Afro-Mexicans in the Mexican War of Independence
{{Main|Mexican War of Independence|Afro-Mexicans}}
Introduction
Afro-Mexicans played an important role in the Mexican War of Independence, yet often are not people we learn about in school and studies. Both visible and non-visible “colonial racism” towards Afro-Mexican's affects the Nation of Mexico and our understanding of how Afro-Mexicans helped build the Nation. It can not simply be ignored, it must be taught. {{Cite web |title=Academic Book: Afro-Mexican Ancestors and the Nation They Constructed |url=https://mellenpress.com/book/Afro-Mexican-Ancestors-and-the-Nation-They-Constructed/9139/ |access-date=2025-04-21 |website=mellenpress.com}} Without acknowledging and recognizing the contributions made by Afro-Mexicans, especially during the fight for the country’s independence, is not giving a complete picture of the history and the people who helped to created it. Mexican scholar, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran found that “by 1810, at least 30 percent of Mexico had some African ancestry.”{{Cite journal |last=Jolly |first=Jennifer |date=2023 |title=José Maria Morelos, Brownness, and the Visibility of Race in Nineteenth-Century Mexico |url=https://muse-jhu-edu.hal.weber.edu/pub/263/article/904558 |journal=University of California Press |volume=39 |issue=2 |pages=302-342 |via=Project Muse}}
People who were identified as Castas, which could mean people with African, First Nations, Asian, and European ancestry{{Cite web |title=Academic Book: Afro-Mexican Ancestors and the Nation They Constructed |url=https://mellenpress.com/book/Afro-Mexican-Ancestors-and-the-Nation-They-Constructed/9139/ |access-date=2025-04-22 |website=mellenpress.com}}, were a considerable amount of the population in places in New Spain. “The tax reports of the Mexican National Archives cite the following Black distribution: Mexico 46,813; Puebla, 11,304; Veracruz, 5,849; Oaxaca, 16,767; Potosi, 49140; Arispe, 10,070; Valladolid, 48768; Guanajuato, 42,868; Guadalajara, 63009; Zacatecas, 58,317; Merida, 29,003. These numbers are dramatic when considering that the reported European Spanish population of New Spain in 1810 was 15,000.”
One of the most known Afro-Mexican leaders is Vicente Guerrero, who became commander in chief of the insurgency, after the previous leaders were executed.{{Cite journal |last=Valderrama |first=Ana Romero |date=2023 |title=Sangre Revuelta, Virtud Y Civilización: Usos Políticos De Las Ascendencias Asociadas a Vicente Guerrero |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/27259015 |journal=Historia Mexicana |volume=73 |issue=2 (290) |pages=713–758 |issn=0185-0172}} Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon, was another one of the most remembered rebel leaders. José Maria Morelos y Pavon identity is blurred due to early depictions of him, his unclear family line, as well as his occupation. He was a leader to a group of insurgents and was later executed in 1815. In an article written by Jennifer Jolly about brown visibility during the same century she states that he “…fought for the end of the castas system and slavery in Mexico…” {{Cite journal |last=Jolly |first=Jennifer |date=2023 |title=José Maria Morelos, Brownness, and the Visibility of Race in Nineteenth-Century Mexico |url=https://muse-jhu-edu.hal.weber.edu/pub/263/article/904558 |journal=University of California Press |volume=39 |issue=2 |pages=302-342 |via=Project Muse}}
Morelos led the Armies of the South, which at one point may have had 8,000 rebels. “…mainly composed of people identified as “Negros” (Blacks) or “Castas” (African off-spring) by the Spanish colonial pigmentocracy.”
Outbreak of the Mexican independence movement
When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the Iberian peninsula, the Spanish Bourbon monarchy was displaced, with Charles IV abdicating the throne and Napoleon's brother Joseph placed on the throne of Spain. For peninsular Spaniards and those in the overseas Spanish Empire in the Americas, the question of legitimacy of the monarchy was a crucial question. In Iberia, the Peninsular War raged between 1807 and 1814; in Spanish America, a number of regions set up local juntas, ruling in the name of the Spanish king sprang up. In New Spain (Mexico), the outbreak of an insurgency for independence came from elite American-born Spaniards who sought independence. Among them was the priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, formerly the rector the seminary in Michoacan to train priests, now exiled to the small village of Dolores as its parish priest. In September 1810 he issued what is known in Mexican history as the Grito de Dolores, denouncing bad government of the Spaniards, loyalty to the Virgin of Guadalupe and Ferdinand VII (considered the legitimate Spanish monarch. In the region north of Mexico City, known as the Bajío, the movement quickly swelled with poorly armed plebeians, who attacked property owned by whites, peninsular-born or American-born, causing them to abandon the cause of independence in the face of a social revolution. Royalist forces caught Hidalgo, defrocked him, and tried and executed him in 1811. The cause for independence was taken up by his former seminary student, a mixed-race priest José María Morelos y Pavón. Morelos was likewise caught by royalists and executed. The insurgency was continued under the leadership of former muleteer Vicente Guerrero in the southern hot country of Mexico, along with many other Afro-Mexicans, castas, and Indians, the dark-skinned plebeians.
Afro-Mexicans
{{Main|Afro-Mexicans}}
At the time of the outbreak of the insurgency for independence, there was a large Afro-Mexican population of mainly free blacks and mulattos, as well as mixed-race castas who had some component of Afro-Mexican heritage. Black slavery still existed as an institution, although the numbers of enslaved had declined from the high point in the 1600s, when the Atlantic slave trade had brought enslaved Africans to Spanish America. For the period 1580–1640, Spain and Portugal were ruled by the same monarch and Portuguese slave dealers could freely operate in Spanish American territory. When the Portuguese revolted against Spain in 1640, the numbers of slaves brought from Africa dropped precipitously and the demand for slaves was met by natural reproduction of American-born Africans. Children of enslaved women became slaves themselves, so that marriage to non-slave women meant the off-spring were free. Unions between enslaved men and free black or mulatto women increased the population of the Afro-Mexican community, but there were also many unions between blacks and women of other ethnicities, resulting in a large, free mixed-race population.
Enslaved Afro-Mexicans were prominent in enclosed seventeenth-century work spaces. They toiled in textile workshops (obrajes), since the Spanish crown mandated that Indians not be forced to work there. Obraje owners were forced to invest some 300 pesos per slave to secure their labor force. Most slaves in obrajes were male.Sierra Silva, Pablo Miguel. Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Angeles, 1531-1706. New York: Cambridge University Press 2018, pp. 45-75 There were enslaved women in convents, usually the private property of individual elite white women who had become nuns, but some slaves were the property of the nunnery as an institution. Male religious orders also owned enslaved, mainly male.Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico, pp.76-106. Enslaved Afro-Mexican men worked in the mining sector. There were Afro-Mexican men, some of who were ex-slaves, who herded cattle,Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, p. 65. while others were muleteers (arrieros), the occupation of Vicente Guerrero before he joined the insurgency for independence.
Regions of the insurgency
The fight for independence originated in the central area of Mexico, but with the failure of the insurgency there and the capture and executions of Hidalgo and other insurgent leaders, the insurgency shifted to the South, where the population was predominantly indigenous and mixed race. On the Pacific coast, which has been called the "Revolutionary Coast"Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, p. 65 the main locus of Spanish economic activity was the port of Acapulco, terminus of the Manila galleons, which brought Chinese porcelains and silks, as well as Asian slaves (known as Chinos). The port was the midpoint in the settled coast, with the Costa Chica to the southwest and the Costa Grandeto the northwest. The Pacific coastal region underwent a population decline in the sixteenth century after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in 1521, with indigenous populations succumbing to diseases brought by the Europeans. Spanish conquerors who were awarded labor grants found few Indians and the region became a destination of runaway African slaves, many of whom formed unions with indigenous women. Starting around 1600, Spaniards saw in the Pacific coast the opportunity for tropical agriculture and imported slaves for cotton cultivation. Slave flight to nearby mountains and a strong impulse toward manumission of slaves created a strongly Afro-Mexican population, with Indian and Asians added to the mix. The 1793 population census recorded an overwhelming number of pardos, free Afro-Mexicans.Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, pp. 65-67 The Gulf Coast was tropical as well and conducive for sugar plantations, whose Spanish owners utilized black slave labor, who strongly supported independence. The topography was similar to the Pacific Coast, with mountains rising behind the coastal strip. There were few white residents in the region.Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero,p. 76 In the south, insurgent priest José María Morelos led a growing army of mixed-race men.
José María Morelos and his mixed-race forces
File:Retrato del excelentísimo señor don José María Morelos.png, Life portrait 1812, Museo Nacional de Historia, Chapultepec Castle.]]
A student of Hidalgo at the seminary was José María Morelos, who emerged as a leader of independence following the death of his mentor in 1811. Morelos sat for a portrait in 1812, which depicts him as a very dark skinned man. Some historians have described him as Mestizo (mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry), but others point to archival evidence that Morelos's mother was a "free woman", that is either a Negra or Mulata, and he was under investigation at the outbreak of the insurgency as to whether he was qualified for the priesthood as a Spaniard. Blacks were barred from taking holy orders.Hermensdorf, Rubén. Morelos, hombre fundamental de México. Mexico: Aeromexico-Grijalbo 1985, pp. 44-46.Guzmán, Martín Luis, Morelos y la Iglesia Católica. Mexico City: Presas 1967, 162-63.Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, p.79. Morelos took to wearing a scarf over his "curly" hair, which one scholar says "suggests a lack of acceptance of his African roots."Vicent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, p.79. Morelos was a muleteer prior to his studying for the priesthood, a line of work that many mixed race men pursued, including Vicente Guerrero. It is unclear why he became a priest, but he succeeded in seminary was assigned a parish of mixed in the "hot country" of southwest Mexico. Priests in relatively remote parishes often functioned as officials carrying out crown business. Morelos was tasked with carrying out a census of his parishioners, one component of which was determining the racial status of his parishioners; however, he declined to provide the racial information.Herejón Paredo, Carlos. Morelos: Vida preinsurgente y lecturas. Michoacan: Zamora 1984, 191-93.Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, p. 81.
Morelos's military campaign was based along the west coast of Mexico and its interior, a region that had a predominantly mixed-race population. Among those who distinguished themselves in his military campaign were Afro-Mexicans Hermenegildo Galeana and Vicente Guerrero. Galeana was killed in battle in 1814, much to the distress of Morelos.Vicent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, p. 100.
Vicente Guerrero
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Upon Miguel Hidalgo's death the army declined and the future was not looking very promising. Guerrilla warfare seemed to be the main line of attack. The army was now under the command of Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña, more generally known as Vicente Guerrero. Born to a poor family of mixed-race farmers in 1782 in Tixtla, near Chilpancingo, in the Mexican state now named for him Guerrero (state) to a poor family of farmers, Guerrero came to distinguish himself as a leader due to his oratory skills and ability to speak different languages. Although he had little formal education he possessed other skills that helped him as a military leader, such as having knowledge of the geography of the region, this helped entering to towns where the access to main roads was difficult. Although his four-year command was mostly a holding action and the military was almost always on the brink of collapse, he was considered one of the greatest Mexican war heroes. He is identified as the “consummator of the Mexican independence”.{{Cite web|url=http://www.memoriapoliticademexico.org/Biografias/GUS83.html|title=Memoria Política de México|website=www.memoriapoliticademexico.org}} When approached by former royalist officer Agustín de Iturbide to join forces against the Spanish, Guerrero did agree to the alliance under the Plan de Iguala and the combined forces, known as the Army of the Three Guarantees was formed. Spanish imperial rule collapsed, and Mexico gained its independence in September 1821.
Bibliography
- Andrews, George. Afro Latin America 1800-2000. Oxford University press 2004. New York, New York
- Vincent, Theodore. The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s First Black Indian President. University Press of Florida. 2001 pg 21
See also
References
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