268 UNIT 2 COLONIAL MESOAMERICA
sympathetic to the rebel cause. Next the Spaniards marched on Guadalajara, which
Hidalgo decided to defend with the full force of his vast following. While fighting on
the grassy plains outside the city, a Spanish cannonball struck one of Hidalgo’s am-
munition wagons, which blew up, killing many of the rebel fighters and setting fire
to the plains. Hidalgo was forced to retreat, losing over l,000 men as well as control
of Guadalajara.
The rebel forces fled to the north, where Allende stripped Hidalgo of his mili-
tary command, and began to seek support from friends on the U.S. side of the bor-
der. At this point, both Hidalgo and Allende were betrayed by a former rebel
lieutenant, who led them into a trap laid by the Spanish forces. The two leaders were
captured at a small desert village named Our Lady of Guadalupe Baján. Hidalgo was
taken to Chihuahua, where he was tried, stripped of his priesthood, and executed in
July 1811. Hidalgo was then beheaded, along with other rebel leaders, and his head
placed in an iron cage hung on one of the four corners of the granary roof at Gua-
najuato. The main threat of the “caste war” had ended for the time being, even
though the idea of independence remained very much alive.
Hidalgo’s rebellion was viewed generally as an Indian uprising at the time, which
is one of the reasons why the creoles abandoned the movement so quickly. The term
used to refer to the Indians, “indios,” was highly ambiguous (indeed, it still is in Mex-
ico), and under this rubric were included poor, underclass, rural mestizos. Indeed,
Hidalgo’s ragged “army” was made up of mestizos, mulattoes, and poor creoles, as well
as Indians. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that tens of thousands of Indians from the
Bajío and western Mexico did take up arms under Hidalgo. We know little about the
ethnic identities of these Indians, but most of them appear to have been Nahua and
Otomí speakers. Enemies of the movement referred to Hidalgo’s Indians as
“Chichimecs,” arguing that they were wild savages very different from the civilized In-
dians in the central and southern zones of Mexico. More likely, however, they were
descendants of aboriginal peoples who had once been part of the pre-Hispanic
Mesoamerican world, albeit the northwestern periphery of that world (see Chapter 3
for information on that periphery).
The native peoples to the south of the Bajío in central and southern Mexico
largely rejected Hidalgo’s call to arms. The historian John Tutino (1986) claims that
this rejection helps explain the failure of the Hidalgo forces to take Mexico City:
The rebels were not supported with either warriors or supplies by the Indians in
areas like Toluca and Morelos on the road to the capital. The Indians in these areas
had retained traditional community organizations, and they had worked out a stable
symbiosis with neighboring haciendas. While these Indians provided much of the
labor needed to work the haciendas, the haciendas in turn protected the Indians’
local autonomy and, within limits, community lands. Thus, the Indians nearer to the
capital were able to maintain strong peasant communities and traditional Mesoamer-
ican cultures. They provided a sharp contrast to the Indians of the Bajío and Guadala-
jara area who joined with Hidalgo. The latter had been subjected to irresistible
commercial forces that disrupted their communities, proletarianized the able-bodied
men, and shattered the traditional Mesoamerican cultures. Such Mesoamerican