| By Nickolas J. Manring
The author is a consular officer in Mexico City.
“Between the cemetery itself and the records in his office, I discovered a mother lode of history about U.S. presence in Mexico City.”
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 ooking for U.S. history in our embassy in Mexico City? Or quiet in the world’s largest city? The chances of finding either seemed remote when I arrived at my first overseas post in August 1994. Nothing associated with the chancery seemed old. The building itself dates only from 1964. One evening, however, while staffing the control room for a vice-presidential visit, a fellow first-tour officer suggested I talk to Paul Badgley.
Checking the embassy’s phone directory, I found Mr. Badgley the sole occupant of the American Battle Monuments Commission’s Mexico City office. I called and was invited to his office. It adjoins the oldest U.S. national cemetery outside the United States.
Days later, a mile north of the embassy, I rang the cemetery gate’s bell. The cemetery is in one of the most densely populated parts in this, the world’s most populated city. Paul Badgley greeted me warmly and apologized for the gate being locked. Inside was an immaculate, green park-a virtual Garden of Eden in the midst of miles of concrete and traffic.
“We started locking the gate after we kept finding Romeos and Juliets behind the shrubbery and occasional wafts of strange bluish smoke from behind the trees,” he said. “It didn’t seem to make the place very hallowed.”
Tombstone territory
Between the cemetery itself and the records in his office, I discovered a mother lode of history about U.S. presence in Mexico City. The cemetery consists of two long walls of crypts six high, with an almost one-acre park between the walls. Walking the grounds, Mr. Badgley recited its history: founded in 1851, three years after the end of the Mexican War, to inter 750 U.S. soldiers killed around Mexico City. From that time until filled in 1924, 813 more soldiers were buried here, including several high-ranking Confederates who fled the United States after the Civil War, a number of U.S. diplomats, and a few dislocated European nobles.
The cemetery’s volumes and files of late 19th-century reports and letters mirrored long-past consular duties in Mexico City. For a time, burials were permitted only if authorized by the consul general. He had to verify the American citizenship of the deceased. Permission to use the cemetery grounds for anything out of the ordinary was also up to the consul general. In March 1887, the consul general wrote the cemetery’s superintendent, asking him to “Please permit the bearer and his friends to make their preparation, for the usual annual celebration or whatever it may be termed, at the grave of Jose Maria on Saturday next.”
Consular officers oversaw transfers of funds to and from the cemetery, ordering tombstones and obtaining supplies (such as the five wagonloads of manure authorized in February 1893). In 1889, the consul general was lobbying the U.S. Army against additional interments:
“The American Colony of this city, now numbering some 4,000, are abundantly able, and most necessarily will very soon secure other grounds for a cemetery, outside of the city limits.”
Fleeing fast
In 1916, during the tumultuous period of the Mexican Revolution, the consul was tasked to make sure the cemetery superintendent was able to flee Mexico City with the rest of the mission’s staff. The cemetery superintendent wrote to Washington, D.C., “The American Consul stated the best chance to get away is now. He is leaving.”
When problems of greater magnitude arose, it was not unusual for the ambassador to become involved. In 1911, Ambassador Henry Luce Wilson wrote repeatedly to the Foreign Ministry, asking that the local government stop all the commotion caused by construction near the cemetery and, later, that a felled tree be removed from near the cemetery entrance.
After an hour or so of sifting through the cemetery archives and comparing my own consular experience in Mexico City with my predecessor’s, I thanked the superintendent for his lesson in diplomatic history and bade him farewell. I then returned to the noise, crowds and pollution of the world’s largest city.
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