Review: A Ballad of Love and Glory by Reyna Grande

Reviewed by Vince Granata

Atria Books. 2022. 370 pages.

Reyna Grande’s A Ballad of Love and Glory offers a close look at a largely unexamined—at least by Americans—chapter of history, one in which American aggression led to a devastating war that created the current border with Mexico. As Grande writes in her author’s note accompanying the novel, “The Mexican-American War has been called the war that the U.S. cannot remember and Mexico cannot forget.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that there have been few works of American art that have tackled the war. The war began as a U.S. land grab, President James K. Polk making good on his expansionist promises by imposing a new border between the countries, the Rio Grande, which was well south of the previous line. A Ballad of Love and Glory begins in 1846, as American troops mass along the river, poised to invade.

Grande’s novel is a dual perspective foray into the chaos of war and the snatches of humanity salvaged amidst destruction. Grande found one of her protagonists, John Riley, through the little-known story of the Saint Patrick’s Brigade, a company of predominantly Irish defectors from the American army who fought on the Mexican side during the war. Her other protagonist, Ximena Salomé Benítez Catalán, came to Grande when she read a John Greenleaf Whittier poem, “The Angels of Buena Vista,” which depicts a Mexican woman aiding casualties on the battlefield. The novel excerpts the poem as its epigraph: “Speak and tell us, our Ximena, looking northward far away, O’er the camp of the invaders, o’er the Mexican array.” As a soldadera, Ximena is one of the many women who supported the Mexican army. For Ximena, this means tending to the wounded using the skills she learned from her grandmother, a gifted curandera or folk healer.

Early in the invasion, U.S. soldiers decimate Ximena’s home. “The wind rippled through the zacahuistle grass. Specks of the windblown ash settled on her opened hand, and she licked them off her palm, tasting the bitter sorrow of innocent families displaced from their homes.” Grande’s lyricism persists even in these descriptions of loss and destruction, her prose, like the novel as a whole, intent on finding beauty and humanity without undercutting the brutality of war.

Initially on the other side of the fight, John Riley quickly becomes disenchanted with the nativist and anti-Catholic officers commanding the American army. In these men, Riley recognizes a similar strain of oppression to what he experienced in Ireland under the boot of British rule. Hoping to seize on the discontent of the foreign mercenaries making up nearly half of the U.S. forces, Mexican soldiers sneak leaflets into U.S. camps encouraging defection. Indicative of Grande’s meticulous research is her reproduction of these materials in the novel, the pleas to men like Riley to “Separate yourself from the Yankees…do not contribute to defend a robbery and usurpation which, be assured, the civilized nations of Europe look upon with the utmost indignation.”

Though Grande’s characters begin apart from each other—opposite sides of the river separating the American and Mexican armies—it’s clear to the reader that the two will collide. And, given the novel’s title, readers know to expect a love story. In less skilled hands, this expectation could have endowed Ximena and Riley’s connection with a sort of preordained inevitability, a fated love story that risks meandering into familiar ground, two unexpected lovers uniting against the backdrop of war. But Grande crafts an authentic connection between her protagonists, two people whose particular lives and circumstances lead them to each other. Riley finds common cause with Mexico and Ximena and identifies with the struggle of defending one’s home from an imperialistic invader. And Ximena, who loses her husband to ransacking Texas Rangers in the novel’s opening, recognizes something in Riley’s steadfast devotion, his dedication to his men, that resonates deeply with her call to minister to the war’s wounded.

The novel considers the question of allegiance, of how to remain faithful to a country, or a lover, or an idea. Ximena’s decision to become a soldadera, to remain on the front lines, is frequently challenged as she’s given ways to flee the fighting. And Riley, who has sworn to fight for Mexico, feels the pull of his homeland, of one day returning to Ireland to fight the British forces that oppress his country. When watching American troops ransack a Mexican church, Riley reflects that he “now knew how his people must have felt when Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland two centuries earlier, desecrating its churches, using them as stables. The seething rage. The impotence.” In this shared “seething rage,” Riley and Ximena’s relationship takes on added meaning, creates a story that is more than a familiar tale of love emerging from the ashes of war, and is instead a story of two characters devoted to causes that feed their love for each other.

Grande also takes full advantage of an opportunity unique to historical fiction: the chance to render powerful figures as characters and create depth around deeds that are recorded in history books. Perhaps the most compelling way that Grande dramatizes these historical figures is through her depiction of López de Santa Anna, the several-times president and commander in chief of the Mexican army. Ximena’s family background places her in a complex relationship with Santa Anna, as her family had been residents of San Antonio de Bexar and had fought against Santa Anna’s Mexican army at the Alamo, a decade prior to the Mexican-American War. Some of Ximena’s relatives were among the Tejanos executed by Santa Anna after the conflict.

Grande renders Santa Anna as a manipulative strong man, someone who easily brings people under his influence, but whose inherent weaknesses become apparent upon closer examination. He is physically infirm, still feeling the effects of a poorly amputated limb, and comes under Ximena’s care. “As she observed him lying prostrate in bed, Ximena saw not an invalid or an amputee, but the monster who had committed such atrocious acts of violence from which her homeland had never recovered. Did he have any idea how the destruction he’d wreaked in Texas had incited the Texians’ fury and loathing of all Mexicans?” In this rendering of Santa Anna, Grande creates an opportunity for the people who are typically voiceless in history books—victims of atrocity, like Ximena and her family—to speak to the figures responsible for their suffering.

Though Grande’s prose, characters, and painstaking research are enough to recommend the book, the novel also shines a light on a conflict that U.S. history seems content to forget. Through attention to the history that Grande details, readers can, hopefully, gain greater awareness of how the present-day flashpoints for conflict about immigration are all places that used to belong, territorially, to Mexico. As Grande writes in her author’s note, “I hope that the more we know about this history, the more that we can remember that Mexicans are native to these lands, that we belong in this country, that we aren’t “foreigners” or “outsiders.”

Vince Granata is a writer from New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of the memoir, Everything Is Fine, which was published by Atria Books in 2021. His writing has recently appeared in Rolling Stone, Fourth Genre, The Massachusetts Review, Creative Nonfiction, and LitHub, and has been recognized in Best American Essays 2018 and Best American Essays 2020. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas.