To the “hero” in this Mexico City-set historical novel, “to flee or
not to flee” is the question.

Men of thought versus men of action, personal ambition versus the
common good, outside forces exploiting national disunity—it’s all
the stuff of classical drama. As Ignacio Solares tells it, it’s also
the stuff of 19th-century Mexican history.

There’s nothing subtle in the presentation of Solares’ note-worthy,
unsettling, newly translated book about the 1847 U.S. takeover of
Mexico City. Yankee Invasion was released on Cinco de
Mayo—the day that celebrates Mexico’s rout of the French. The
cover art depicts Uncle Sam as mounted Death, gleefully trampling a
group of fleeing souls.

The novel is bookended by two maps of Mexico. In the first, from
1824, Mexico occupies its old arc up the Pacific Coast; in the second,
34 years later, Mexico is missing its top half—Alta California,
Sonora and Sinaloa, Nuevo Mexico, Coahuila and Tejas have been lopped
off and transformed into California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Novelist, playwright and essayist Solares was born in
Juarez—right at the lop line. In the introduction, writer Carlos
Fuentes underscores Solares’ perspective on U.S.-Mexican relations.

Solares presents the narrative in Yankee Invasion as the
1890s reminiscences of a melancholy, aging intellectual, Abelardo.
Abelardo’s wife has persuaded him to relieve his decades-long guilt
about his part in the U.S. invasion of Mexico City in September 1847 by
writing it down.

Abelardo opens by relating a symbolic action: A renegade Jesuit
priest shoots dead a U.S. soldier who is raising the American flag over
the Mexican National Palace. The flag eventually gets raised, but the
action resonates. Then Abelardo himself commits an uncharacteristic,
very Hamlet-like act with a dagger.

Young Abelardo of 1847 had whiled away hours discussing philosophy
and politics with his friends in the Progreso Café. He had lived
his 25 years through the political instability of the nascent Mexican
Republic, from its independence from Spain through intermittent
skirmishes with the French; now the Americans were on their
doorstep.

With the invasion looming, Abelardo’s parents urged him to accompany
them back to Spain, but he declined. He tried to live as before. He
attempted to read and write; he participated in heated discussions at
the Progreso—but he accomplished nothing. He became increasingly
anxious and despondent. He considered and reconsidered escape
plans.

As Gen. Winfield Scott’s U.S. troops marched from Veracruz to the
capital, the Mexican people, apparently as incapable of action as our
narrator, mounted little resistance.

There is no single villain in this Mexican republic coming-of-age
story. It’s not the American invasion alone, but the nature of Mexican
society that contributes to Mexico’s defeat: Politicians are corrupt
and self-serving; the rich would sooner truck with Europeans or
Americans than their poor countrymen; the establishment church serves
at the bidding of shady government; the military is run by officers
protecting their fiefdoms. When a few courageous officers attempt to
stand up to the Americans, they are either punished or abandoned by
Santa Anna.

The narrative line of Yankee Invasion—which amounts to
Abelardo’s wringing his hands as the U.S. juggernaut rolls toward the
city—stretches thin over the history; the more Abelardo
equivocates, the more he loses the reader’s sympathy. However, Solares
brings in a second voice, that of Abelardo’s friend Dr.
Urruchúa, who offers another perspective on the invasion and
serves as a character foil. Dr. Urruchúa is our selfless man of
action. No hand-wringer, he dives into treating the wounded (and
alleviates the reader’s impatience).

Solares’ descriptions can be luscious, but his tone is generally
disciplined. Objective-sounding, it nonetheless hints at an underlying
resentment of the invaders (more than once, Abelardo refers to the
horror of yankees living “on top” of him) and rueful national
self-knowledge (“the lie called Mexico … does not exist except in
bombastic speeches, official seals, and land plundered from within and
without alike”).

It’s impossible not to read contemporary implications into this
text. At one point, Abelardo’s wife makes a wry observation: “I’m glad
you have no desire to visit the United States, because if you publish
your chronicle, I’m sure they wouldn’t let you in, anyway.”

Well, Abelardo’s in. And it’s worth taking a look at
Mexican-American history from el otro lado.

This article appears in May 7-13, 2009.