CHAPTER 7 MESOAMERICANS IN THE NEOCOLONIAL ERA 269Indians were attracted to Hidalgo’s movement and had considerably less to lose from
joining it than the communities of Indians located adjacent to the Basin of Mexico.
The thousands of Indians from the north and west who followed Hidalgo saw him
as a charismatic religious leader whose message was sympathetic to their repressed
social condition (Hidaglo was not unlike the friar in Chiapas who translated the
Spanish constitutional proclamation into the Tzotzil language as recounted in Box
7.1). As noted, Hidalgo played to the Indians’ religious inclinations by adopting the
Virgin of Guadalupe as the movement’s key symbol, a symbol deeply meaningful to
the Indians. On a more practical level, as priest of Dolores, Hidalgo was widely re-
spected for having promoted a series of “development” projects to help the Indians.
Among the projects—managed by the Indians themselves—were commercial pot-
tery making, cultivation of silkworms, and the growing of grapes for wine and olives
for oil.
Hidalgo struck a responsive chord with the struggling Indians of the Bajío when
he spoke of his movement as a “reconquest,” undoing some of the wrongs inflicted
on the Indians by the Spanish conquistadors. He pronounced in favor of eliminat-
ing the hated tribute payments and of returning lands to the Indians (Hidalgo’s In-
dians were allowed to keep properties taken from Spaniards during the war). Hidalgo
was not a revolutionary, and we must not exaggerate the extent to which his move-
ment was carried out on behalf of the Indians. Yet, the Indians believed he was on
their side, and they became faithful, even fanatical, followers.
Hidalgo’s independence movement in Mexico was carried on after his death by
others, particularly by another parish priest from the Michoacán area, José María
Morelos. Morelos’s followers were primarily mestizos and mulattoes rather than In-
dians, recruited largely from among the peons working on haciendas in the lowland
areas of Michoacán and Guerrero. Morelos, in fact, forbade his followers to use the
term “indio,” which he felt helped perpetuate the colonial caste system. Nevertheless,
he was strongly supported by Mixtec Indians in the military takeover and plunder-
ing of Oaxaca (Reina Aoyama 2004:96ff). Morelos came to envision a Mexican na-
tion that would revere its Mesoamerican ancestry and give the native peoples their
rightful place within it. Thus, at a rebel constitutional assembly in Chilpancingo
(Guerrero) in 1813, Morelos issued the following proclamation:
Spirits of Motecuhzoma, Cacamatzín, Cuauhtemoc, Xicotencatl, and Calzontzín! Take
pride in this August assembly, and celebrate this happy moment in which your sons have
congregated to avenge your insults! After August 12, 1521, comes September 8, 1813!
The first date tightened the chains of our slavery in Mexico-Tenochtitlán; the second
broke them forever in the town of Chilpancingo.... We are therefore going to restore
the Mexican Empire! (Cumberland 1968:125)Morelos’s warrior band was much smaller than Hidalgo’s, and it never posed a
serious threat to the Spaniards and their creole allies. Like Hidalgo, Morelos at-
tempted to strike against Mexico City, but he also failed to find support from the In-
dian peasants in the areas surrounding the Central Basin. Even in the area of the
present-day state of Morelos (named after this independence hero), which 100 years