256 UNIT 2 COLONIAL MESOAMERICA
peoples of the region could draw in their struggle to survive as ethnically distinct
peoples within the independent states of Mexico and Central America. We will learn,
too, that the Mesoamericans contributed in concrete ways to the important social
movements of the region far more than is generally recognized.NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOCIAL HISTORY:
FROM INDEPENDENCE TO DICTATORSHIP
The Break from Spain
The emergence of the modern states of Mexico and Central America between 1810
and 1825 came through a dominolike set of events, many of which began violently
in Europe and reached America almost as a distant echo. The close of the eighteenth
century brought the last gasp of the millennium-old vision of the Holy Roman Em-
pire. Underwritten by the waning idea of the divine right of kings to hold both po-
litical and religious authority on behalf of universal Roman Catholic Christendom,
France and Spain in the late-eighteenth century were besieged by the rising eco-
nomic and political power of the Protestant nations of northern Europe, particu-
larly Britain, and by the perceived threat of the Russian and Ottoman empires in the
east. The U.S. independence movement beginning in 1776 was also being watched
with the greatest of interest by Spanish-American creole leaders and intellectuals.
These external political and economic forces, together with the growing favor
being enjoyed by Enlightenment ideals of individual and collective rights and free-
doms under secular state authority, led to a violent end to the eighteenth-century po-
litical order of Europe. The French Revolution of 1789 and the subsequent
continental firestorm of the Napoleonic Wars brought with them the fall, in 1807, of
the faltering Bourbon monarchy of Spain. Carlos IV’s abdication, the Napoleonic
occupation and defeat, followed by the restoration in 1817 of a greatly weakened
Spanish monarch, Fernando VII, created a full decade of political vacuum that en-
abled most of Spain’s vast empire in America to mobilize for a clean break from Eu-
rope.
The ideologies of the American and French revolutions were conscious models
for Latin America’s independence movements (1810–1825), yet it is important to
note that the “Nationalist period” of Latin American history was dotted with early pan-
national experiments, notably Iturbide’s Mexican–Central American empire
(1822–1823) and Simón Bolívar’s confederation of Gran Colombia (1819–1830).
These experiments failed, but the ideology of unity persisted even when unity could
not be achieved, notably in the case of the Central American Federation, which lasted
from 1823 to 1839 (Figure 7.1).
Nationalism in Mexico and Central America was intimately linked with the effort
of creoles to forge a home for themselves in a region divested of the authority of the
Spanish Crown. The creoles, who were left in power when Spain departed, naturally
sought to stay in power. They accomplished their goal by creating states in which it
made sense—at least to themselves and to Europe and to the United States—that