On this day in 1847, United States forces under General Winfield Scott stormed Chapultepec Castle, then the military academy above Mexico City. Among the dead were six cadets, most of them teenagers: Juan de la Barrera, Juan Escutia, Francisco Márquez, Agustín Melgar, Fernando Montes de Oca and Vicente Suárez. The city fell the following day. Thousands of soldiers and civilians died in that war on both sides, and most of their names are gone.
These six are not. Each 13 September the flag is lowered at dawn, and at the white monument at the foot of the hill the six names are read aloud, one after another, and after each one a voice answers that he died for his country. It is a short ceremony. Nothing in it is new; that is rather the point of it.
I spend my working life among liturgies, and this is one: a fixed form, a fixed day, a roll of the dead called out so that the silence after each name is filled by living people. Every nation makes such choices about which of its dead it will keep saying out loud. Mexico chose six boys. In the photograph below, the esplanade runs toward the columns, and the castle stands on the wooded hill behind, where they were.
Thank you, Miriam. The part that stays with me is the schoolchildren who stand through it in the early cold, in uniform, holding still for names older than their great-grandparents — a roll call answered, year after year, by people who never knew them.
The white monument, the Altar a la Patria, was finished in 1952 — six marble columns, one for each cadet, rising from a semicircular base, designed by the architect Enrique Aragón Echeagaray with sculpture by Ernesto Tamariz. Six columns is an unusual number for a colonnade; it was chosen for counting, not for symmetry.