An Old Soldier's Lament

Porfirio Diaz to Julian Grajales, November 25, 1892. Coleccion Porfirio Diaz, Legajo 17, Documento 017186.

Essentially, this letter, in all its illegible, scratched out glory (I am sure I will become an expert at deciphering the hands of Diaz's secretaries before this is all over), simply says,
'Sorry, but there's not much I can do about it.'

Grajales, who must have been getting on in years by 1892, wrote to complain that despite his years of service, he had never been compensated for his humble bravery in the fight back 'in the year of '58' against 'the empire' (the French, of course, and their puppet Austrian, Maximilian) and then against Diaz's enemies until his party 'triumphed, for once and forever'.


Julian Grajales to Porfirio Diaz. November 1, 1892. Coleccion Porfirio Diaz, Legajo 17, Documento 017185.

If nothing else, I love this man's handwriting, so loopy and scratchy in a way that evokes an old soldier, sitting on his front porch in the lowlands of Chiapas, grumbling about the young whipper snappers in government who owe him their freedom and their respects. And who, of course, frequently forget that debt.

Diaz's response is painfully polite and obsequious, as befits a gentleman dictator. What makes his archive so rich is the degree to which the personalism that tinged all of governance during his reign was backed up by reams of letters such as this. Diaz was everyone's president (well, to a degree), and if you wrote to him, he would respond. Who knows that he ever followed through on his promise to remind Governor Rabasa of Grajales's service, but I am certain it made the man happy to receive such assurances of his value to his nation.

Or maybe it didn't.

A soldier from 1889, but add a few years onto him and stoop his back a bit, and this is how I picture Grajales, still ready to march out in defense of his president.