For three weeks rolling displays of the Mexican flags for sale in all sizes and materials have been plying local streets, announcing the September 15-16 national celebration of the beginning of Mexico’s bloody 11-year struggle for independence from Spain. Thousands of people were killed just in the first months of the 1810 uprising. And for the most part, the rebellion was led by disillusioned criollo and mestizo Catholic priests.
When looking for reasons, the Catholic hierarchy, the Spanish crown and the viceregal government it placed in New Spain, seemed ignorant of a crucial, obvious fact: in 1806 the total population of New Spain was 6.1 million (40,000 Spaniards, a million criollos (Spaniards born in the New World), 3.5 million pure-blooded Indians, 1.5 million meztizos). The (unequally distributed) per capita income was 28 pesos. In this carelessly managed economy inflation was a constant threat. As the 1800s began, for instance, food prices doubled by 1810. The streets of Mejico (Mexico City) and other cities – Celaya, Guanajuato, Valladolid (today’s Morelia) and Guadalajara – swarmed with hungry, jobless beggars, vagrants and leperos. The wealthy and viceregal bureaucrats seemed blind to what was occurring because this minority was comforted by the dangerous fact that the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer.
Both the swiftly growing numbers of mestizos and criollos became increasingly angry over their exclusion from a society whose contempt seemed unchecked, despite the promises and efforts of well-meaning Catholic priests, friars and bishops.
In 1774, Edmund Burke, the noted conservative thinker, addressed the British parliament on the eve of rebellion in the Thirteen Colonies. He urged its members to reflect “on how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not.“ To tax the colonists, as parliament had in mind, he warned, would yield “nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience.”
Spain should have been listening. For the thinly veiled disorder that was New Spain spawned two categories of seething colonial bitterness. One was the popularity among criollos of literary societies that met for the discussion of the classics. Soon books on the Inquisition’s Index Expurgarorius were being smuggled into the country: The French Encyclopedists, texts by Rousseau, Voltaire, Descartes, Moliére. Secondly, the Spanish king’s own absolutionist ignorance of the damage, the mistreatment and indifference regarding Mexico’s indios and criollos.
Into this contradictory clutter of unchecked greed, prejudice and mistreatment of the majority appeared Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo, an outspoken, well-read and incorrigibly disobedient priest who attracted followers with his adventurous teaching and aid to “common folk” – indios, campesinos, the excluded poor. He had been born in 1753 at the Hacienda de Corralejo, near Pénjamo, Guanajuato. His father, Don Cristobal, mayordomo of the ranch, encouraged him and his brother to enroll at the Jesuit College of San Francisco Javier College in Valladolid. The boys were only in their second year at the college when King Charles III of Spain banished the Jesuits from the Spanish Empire. That was a strong, permanent lesson. Hidalgo transferred to the Colegio San Nicolas and earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Mexico in 1774. He immediately began studying to become a priest, and was ordained in1778. Hidalgo soon was known as “one of the best theologians in his diocese.” He had returned to San Nicolas to teach and then became its rector.
However, soon the Inquisition was informed of a curate whose orthodoxy was questioned. Hidalgo was suspected of questioning priestly celibacy, of suggesting that fornication out of wedlock was not a sin (he was to father two daughters), of reading forbidden books, indulging in gambling, enjoying dancing, challenging the infallibility of the Most Holy Father in Rome, doubting the virgin birth of Jesus, and referring to the Spanish king as a tyrant. Hidalgo was brought before the Inquisition in 1800, but hearsay and questionable witness undermined any charges – though these “suspicions” were filed away for possible later use. His accomplishments and the two books he wrote – one in Latin, one in Spanish – earned him notice and some protection, as did his friendship with the Bishop of Michoacan, Manuel Abad y Queipo, “one of the most fascinating intellectuals of the Enlightenment in New Spain,” (destined to excommunicate him). His behavior cost him the rectorship of San Nicolas. He was assigned to lesser dioceses: San Felipe, Colima, then, fatefully, to Dolores in 1803.
It is at this time that the question, both for contemporary observers and future historians, begins to appear: Who is Miguel Hidalgo? This was nourished by the Mexican establishment’s suspicions of him. The Catholic Church at first feared him for so openly opposing the Church’s harshly conservative social\political choices and its enchantment with inveterate absolutist conniving. In the dioceses to which he was assigned, he increasingly tended to ignore his administrative (and often spiritual) duties to spend time working among his indio and campesino parishioners to improve their family economies. For this work, he learned Nahuatl, Mixtec, Otomi and Tarascan.
But the question of who Hidalgo really was, has continued. In 1810, he became the eccentric leader of an insurgency against Spanish rule. Eccentric because he did not really seek independence from Spain. Napoleon Bonaparte had invaded Spain and put his brother on the Spanish throne. To Hidalgo and his fellow conspirators from San Miguel el Grande and Queretaro, the idea of a French usurper ruling New Spain was an outrage. Thus the insurgent leaders’ aims for independence from metropolitan Spain were actually modest. Oddly, they merely wanted to return Fernando VII (toppled by Napoleon) to the Spanish throne (they didn’t know Fernando was an arch-conservative), and, in New Spain to unseat the gachupines (“spur-wearers,” meaning Spaniards) from power. The gachupines would abdicate or the insurgents would ship them back to Spain.
Captain Ignacio Allende, a criollo land-owner from San Miguel el Grande, the organizer and leader of the conspiracy planned to first suborn the criollo officers of the local standing army. He inducted the much better educated Hidalgo into his “literary club,” for the two already agreed that the political/social situation in both New Spain and metropolitan Spain was intolerable. Allende planned to stage his coup December 8, 1810. But by September there were some 3,000 people throughout Mexico’s Bajio region included in the conspiracy. Secrecy was impossible.
By September 14, orders had been issued to arrest Allende, Hidalgo and other leaders, But gachupine security was no better. That night, both Allende and Juan de Aldama, another criollo army officer, rode swiftly to Dolores to warn Hidalgo and figure out what to do in this moment of betrayal. They pounded on Hidalgo’s door at around two o’clock on the morning of September 16. Panicked, they wanted to go into hiding. Hidalgo, it is said, dressed slowly, thinking of what was the best thing to do. As he was pulling on the long black socks he habitually wore, Hidalgo declared that the only course of action was to go “hunting gachupines.”
At daylight, the church bells of Dolores were rung, and Hidalgo, his declaration of rebellion already formed in his mind, was about to become the leader of New Spain’s 11-year struggle for independence from Spanish rule. (This is the first of a two-part series.)