I was thinking what to write about and I decided to tell you about my class with my junior high students last week.
As the first class in my program I had to apply an examination about the Mexican Anthem, they needed to remember the complete lyric and who wrote it and who wrote its music to, I was in shock because some of the students just write a little bit of the chorus and others couldn't write the first verse at least.
I gaved them the complet lyric and as homework they investigated the Mexican Anthem history, in english because my art class is in english. In our second day we were talking about interesting events that happened before our anthem was written.
For example:
Antonio Lòpez de Santa Anna was the president who announced the competition and 25 poets participated in the contest, at the end, Francisco González Bocanegra's lyric was chosen.
But first, Francisco Gonzàlez Bocanegra wasn't interested in participating in the competition but his fiancée Guadalupe imprisoned him in a room untill he produced an entry for the competition. There were many pictures of the Mexican history events wich could helped him to inspired his work.
Jaime Nunó , a Spanish-born band leader, composed the music that was chosen for Gonzalez's lyric in a second national contest because in the first one the music of Juan Bottesini was disliked.
The Prima Donna Enriqueta Sontag sang for first time our anthem, she was the most beautiful voice at that time, unfortunatly one month later she died because of the cholera.
Some students were really interested about the history and now they think that our anthem is important for them, we are going to continue practicing the Mexican Anthem next week and I hope they can feel proud of being mexicans.
