Google Doodle celebrates the 198th birthday of Francisco González Bocanegra, who wrote Mexican National Anthem lyrics

Google Doodle celebrates the 198th birthday of a Mexican poet Francisco González Bocanegra, who composed the lyrics of the Mexican National Anthem in 1853, on January 8, 2022.

Who was Francisco González Bocanegra?

Francisco González Bocanegra was born on 8th January 1824 in San Luis Potosí into a Spanish family.

Notwithstanding his father being absolved due to being married to a Mexican, in 1827, his family moved to Spain after a law was instituted expelling all leftover Spanish residents in the country. They settled in the port of Cádiz until the family got back to San Luis Potosí on December 28, 1836.

Francisco González Bocanegra’s parents dedicated him to commerce, through which he gained an agreeable position that permitted him to dedicate himself to the cultivation of letters. He additionally held high positions in the administration, for example, theater censor during the government of Miguel Miramón, from 1859 to 1860.

Francisco González Bocanegra is mainly known for the verses of the Mexican national anthem, for which the government had opened a contest wherein 25 poets partook, and of which he was the winner. In his national anthem, he features the strength of the words (considered by some to be excessively contentious) and the music, in time to march, translated by a war band, without the gift of strings.

On November 12, 1853, President Antonio López de Santa Anna declared a competition to compose a national anthem for Mexico. González, a talented poet, was not interested in partaking in the competition. His fiancée, Guadalupe González del Pino (or Pili), had unfaltering confidence in her fiancée’s poetic skills and was disappointed with his steady refusal to partake. Misrepresentations affectations, she locked him in the room and would not let him out until he produced an entry for the competition.

Following four hours of fluent (yet constrained) inspiration, Francisco recovered his opportunity by slipping each of the ten verses of his creation under the door. After Francisco got approval from his fiancée and her father, he submitted the poem and won the competition by consistent vote. González was declared the winner in the publication Official Journal of the Federation (DOF) on February 3, 1854.

In 1943, six of Francisco González Bocanegra’s ten verses were cut from the official full national anthem, leaving his chorus and stanzas 1, 5, 6, and 10.

His submission won, and on the eve of Mexico’s Independence Day in 1854, Bocanegra’s anthem was sung for the first time at the Santa Ana Theater (referred to the present time as the National Theater). This hymn was embraced by the government as the country’s official anthem in 1943, and the rest is history!

Francisco González Bocanegra likewise left different compositions that are recognized by their straightforwardness and motivation, and the drama entitled Vasco Núñez de Balboa, which was debuted on September 14, 1856, at the Iturbide Theater, and whose first printed edition was not published until 1954. This historical-chivalric drama, particularly in accordance with the overall romanticism, deserved for its excellent versification the recognition of the Spanish playwright José Zorrilla, who nevertheless called attention to the gradualness of its improvement as the fundamental imperfection.

Francisco González Bocanegra, a romantic poet, published part of his work in newspapers and magazines. Well known for being the author of the lyrics of the National Anthem, an honor he won in a challenge, being the members of the jury Manuel Eulogio Carpio Hernández, José Joaquín Pesado Pérez, and José Bernardo Couto. Part of his works in verse were published in La Ilustracion Mexicana (1851-53), Presente Amistoso (1851 and 1852), Diario Oficial (1860) and Álbum de Señoritas . He was the director of the Official Gazette.

Francisco González Bocanegra died in 1861 and is buried in the Rotonda de las Personas Ilustres (Rotunda of Illustrious Persons) in Mexico City.

On January 8, 2022, Google featured a Doodle on its homepage for celebrating Francisco González Bocanegra’s 198th Birthday.

Today, his words remain deified in the Mexican National Anthem and have been translated into 12 unique Indigenous languages spoken all through the country.