clifden, County Galway in Ireland, crossed the Rio Grande and joined the Mexican army before the war even officially started. Others followed. They formed a unit called the Batallon de San Patricio, the Saint Patrick's Battalion, and Mexican generals praised them for fighting with "the most consummate bravery."

They even had their own flag. It was made of green silk. One side had a golden harp, shamrocks, and the Mexican coat of arms with the words "Libertad por la Republica Mexicana." The other side said "Erin Go Bragh," which is Irish for "Ireland Forever." Ireland and Mexico, sewn together on one flag. Though no pictures of the flag exist, this reddit user attempted to create their own version of what it may have looked like from firsthand descriptions.

The Irish soldiers were not just going along for the ride either. They had watched empires use the same tricks over and over to justify taking land from people. They had lived it. And on the banks of the Rio Grande, they saw it happening again to someone else. A lot of them decided they were done being on the wrong side of that story.

The San Patricios were not just a small group of runaways either. After a big win at the Battle of Monterrey, their numbers grew from about 200 to nearly 700 fighters, including German, Polish, and French Catholics who felt the same way. They were skilled with cannons and artillery, and they made several battles much closer than the U.S. expected.

But the U.S. Army eventually started winning. At the Battle of Churubusco, the San Patricios fought until they had almost nothing left. They tore down a white flag of surrender three times rather than quit. Only when one soldier used his own handkerchief on the end of a bayonet did the fighting stop. Thirty-five San Patricios died that day, and 85 were captured.

The Hangings

What happened next was harsh, even by the standards of war.

The 72 captured San Patricios were denied lawyers, put on trial in a process that lasted only a few days, and sentenced to death. Fifty of them were hanged. The rest were whipped and had the letter "D" burned into their cheeks with a hot iron. That "D" stood for deserter. Other soldiers who deserted in that war were shot by firing squad, which was considered more humane. Only the San Patricios were hanged. They were made an example.

The officer in charge of the biggest hanging, Colonel William Harney, left 30 bodies on the gallows in full view of Mexico City as a warning. When someone asked about taking them down, he reportedly said, "I was ordered to have them hanged and have no orders to unhang them."

John Riley, the man who started it all, got a lighter sentence because he had left before the war was officially declared. He was branded and whipped, but he lived. He stayed in Mexico and kept serving in their army. Today a bronze bust of Riley stands in Mexico City's Plaza San Jacinto, next to a plaque that reads, "In Memory of the Irish Soldiers of the Heroic Battalion of San Patrick Who Gave Their Lives for the Mexican Cause During the Unjust North American Invasion of 1847." The Mexican government also put up a statue of Riley in his hometown in Ireland.

Every September, Mexican bagpipers play a tribute at the same plaza where the hangings happened. Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo once said, "We honor their memory. In the name of the people of Mexico, I express my eternal gratitude."

This Was Not a One-Time Thing

The San Patricios were not some random fluke. The Irish have a long history of showing up to fight for other people's freedom. For centuries, Irish soldiers known as the "Wild Geese" left Ireland to fight for Catholic countries across Europe and Latin America after being pushed out by the British. It was a pattern. When you spend hundreds of years being told your fight does not matter, you tend to recognize other people's fights pretty quickly.

Why It Still Matters Right Here in El Paso

The Rio Grande that John Riley and his soldiers crossed in 1846 is the same river you can see from downtown El Paso today. The border that war created is the same border this city lives with every single day. Mexico lost roughly half of its land in that war, and the communities on both sides of the river have been shaped by it ever since.

The Irish immigrants who helped build El Paso, who ran its courts, who laid the county courthouse cornerstone on St. Patrick's Day, and who gave their name to its cathedral did not arrive here as strangers to hard times. They came carrying the memory of famine and stolen land. When they looked at their Mexican neighbors, they saw people who knew that same feeling. That shared history is what built the bridge between these two cultures at the border.

When El Pasoans pack St. Patrick's Cathedral every March 17th, most are not thinking about any of this. But it is there in the walls. Two peoples who refused to disappear, sitting together in a church named for a saint they both claimed as their own.

Not a bad thing to share at all.