Question: On what day is Mexican independence celebrated?If you said Cinco de Mayo, a national holiday in Mexico in honor of a military victory in 1862 in Battle of Puebla over the French forces of Napoleon III, you’d be in good company, but you’d also be wrong.
On this day in 1810 Miguel Hidalgo issued El Grito de Dolores, the battle cry of Mexican independenceThe day celebrated as Mexican Independence Day is September 16 and predates Cinco de Mayo by 52 years. It was 200 years ago today, on September 16, 1810, that Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, called the Father of Mexican Independence, issued his famous Grito de Dolores (the “Cry of Dolores”), which became the battle cry of the Mexican War of Independence from Spain. In commemoration of his cry, on the eve of Mexican Independence Day the president of Mexico shouts a version of “el Grito” from the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City: “Viva México! Viva la Independencia! Vivan los héroes!”
So, what is the context of el Grito and what did Hidalgo accomplish? As Britannica’s article on Mexico discusses,
Warning that the Spaniards would deliver Mexico to the “godless” French, Hidalgo exhorted his followers to fight and die for the Mexican Virgin, Our Lady of Guadalupe. When Hidalgo left his tiny village, he marched with his followers into Guanajuato, a major colonial mining centre peopled by Spaniards and Creoles. There the leading citizens barricaded themselves in a public granary. Hidalgo captured the granary on September 28, but he quickly lost control of his rebel army, which massacred most of the Creole elite and pillaged the town.
Reports of the chaos in Guanajuato fed the support for the viceroy’s efforts to crush the rebellion, lest a full-scale caste war ensue. Royalist forces defeated Hidalgo at the Bridge of Calderón on Jan. 18, 1811, and captured him along with other major insurgent leaders on March 19. On July 31 Hidalgo was executed, ending the first of the political civil wars that were to wrack Mexico for three-fourths of a century.
The Hidalgo cause was taken up by his associate José María Morelos y Pavón, another parish priest. With a small but disciplined rebel army he won control of substantial sections of southern Mexico. The constituent congresses, which Morelos called at Chilpancingo in 1813, issued at Apatzingán in 1814 formal declarations of independence and drafted republican constitutions for the areas under his military control.
At about the same time, Napoleonic troops were withdrawing from Spain, and in 1814 Ferdinand VII returned from involuntary exile. One of his first acts was to nullify Spain’s liberal 1812 constitution. Spanish troops, which were no longer needed to fight the French, were ordered to crush the Morelos revolution. Captured and defrocked, Morelos was shot as a heretic and a revolutionary on Dec. 22, 1815. Scattered but dwindling guerrilla bands kept alive the populist, republican, nationalist tradition of Hidalgo and Morelos.
Mexican independence came about almost by accident when constitutionalists in Spain led a rebellion that, in 1820, forced Ferdinand VII to reinstate the liberal constitution of 1812. Conservatives in Mexico, alarmed that anticlerical liberals would threaten their religious, economic, and social privileges, saw independence from Spain as a method of sparing New Spain from such changes. They found a spokesman and able leader in Agustín de Iturbide, a first-generation Creole. Iturbide, who had served as a loyal royalist officer against Hidalgo and others, had been given command of royal troops with which he was to snuff out remnants of the republican movement, then headed by the future president Vicente Guerrero.
While ostensibly fighting Guerrero, however, Iturbide was in fact negotiating with him to join a new independence movement. In 1821 they issued the so-called Iguala Plan (Plan de Iguala), a conservative document declaring that Mexico was to be independent, that its religion was to be Roman Catholicism, and that its inhabitants were to be united, without distinction between Mexican and European. It stipulated further that Mexico would become a constitutional monarchy under Ferdinand VII, that he or some Spanish prince would occupy the throne in Mexico City, and that an interim junta would draw up regulations for the election of deputies to a congress that would write a constitution for the monarchy.
United as the Army of the Three Guarantees (independence, union, preservation of Roman Catholicism), the combined troops of Iturbide and Guerrero gained control of most of Mexico by the time Juan O’Donojú, appointed Spanish captain general, arrived in the viceregal capital. Without money, provisions, or troops, O’Donojú felt himself compelled to sign the Treaty of Córdoba on Aug. 24, 1821. The treaty officially ended New Spain’s dependence on Old Spain, renamed the nation the Mexican Empire, and declared that the congress was to elect an emperor if no suitable European prince could be found. In one of the ironies of history, a conservative Mexico had gained independence from a temporarily liberal Spain.
El Grito kicked off more than a decade of struggle in which much of Latin America received its independence from Spain, and mid-September to mid-October is a month set aside to honor the achievements of Latinos. In honor of that month, Britannica presents Hispanic Heritage in the Americas, a special feature, which explores the people, places, events, and traditions that have shaped—and continue to shape—the vibrant Hispanic culture that thrives today in South, Central, and North America.
Photo credits (from top to bottom): Encyclopaedia Britannica; Ann Ronan Picture Library/Heritage-Images; The Granger Collection.
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