I wrote my dissertation (as I’ve mentioned too many times before) on the parallels and intersections between Irish and Latin American literature. The history of Irish emigration to Latin America is long and variegated, but the go-to example of this transatlantic relationship among the sort of people who study this sort of thing is the San Patricios–literally, “St. Patricks” in Spanish–a battalion of Irish immigrants who fled the Potato Famine to America, were drafted into the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War, then promptly defected to the Mexican side.

All they saw happening, after all, was a bunch of Anglo-Protestants stealing land from a bunch of Catholics, something they already had plenty of experience with back in Ireland. This, combined with the bigotry they suffered at the hands anti-Irish nativists in the U.S. (who used the same racist rhetoric still deployed against Mexican immigrants to this day) made their decision to defect easy.

According to no less than Ulysses S. Grant, the San Patricios put up some of the stiffest resistance of the war, and even continued fighting long after they ran out of ammunition during the fateful Battle of Churubusco. Nevertheless, after the invasion ended in decisive U.S. victory, the majority of the San Patricios were rounded up and hung for high treason in September of 1848. According to legend, the famed Niños Héroes–those young Mexican military cadets who preferred death to dishonor—who leapt from the top Chapultepec castle wrapped in the Mexican flag in full view of the last of San Patricios to be executed. These Irish soldiers in turn cried out “Viva Mexico!” with their last breaths. Needless to say, ever since 1848, Mexico and Ireland have enjoyed a very close and friendly relationship.

For these reasons, the Irish folk-band The Chieftans recorded an entire album in 2010 entitled San Patricio, which featured numerous collaborations with Mexican folk artists as well; my research advisor gave me a CD copy for my birthday as I prepared for my dissertation defense in 2017. The album cover advertises that it features collaborations with the Californian folk-singer Ry Cooder; but the albums biggest coup by far is securing the talents of Oscar-winner and Northern-Ireland native Liam Neeson, who provides voice-over on the album’s center-piece, “March to Battle (Across the Rio Grande).”

The song provides a more succinct and stirring summary of the San Patricios than I just gave, as Neeson narrates with the sort of gravitas that you’d hope an Academy-award winner would bring. I have a hybrid Halloween/Day of the Dead playlist on my phone (it won’t surprise you to learn) that this track features prominently on, due to the ghostly nature of its closing lines, so apropos of the twin holidays that both Ireland and Mexico bequeathed us:

“We’ve disappeared from history
Like footprints in the sand
But our song is in the tumbleweed
And our blood is in this land
But, if in the desert moonlight
You see a ghostly band
We’re the men who died for freedom
Across the Rio Grande.”

Those lines move me especially, because (as I’ve noted before) we are repeatedly taught that the veil is thinner than we realize; that the dead move upon us “with the spirit of Elijah;” that our hearts must turn towards them as theirs do towards us; that even the Book of Mormon, the keystone of our religion, is as a voice “whispering out of the dust,” brought forth by the forgotten dead who–like the revenants of Irish and Latin American literature–have been erased from history but are not silenced, and will return again.