How To Celebrate Grito de Dolores Without Really Trying

If you know only a little Spanish, you might be excused for thinking Grito de Dolores means that raw oyster you ate had some sand in it, and you have a stomachache. After remedial classes, you might mistake it for I yelled until I had a headache. But after you live in Mexico for a while, you’ll discover that Dolores is a town, full name: Pueblo Nuevo de los Dolores. And a grito is a shout.

The Shout of Dolores is a civic reenactment of a call to revolutionary arms, spoken by a Catholic priest named Miguel Hidalgo, or Don Miguel Gregorio Antonio Ignacio Hidalgo y Costilla Gallaga Mandarte y Villaseñor if you’re not into the whole brevity thing. He opened his window and yelled something to an assembled throng outside. Don Miguel was the equivalent of the Indy Pace Car. He got the Mexican War of Independence rolling by ringing his church bell and yelling at everyone to hate the French.

Why hate the French, you ask? well, it was 1810, and Napoleon had installed his brother as the King of Spain. That made him the king of New Spain, too. Mexicans had only recently gotten used to bonafide Spaniards ordering them around and calling the place New Spain, and decided they’d rather fight than switch to the bonaparte varietal. So Mexicans chose sides between supporting the repulsive abdicated heir to the throne Ferdinand VII, and the toadies who supported Joe Bonaparte. Game on, said Don Miguel.

The politics of it are pretty murky, actually, and will spur you on to a grito de dolor de la cabeza of your own if you dive into it too far. It caused the Peninsular War in Iberia, too, so prepare to spend the whole day in the library figuring it out. Bring Excedrin.

In any event, September 16th is Independence Day in Mexico, similar to July 4th in the US. Of course Mexico had either one, two-hundred year revolution, or innumerable small ones strung out over the calendars, but you have to pick a day and stick to it, and Mexico picked the day of the Grito de Dolores for their founding fiesta.

Except they didn’t. The 16th is officially the holiday, but the whole country celebrates it at 11:00 PM on the 15th. The holiday itself is like New Year’s Day, just a day off to nurse your hangover. The president, assorted governors, and anyone else with a plaque on a government desk wants to read the Grito de Dolores at 11:00 at night on the eve of the holiday, and then shout, “Viva Mexico” three times while the crowd cheers, and throw a party.

Here’s the current president of Mexico giving it a whirl. She appears to be running for class president on the Girls, Girls, Girls! platform every day of her term:

There is a problem with reciting the Grito de Dolores that you might have noticed in the video. Mexicans, being a boisterous and happy-go-lucky people, didn’t write down, or even remember what Don Miguel actually said. Everyone agreed that it was a stirring call to arms, or a soul-searching appeal to patriotism, or an amazing rant, or maybe a grocery shopping list. Many scholars have tried to re-create the speech, which ends up sounding like what that particular scholar would have said. The politicians have given up on the speech part of the enterprise, and just read the names of a hearty handful of fallen heroes of the revolution, followed by yelling Viva Mexico! three times. It’s like saying Beetlejuice! three times, but Mexico appears instead of Michael Keaton.

Mexicans are pretty happy being Mexican, so there aren’t many grumblers holding People Against For placards at any given Grito. And they like a fiesta in any case, so they set up bleachers and food stalls and hire bands to blast away between the fireworks displays. In Merida, they had the awesome La Adictiva:

We could have walked down to the zocalo (the main square) to yell Viva Mexico! along with everyone else. It’s a stirring spectacle, and a charming slogan for a country. But I already had a dolor de cabeza, and while I could have withstood the fireworks, the bells, and shouting, I don’t think my head would have survived a band with an entire valved trombone section.

I used to play the trombone, and I can assure you that’s not music, that’s plumbing.