Say you’ve lived in Mexico for years. You’ve come to love the place — the people, the pace of life, the amazing food. At a binational gathering, maybe one of the July 1 and July 4 celebrations that draw expats and locals together around Lakeside, three anthems play back to back: the Star-Spangled Banner, O Canada, and the Himno Nacional.
You know the words to the Mexican one by now. You’ve heard it enough times that the opening line is stuck in your head: “Mexicanos, al grito de guerra” (Mexicans, to the cry of war). So you sing along. Maybe your hand drifts to your chest, out of habit, the way it would for your own anthem back home.
Does that make you a traitor? Or just someone who’s paid enough attention to a country to know some of its songs?
Actually, it’s a strange line to sing along with. A national anthem that opens by summoning its citizens to war. Whose war, exactly, is a little ambiguous. The anthem was written in the 1850s, well after independence from Spain, in an era of repeated foreign interventions and internal upheaval. It’s less a specific declaration against any one country than a general hymn to sovereignty and resistance, forged in a period when Mexico had reason to feel besieged from several directions, the United States very much included. Most Mexicans singing it today aren’t thinking about any of that history. They’re simply doing their patriotic duty. Which is kind of the whole point of anthems: nobody actually thinks about the lyrics.
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