Associated Press
Offices came to a halt in Mexico City and even Mexican expatriates from as far away as Bahrain placed their hands on their hearts and belted out their national anthem in unison Wednesday, celebrating 150 years of the song.
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MEXICO CITY – Offices came to a halt in Mexico City and even Mexican expatriates from as far away as Bahrain placed their hands on their hearts and belted out their national anthem in unison Wednesday, celebrating 150 years of the song.
The international call to song came at 12 p.m. Mexican time (1 p.m. EDT, 1700 GMT.) But some got a head start. In Brussels and Rome, the Mexican embassies honored the anthem around midday local time, several hours before Mexico City.
Office workers in the capital drifted to windows overlooking Mexico's Independence Monument and filtered out to the street where a brass band played a special rendition of the anthem.
The collective singing drew puzzled looks from passing drivers who apparently had not noticed the weekslong national campaign calling on Mexicans to participate.
Jose Luis Garcia, 33, said he hadn't heard anything, and spent the entire song chatting with a friend.
"I've got to be honest. I don't even know the words very well," he said.
While government workers were handed copies of the lyrics and encouraged to sing, many Mexicans in the capital seemed to be too busy to stop what they were doing.
"We just got robbed, and we are trying to get someone to lend us 10 pesos (US$1,euro1) so we can get to the park," 14-year-old Juan Carlos Hetshel said, passing the brass band as the anthem began.
Others welcomed the patriotic show.
Rosario Garcia, a 23-year-old student, said the song "is our Mexican identity."
"Recently, the country seems fragmented, and it's good to remember our country's independence," she said as workers prepared decorations and stages for celebrations of the country's Sept. 16 declaration of independence from Spain.
Spread largely by word of mouth, the call to song reached as far as the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain, where restaurant chef Romaldo Martinez, 45, of Acapulco, sang in Spanish, "all that I can remember" of the anthem while preparing a special Independence Day menu at the busy Casa Mexicana restaurant.
"I am happy, and I wish I was home right now," Martinez said.
The anthem campaign, sponsored by a nonprofit media council and endorsed by the government, called on Mexicans – no matter where they were in the world – to stop what they were doing and sing.
The country's embassies and consulates joined in, with some inviting those waiting for visas or other paperwork. Television commercials promoting the anthem campaign featured a man shouting out the song in an airplane, despite quizzical looks from other passengers.
The singing of the anthem came as the country tried to mend social and political divisions that have prompted even the president to call for the country to come together.
"Mexico's destiny depends today on unity, of the joining of wills to triumph in these battles and create a complete, just and inclusive country," President Vicente Fox said Tuesday during a ceremony at the National Palace.
Many have become openly angry over Fox's perceived shortfalls, crime and poverty, joining massive marches and calling for an end to corruption.
While they elected Fox in 2000, ending 71 years of rule by the once all-powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party, some have also complained about the bickering and political infighting of Mexico's broadened democracy.
In some ways, Mexico finds itself a situation similar to that when the anthem was written 150 years ago by an unknown, 30-year-old Mexican poet.
The song was chosen during a national contest that the government then hoped would unite a country defeated and divided, in part by the loss of half of its territory to the United States in 1848.
"It's undeniable that when our hymn was composed, the country was suffering indescribable distress and difficulties," historian Javier Garciadiego said during Tuesday's National Palace ceremony, adding: "It is a hymn that summons national reconciliation, and condemns discord and internal struggles."
The anthem itself isn't without controversy. Mexican officials were outraged a few years back to discover that a U.S. company claimed a copyright to a version of the song.
