Mexicanas, mexicanos: ¡Viva la Independencia! ¡Viva Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla! Gather as the bronze bells of the Lord sound from on High! Prepare yourselves, for the flames of liberation are coming! We ask our Lady of Guadalupe: ruega por nosotros as we brandish our weapons and turn them on the viceroy! Our first rounds fire under the watch of cocoa eyes from Dolores with the hope that our bullets break off the arm of corruption from the statue of Spanish authority! Our second rounds aim at the guts of gluttons! The tears of mothers, whose children were lost to their gorging, will clean the streets of the filthy scraps they toss us! Our third rounds aim at the wicked slaveholders! May we pierce their spineless backs with the fruits of our labor born from their whips! Our fourth rounds, carried by the gracious wishes of the Padre, will fire from barrels resting on the chests of those who dare try to silence us on the day we finally declare victory! ¡Viva Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez! Knock on your walls! Stomp on your floors! Breathe in the dust of your land and raise your voices! Call out to your sleeping brothers and sisters, for our hour has come! Come, you who were born of Las Sierras, your spirits unbreakable! The path to victory is treacherous and our trials will be more than mere cannons and bayonets. Peaks cloaked in glistening white shrouds, sinuous rivers which carve out vast canyons, sweltering deserts home to serpents and scorpions whose venom is more potent than any Spaniard’s bullet. The loss of life will, indeed, be great, but greater still is our yearning for dignity and freedom! Rise, you who were forged by Popocatépetl, your wills indomitable! Just as the warrior who watches over his sleeping maiden, you too must stay vigilant! Our enemy is one of great strength, but also one of great cunning. He will try to fool you with titles and riches and false promises to place a crown on your head. Be attentive to the needs of your people and listen not to the siren’s song of vanity in your heart. Come, then, all of you who inhabit this land, with pride in your hearts and bullets in your guns! Gather together as patriots for our noble cause! ¡Viva Ignacio Allende! Be warned, brothers and sisters, that our fight will not be a short one. The fighting will be arduous, our suffering will be great. It is therefore in our best interests to unite! To unite as one force, to unite as one people, to unite as one nation! There are those among us who may think that raw power alone will bring us victory, but they are every bit as foolish as the ones who say our struggle is in vain! Just as our enemy will not rely on might alone, we too must be intelligent with our actions! We must learn to best the serpent at his own game. Needless cruelty will only drive those uncertain of our cause into the arms of our enemy! Bloodshed for the sake of statement is every bit as cruel and evil as the desecrated bodies left on the roads! Such acts of barbarism would sooner serve as our poison than our sword. Could we truly call ourselves a force of liberation for a people who we slaughter with impunity? To do so would only sow the seeds of cynicism which surely will bring us not the bountiful harvest of victory, but the bitter famine of defeat.
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