How a Locked Door Gave Mexico Its National Anthem

On November 12, 1853, President Antonio López de Santa Anna announced a contest: Mexico needed a national anthem, and he wanted the country’s poets to write one. Francisco González Bocanegra, one of the most talented poets in Mexico City, wasn’t interested. Love poetry and patriotic verse, he told anyone who asked, called for completely different skills, and he didn’t especially want to try the second kind. His fiancée had other plans.

Locked in for four hours

Guadalupe González del Pino had heard González Bocanegra turn down the contest one too many times. Under the pretext of a family visit, she led him into a bedroom in her parents’ house, room hung with paintings of scenes from Mexican history, and locked the door behind him, refusing to let him out until he’d written something. He had no way out and, it turned out, no real excuse either. Four hours later, he slid ten completed stanzas under the door. His fiancée and her father read them, approved, and he submitted the poem to the contest under his own name. The jury chose it unanimously.

A Catalan bandleader, by way of Cuba

Words alone weren’t an anthem, and a second contest followed to set González Bocanegra’s poem to music. It was won by Jaime Nunó, a composer from Sant Joan de les Abadesses, in Catalonia, who’d lost both parents before he turned nine and been raised by an uncle who paid for his music lessons. Nunó trained under the composer Saverio Mercadante in Naples, led a Spanish royal regimental band, and, on a posting to Cuba, happened to meet Santa Anna, then living there in exile, through the island’s governor. When Santa Anna returned to Mexico to resume the presidency in 1853, he invited Nunó along to lead the country’s military bands. By April 1854, Nunó was running Mexico’s National Conservatory. Four months later, on August 12, he won the contest to compose the anthem’s music, a job he’d stumbled into largely because of a friendship made on an island that had nothing to do with either the poem or the country it was written for.

Ninety years unofficial

The finished anthem premiered on September 15, 1854, at the Gran Teatro Santa Anna in Mexico City, named, like a great deal else in the country at that moment, for the president himself. A soprano and tenor from a touring Italian opera company sang it with full orchestra; the next day, September 16, Independence Day, it entered public use for good. What it didn’t have, for a long time, was the force of law. Mexicans sang it at school, at ceremonies, at every official function that called for one, for eighty-nine years before President Manuel Ávila Camacho finally made it official in 1943. That same law trimmed González Bocanegra’s original ten stanzas down to four for regular use, the first, fifth, sixth, and tenth, plus the chorus, leaving out the verses tied to specific 19th-century conflicts that no longer made sense for the country to keep singing.

That’s the version still in use today. By law, no one may alter it or use it commercially. For decades it was also required at the start and end of every day’s television and radio broadcasts nationwide, a photo of the flag displayed on-screen while it played, and it’s mandatory listening, if not mandatory singing, in every Mexican preschool, primary, and secondary classroom every Monday morning. All of it traces back to one poet who didn’t want the assignment, and one fiancée who decided that wasn’t going to be his choice to make.

Sources: Historical accounts of Francisco González Bocanegra and the 1853 lyrics competition, including the account of his confinement by Guadalupe González del Pino; biographical accounts of Jaime Nunó’s life and his 1854 win of the music competition; historical documentation of the anthem’s September 1854 premiere and its 1943 official adoption under Manuel Ávila Camacho; the Ley Sobre el Escudo, la Bandera y el Himno Nacionales governing the anthem’s official use today.