FATHER MIGUEL HIDALGO Good afternoon and thank you for inviting me - PDF document

FATHER MIGUEL HIDALGO Good afternoon and thank you for inviting me back once again. Today I’m going add a video presentation to the lecture and both of them address the same topic: Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. In historical memory, he stands as the father of Mexican independence. As a young man, he entered the Colegio de San Nicolas in Morelia. There, he took courses in theology and philosophy. Miguel Hidalgo earned his bachelor’s degree in 1773 and then entered a seminary. After five years of study, he was ordained in 1778. He proved himself a man of exceptional academic talent. For example, in addition to earning his B.A. and learning all that priest needed to know, he occupied himself with translating French books into Spanish. Known to his fellow seminarians by the nickname of Zorro, the newly ordained priest subsequently proved so talented as both an administrator and as a scholar that he received an appointment a rector of the College de San Nicolas in 1791. Later, when his elder brother died, Father Hidalgo inherited a substantial income of some 8,000 pesos per year. Men of lesser energy might have used that income to live a life of leisure. He did not. Instead, Miguel Hidalgo first created a pottery factory in his parish of Dolores and then established workshops for other creative arts. When some of the Indians wished to form an orchestra, he donated the instruments and taught them to play. When the village needed a facility to cure hides, he built one. Father Hidalgo devoted his material wealth and indeed his life to the betterment of others. He refused to accept the injustices of the society in which he lived. And during the last part of the 1700s, colonial México was a place of many injustices. Bitter divisions separated a small minority living in great comfort and wealth from the majority that dwelled in poverty. Further, divisions based upon ethnicity prevented everyone in México except the small number of Spaniards who ruled the colony from reaching their full potential. For the great majority of Mexicans, life often began and ended in the same village. Work outside of that community often provided meager wages for work often performed upon land that had been seized from the ancestors of those Indians by an earlier generation of Spaniards In the final years of the empire, the Spanish, who comprised barely two per cent of the colony’s nation’s population, strengthened themselves at the expenses of the ninety-eight per cent of the population who were not born in Spain. Up until that time, Spaniards had reserved for themselves all of the senior positions in the colonial government and gave themselves various commercial monopolies. Then starting in 1764, the royal government in Madrid restricted much of the liberty and opportunity that colonists had enjoyed. The new measures included the 1

purging of Mexicans from mid-level positions in the colonial government and limiting the local self-rule Mexicans living in towns and cities had enjoyed for centuries. Similarly, many of the indigenous tribes of México lived for centuries in autonomous villages in which they too exercised control over local affairs. But in the newly centralized Spanish empire, such privileges were to be limited. The appointment of royal officials to the municipal councils and the appointment of so many additional magistrates, to monitor and control the citizenry created an environment of repression. In dozens of communities throughout México and in the capital in particular, the number of Spanish bureaucrats assigned to tax, regulate, and control the populace would be doubled and then doubled again. Even the Church herself faced challenges from the Spanish crown. Those kings sought to replace the concept of a universal community of believers embracing congregants of all nations with the notion of a national church serving the state. In opposition to this order stood the most learned of all Roman Catholic religious orders, the Jesuits. Their principled stand earned them an order of expulsion from all of the Crown’s realms includi ng México. In doing so, King Charles III asserted: “Once and for all, subjects must know that they have been born to obey, not to discuss lofty governmental designs.” To add injury to both insult and previous injury, in 1804 King Carlos IV destroyed much of the colony’s financial base by seizing both the capellanías and obras pías that belonged to the Church. These assets, which served as the sources of almost half of the loans in México, were needed for the economic sustenance of the colony. They no longer would be available. In that same year, the imprisonment Spanish King Charles IV and his son Ferdinand VII by Napoleon Bonaparte brought a crisis. In the absence of a king, the question became who ruled and by what right. Empowered both by the defense of their ancient Spanish privileges as citizens of free municipalities and by the egalitarian ideas sweeping through much of the North Atlantic basin, Mexicans thought long and hard about their choices. As if all of this were not enough, a severe drought struck much of México during the first years of the 1800s. As harvests fell and prices rose, many went hungry. The drought affected even the fertile lands of the Bajio , that region lying north of México City, in which Father Hidalgo lived. The Spanish officials of the colony, secure in their power and growing rich by virtue of their salaries and corrupt practices, were furious that Mexicans would dare consider a change in the governing arrangements. After all, a change would threaten the positions that the Spanish held. And so when México City’s councilmen and the highest ranking Spaniard in the colony began such discussions, Spanish officials arrested them both. Driven by fear, they then sought to crush 2

any group of Mexicans seeking autonomy or independence. Spies and sympathizers infiltrated local communities throughout the colony in an effort to find potential plotters. When they found one such group in the Morelian community of Valladolid during an 1809 search, the royalists became even more concerned about such groups. Miguel Hidalgo was a member of one such group. Meeting under the guise of being a tertulia , or social gathering, he and Ignacio Allende, Josefina Ortiz, Ignacio Rayon and others talked of rebellion and spoke fondly of a free México ruled by Mexicans. For some time, Father Hidalgo had recognized the many of México ’ s problems existed because of Spain. The rule of the few over the many, the widespread poverty, the division of the nation in mutually suspicious ethnic groups, the denial of political liberty, the oppressive taxation and the frustrated lives and careers of so many were due in large part to the Spanish government. In the fall of 1810, an informer told royal authorities of this group. Hidalgo learned of this betrayal and decided that he had three choices. He could accept arrest and imprisonment; he could flee into the night as a refugee, or he could rebel in the face of great odds. Hidalgo chose the most dangerous the three alternatives. He would rebel. On September 16 th , he summoned his parishioners by ringing the Church bell at midnight. When they had assembled, he spoke to them from the balcony of his small church, uttering: “ Viva México ” and add ing “ Muera el mal gobierno (Death to bad government) .” Hidalgo called for a free México governed by Mexicans who none the less would acknowledge a king who in turn would acknowledge their rights. Surely this was a bold gesture that struck some as foolish. However, the brave priest soon learned that he did not stand alone So great was the discontent of Mexicans that later that same September 16 th , as Hidalgo marched with very few men towards the village of San Miguel el Grande, he was met by more than three hundred supporters ranging from cavalrymen of a previously loyal troop to poor men armed with clubs, bows, and arrows, and spears. After freeing a dozen political prisoners in the town jail, he declared: “ Caballeros, somos perdidos, no hay mas recurso que ir a coger gauchupines .” (Men, we are lost and have no recourse other than to take on the Spanish.) And so he marched forward. With a few months, his army grew to some 80,000 followers than included people from all ranks and ethnicities of Mexican society. During this time, Hidalgo thought much about the changes needed. He declared on behalf of the army he now led, slavery would be abolished and the owners of the great haciendas and plantations would have to return half of their lands to the descendents of the Indians from whom those lands had been stolen. The Indians and all the poor of México once again would support themselves as free men and women on their own land. 3