The Mexican Wars for Independence: A History - Softcover

Timothy J. Henderson is a professor of history at Auburn University Montgomery and the author of several books on Mexican history, including A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States (H&W, 2007).

Chapter One

 

The Colony

 

In the year 1623, so the story goes, a man in the dusty village of San Juan de los Lagos in western Mexico was teaching hisyoung daughters to do acrobatic tricks on the trapeze. To make the show more compelling, he had the girls perform the tricks above several swords affixed in the earth and pointing menacingly toward the heavens. One of the girls fell, was impaled on the swords, and died instantly. The small corpse was taken to a nearby temple, where an old woman named Ana Lucia, renowned for her piety, was caretaker. Ana Lucia took a moth-eaten statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception out of a closet, where the parish priest had hidden it, for he was embarrassed by its sorry condition. When Ana Lucia placed the statue on the child’s chest, the girl was at once restored to full life and vigor. Soon after, a mysterious boy appeared by night and transformed the decaying statue into a beautiful and flawless image of the Virgin, then disappeared without asking for payment. The townsfolk assumed he was an angel.

 

The miracle transformed the rude village of San Juan de los Lagos into one of Mexico’s most popular religious sites. Each year thereafter, between December 1 and 9, thousands of pilgrims would descend on the small town to pay their respects to the miraculous figure. In 1810, a hundred thousand souls were expected to attend, most of them desperately poor Indians. Those Indians, it could safely be assumed, would have little to lose, and they would loathe Spaniards. The thought of so many Indians gathered in one place, all of them seething with hatred for Spaniards, in the grip of religious fervor and quite possibly drunk, was irresistible to a small group of American-born whites conspiring to overthrow the government.

 

This, they reckoned, was the perfect time and place to start a revolution.

 

Indians and Castes

 

Although the conspiracy to launch the revolution from the festival of San Juan de los Lagos was ultimately foiled, the veryfact that such a plan was laid raises several key questions. Why did Indians bear such ill will toward Spaniards? Was therea natural link between popular religious fervor and violence? What reason did whites have to imagine the Indians would be willing to fight their revolution for them? Would Indians and whites fight with the same goals in mind?

 

Relations between Europeans and Indians began with violence, race prejudice, and exploitation, and the pattern of those relations did not change in their fundamentals over the three hundred years of the Spanish colony. The Spaniards who conqueredthe indigenous civilizations of Mexico were not professional soldiers, but rather armed entrepreneurs out for wealth and glory. There was not enough gold in the new colony to satisfy those conquerors, and when Tenochtitlán, the opulent capital of the vast Aztec empire, fell to the invaders in 1521, the discovery of Mexico’s rich silver mines was still more than two decades away. The only rewards available, then, were Indians and land. For the Spaniards land had no value without Indians to work it, so royal authorities parceled out the Indians to the conquistadors in the form of grants known as encomiendas. A grant of encomienda allowed the grantee—known as an encomendero—to demand tribute and labor from a specified number of Indian villagers. The demands made on the Indians were often extraordinary, helping to accelerate the appalling decline in their numbers. Waves of epidemic disease swept through the Americas, killing, in some areas, nine out of every ten people. The decline in the native population deprived the Spaniards of labor, but it also freed up quite a bit of land, which the Spaniards hastened to claim. The Spanish American hacienda—an infamous and durable institution that produced crops principally for the Spanish cities and mining camps—was thus born.

 

The encomiendamdash;the first mechanism the Spaniards used to exploit Indians—was largely ended by the late 1500s, but new forms of exploitation, such as labor drafts and peonage, supplanted it. The essential feature of the system was fixed: Indians worked; whites enjoyed the benefits of their labor.

 

Catholic missionaries who arrived in New Spain to convert the Indians to Spain’s rigid version of Catholic Christianity tended, at least in the early years of the colonization, to see the natives as God’s providential compensation for the tragedyof the Protestant heresy, a vast multitude of souls ripe for salvation. The harvest of so many souls would surely, in their view, be the harbinger of the millennium, that thousand-year period foretold in the Book of Revelation during which Satanlanguishes in prison while Christ rules the world, preparing for the fearsome battles of the world’s final days.

 

Given the high stakes, the missionaries were understandably zealous in their efforts. About sixty Franciscan missionaries claimed to have converted five million Indians to Christianity after only twelve years in Mexico; one friar boasted of having baptized 1,500 in a single day. Obviously, these "conversions" left the Indians with an extremely imperfect understandingof orthodox Christianity. As late as 1792, one village priest estimated that among his flock of five thousand, fewer than ahundred could mutter even the simplest of prayers. Priests visited remote villages infrequently, so villagers seldom heard mass, took communion, or confessed their sins. Babies went unbaptized, couples lived in sin, and the dead were buried without the proper Christian rites. Secular education was likewise deficient. Village schools were fairly common throughout Mexico by the late colonial period, but their impact was minimal, undone by poverty and Indian resistance. Most Indians in Mexico were never assimilated into the world of the whites.

 

This is not to say that the Indians were irreligious. In fact, religion penetrated every facet of life. It was a lively, naive folk Catholicism full of spirits in the earth, saints in the heavens, witchcraft, magic, and miracles. From time to time, prophets and messiahs would appear claiming to work miracles and promising an earthly paradise in the offing. One commonobject of veneration, surprisingly, was none other than the king of Spain. The Indians may have despised Spaniards in general, but they revered the distant king, a figure no less abstract or perennially popular than God himself. When the conspirators of 1810 planned their revolution, they decided to rally the people not to revolution, but rather in defense of the king—"The Indians," explained one of the movement’s leaders, "are indifferent to the word liberty."1 During the rebellion rumors ran among the Indians that the Spanish king was in Mexico, that he wore a silver mask, or rode in a black coach, or was invisible, or was in many places at once.

 

The Spanish regime’s failure to integrate the Indians into their world was ultimately unfortunate, but entirely deliberate.The early missionaries were convinced that the Indians were perpetual children in need of extraordinary protection and guidance lest they die out or succumb to the corrupting influences of white society, and they worked tirelessly to sway the Spanish king to their belief. The sage advice of Mexico’s first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza—"Treat the Indians like any other people, and do not make special rules and regulations for them"2mdash;accordingly went unheeded. The society that the friars helped bring into existence was formally segregated into two orders, or "republics": the republic of Spaniards and the republic of Indians. The republic of Indians consisted of villages, many of them created by the missionariesto provide refuge from the ravages of plagues. Those newly created villages were designed to facilitate supervision and conversion, with priests acting as father figures and crucial intermediaries between Indian and white societies.

 

Starting in the 1530s, the crown of Spain decreed that Indians should have permanent and inalienable possession of croplands, pasturelands, and woodlands, which they were to use mostly to provide for their own needs; they also were exempted from some Spanish laws and taxes, and were granted more lenient treatment by the courts on the grounds that, as irrational creatures, they could not be expected to understand and obey the conventions of polite society. Indians were not to dress in European clothing, ride horses, or bear arms. Apart from priestly supervision and white demands for labor, the Indian village was largely self-governing, with traditional native authorities overseeing the distribution of land and water and defendingvillage interests in law courts set up specifically to hear Indian complaints. Indians were required to pay tribute, a burden from which whitesmdash;who became the de facto nobility of the New World—were exempt. The system was intended to perpetuate inequality, in accordance with the Spanish conviction that God designed human society along hierarchical lines. Whites, in this conception, were gente de casta limpia, people of pure lineage; Indians were gente sin razón, people incapable of reason; and blacks, who were brought in increasing numbers to the colonies to labor in mines, plantations, and workshops, were in-fames por derecho, legally debased.

 

This neat separation of the races was soon rendered little more than an ideal, or a fantasy of social engineering. The pristine system imagined by the missi...