Welcome friends! Today it is my pleasure to host author Reyna Grande and learn more about her and her book, A Ballad of Love and Glory! I posted the review for it a few days back and have since talked to talked to many people about the history it reveals. For many of my well-travelled friends, it is has been eye-opening to learn about the places they love to go to in the US and their relation to Mexico. If you want to refresh your memory, the synopsis of the book is below, but feel free to skip it and read this equally educational and candid chat with Reyna!
A Ballad of Love and Glory by Reyna Grande
A forgotten war. An unforgettable romance.
The year is 1846. After the controversial annexation of Texas, the US Army marches south to provoke war with México over the disputed Río Grande boundary.
Ximena Salomé is a gifted Mexican healer who dreams of building a family with the man she loves on the coveted land she calls home. But when Texas Rangers storm her ranch and shoot her husband dead, her dreams are burned to ashes. Vowing to honor her husband’s memory and defend her country, Ximena uses her healing skills as an army nurse on the frontlines of the ravaging war.
Meanwhile, John Riley, an Irish immigrant in the Yankee army desperate to help his family escape the famine devastating his homeland, is sickened by the unjust war and the unspeakable atrocities against his countrymen by nativist officers. In a bold act of defiance, he swims across the Río Grande and joins the Mexican Army—a desertion punishable by execution. He forms the St. Patrick’s Battalion, a band of Irish soldiers willing to fight to the death for México’s freedom.
When Ximena and John meet, a dangerous attraction blooms between them. As the war intensifies, so does their passion. Swept up by forces with the power to change history, they fight not only for the fate of a nation but for their future together.
Heartbreaking and lyrical, Reyna Grande’s spellbinding saga, inspired by true events and historical figures, brings these two unforgettable characters to life and illuminates a largely forgotten moment in history that impacts the US-México border to this day.
Will Ximena and John survive the chaos of this bitter war, or will their love be devoured along with the land they strive to defend?
Content Notes include War, Injury/injury detail, Rape, Alcoholism, Confinement, Death.
Reyna Grande is the author of the bestselling memoir, The Distance Between Us, (Atria, 2012) where she writes about her life before and after she arrived in the United States from Mexico as an undocumented child immigrant. The much-anticipated sequel, A Dream Called Home (Atria), was released in 2018.
Her other works include the novels, Across a Hundred Mountains, (Atria, 2006) and Dancing with Butterflies (Washington Square Press, 2009) which were published to critical acclaim. The Distance Between Us is also available as a young readers edition from Simon & Schuster’s Children’s Division–Aladdin. Her books have been adopted as the common read selection by schools, colleges, and cities across the country. She has two forthcoming books due to be published in 2022: A Ballad of Love and Glory (Atria, March 15), a novel set during the Mexican-American War, and an anthology by and about undocumented Americans called Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival and New Beginnings (HarperVia, June 7).
Let’s welcome Reyna and learn more about the book from her!
Hi Reyna! Thank you so much for taking some out for me and my readers.
Your note to the reader was very insightful for me and I have come back to it after finishing the book. A lot of my questions actually stem from that, thank you for sharing some of your journey of writing this book with readers! Firstly, having grown up in India and then only recently moved to Canada not even a decade ago has really expanded my thirst to know the history of the world. Through A Ballad of Love and Glory I dived into Mexican and American history for the first time. How has researching the history of places, for your books and yourself, changed you?
I’ve been living in the US since I was 9. Now I’m 46. Through all these years of trying to make a home here, I struggled trying to find my place in this country, trying to “earn” my right to be here. Yet, as a Mexican, as a Spanish speaker, I’ve been made to feel that I don’t belong here, that I’m an outsider, a foreigner. Researching the history, digging into the creation of the US-Mexico border, was empowering. In my US history classes we never learned about the US invasion of Mexico in the 1840s, the unjust war that it waged against the Mexican people in order to take their land. We don’t learn that the American Southwest was once Mexico. No, I had to take a History of Mexico class to learn about this. Knowing all this history of both my countries helped me to reframe how I see myself and understanding that I am not a foreigner in these lands, as I’ve been led to believe.
You have written about immigration as well as migration. What are some challenges to writing about these hard topics, especially when it comes to historical fiction?
I confess that one of the things that excited me about writing A Ballad of Love and Glory was taking a break from writing about immigration—I thought I was going to write about love and war. But my male protagonist—John Riley—is an Irish immigrant, and as I researched Irish immigration of the 1840s, I found so many parallels to the way the Irish were discriminated and demonized in those days to how Latino immigrants are treated today. It surprised me because nowadays we see Irish-Americans as part of mainstream society and benefitting from white privilege, but that wasn’t always the case. I was amazed at how much I had in common with John Riley. So I ended up writing an immigrant story again! Perhaps John Riley immigrated in the 1840s and me in the 1980s, but immigrant trauma is immigrant trauma, regardless of when you were forced to leave your homeland. And US nativism is still as rampant today as it was in the 19th century. There is also a timeless and universal longing for the home we leave behind, for the loved ones we abandoned, and I gave that to John Riley. I also gave him my desire to give the best of myself to the US, only to be told, in subtle and not so subtle ways, to go back to where I came from.
What sets your book apart from other historical fiction that I have read is that you did not shy away from exposing the atrocities of war. While in the middle of the battlefield, and then later as a prisoner of war, those heart wrenching details are what made this book equally real and hard to read. We are fortunate that in today’s day and age we probably won’t need to fight like Riley did, but at the same time, seeing the situation in Ukraine exposes the fact that peace can be an illusion easily shattered. How many of the places and events that you have shared in the book, particularly the part about how the Yankees treated the prisoners after Santa Anna had fled and their movement between prisons, were documented?
Thank you for saying this. To be honest, it was something I worried about—how much to write about the battles, the carnage, the violence. I know not all readers will appreciate being thrown into the frontlines of the war along with my characters. But I told myself if I’m going to write a story about an invasion, then I’m going to write about it—what that looks like and feels like. We are seeing the atrocities of an invasion being played out right now in our TV screens. There is destruction, desolation, and death. All of the details in the book come from my research—like the horse that is chewing on the grass even though its guts are spilling out, or the wild animals roaming the battlefield to feast on the dead. The battles I write about are very well documented, and I didn’t exaggerate or add gratuitous violence. The way the Yankees treated foreign soldiers is detailed in the soldiers’ diaries, letters, and even memoirs written after the war. I didn’t use creative license for any of it. It’s all there in the documents.
Ximena is a healer and I suspect a lot of research would have gone into learning about herbs and remedies that she would have used. Did you have any prior knowledge in this area or was this something new for this book?
My grandmother was a folk healer in Mexico. Since I immigrated when I was 9, I didn’t get trained by my grandma. She wasn’t given the chance to pass this knowledge on to me. However, I inherited her love of plants, and so I’m an avid gardener. To bring Ximena to life, I had to research medicinal plants—especially in the region where she lives—and I consulted with an expert on herbal healing. I also read books about field nurses and what remedies they used in the hospitals. In fact, this is where I learned that calendula flowers were used to staunch the flow of blood, and I put that in my scene when Ximena’s husband is wounded.
A Ballad of Love and Glory is a lot more than a book about two people who are brought together by war. It is the story of standing up to one’s values (such as Riley and others leaving the Yankees to join Mexico seeing how unfairly they were treating him), and not losing faith (like Ximena’s efforts to get Riley back, knowing very well that he is a different man than the one she first met). What did you find most surprising while researching for this book? How did you weave that into the narrative?
With John Riley, what fascinated me is understanding why he deserted and also what kept him fighting for Mexico even though he was on the losing side. Upon reading about the atrocities committed against the Irish and other foreign soldiers, I began to understand his motivation for deserting. Also, religion played a big part because as a Catholic man, he must have felt conflicted having to fight against a Catholic nation that was being oppressed by a Protestant invader. What surprised me was finding so many parallels between Ireland and Mexico. When I learned about the Texas Rangers desecrating Mexico’s churches—and then I learned how the English had done the same to Ireland’s churches—I felt so connected to the Irish people. With Ximena, what surprised me was that even though she is a fictional character, unlike John Riley who really existed, she became so real to me on the page. I was able to weave her into the real historical timeline and events. My favorite scenes with her are when she interacts with Santa Anna and when she visits Gen. Scott.
If readers could take one thing away from this book, what would you hope it be?
I hope that the book helps people understand Mexico, to see it differently. The Mexican people were victims of US imperialism and aggression, and in a way, that never really ended. Also, anti-immigrant people use the word “invasion” to describe the influx of Mexican/Latino immigrants to the US, but really, who invaded whom?
Your books have been published in Spanish as well as English. A Ballad of Love and Glory is also available in Spanish. Do you write in both languages? I’m curious about your involvement in different editions of your books!
I don’t write in Spanish. My Spanish education ended when I set foot in the US. From that point on it was all in English. In college I took a Spanish For Spanish Speakers class that helped me to re-learn some of it, but I can’t write in Spanish. I pick up the dictionary every other minute and that pulls me out of the world I’m creating and disconnects me from my characters. I tried translating my own books but the translation was riddled with mistakes, so I’ve stopped. We now hired translators and I work very closely with them to make sure my voice doesn’t’ get lost in the translation.
Are you currently working on another project?
I have another book coming out this June! Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings is an anthology of poems, essays, and artwork from 41 undocumented or formerly undocumented Americans. I’m excited about this project because this gave me the opportunity to elevate immigrant voices from different parts of the world, not just Latin America. We have contributors from the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Brazil, Nigeria, and elsewhere.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and sharing your latest book! It has been amazing to learn from you and I am excited about what you will write next and where A Ballad of Love and Glory will lead me. 🙂
Thank you for hanging out with Reyna and me! Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter and her website. Definitely check out A Ballad of Love and Glory to expand your knowledge about North American history!
Cover Photo on Unsplash
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