HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMIGO CHENO CORTINA, MAY 16, 1824

"That Friend"

(With apologies to Pablo Neruda's "Aquel Amigo")

Then Cortina crossed the chaparral

and cast his sacred gunpowder

against bandit Rangers

in Austin grown and paid:

He burned the earth, the mesquite resounded:

the Rinches did not expect what happened:

so well dressed were they  for slaughter

their boots, Colts, and Remingtons shone

but from experience they soon knew

who Cortina and South Texas were:

everything was the grave of blond thieves:

the air, the trees, the road, the water,

Cortina's Aguilas Negras emerged

even from the tequila they uncovered

And putitas they had bought

and fell ill with sudden death

the glorious slave hunters of this Texas

used to hanging blacks

showing superhuman bravery:

two thousand hooded thugs 

busy with one black man, 

a noose, and a branch

on a southern live oak

Here things were radically different:

Cortina attacked, and waited,

He was the coming of the night from Santa Rita

and then he was the light that killed them from Bagdad

Cortina was a Loma Alta with flags,

He was the rifle with hope.

The lessons were very different,

in the plantations the teaching was clean:

they never taught them there

that he who killed could also die:

the Rinches didn't learn

that we love our poor beloved tierra

and that we will defend our ranchitos

created with love and pain.

Neither did Stillman, Kenedy

Kleberg, Ford,

and even King

If they didn't learn this in Austin

they knew it with blood on the Bravo

there the captain of the border waited:

Juan Nepomuceno Cortina was his name

And in this song his name will remain

great as a flare

so that it gives us light and gives us fire

in the continuation of our war