MEXICO’S ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE 171
(the clergy’s privilege of exemption from civil
courts); free trade; and measures to promote the
reform of mining, agriculture, and industry.
The creole movement for home rule and free
trade, however, posed a threat to the peninsular
merchants, whose prosperity depended on the con-
tinuance of the existing closed commercial system
with Seville as its center. On the night of September
15, 1808, the merchants struck back. The wealthy
peninsular merchant Gabriel de Yermo led the
consulado’s militia in a preemptive coup, oust-
ing Viceroy Iturrigaray and arresting leading cre-
ole supporters of autonomy. A series of transient,
peninsular-dominated regimes then held power
until a new viceroy, Francisco Javier de Venegas,
arrived from Spain in September 1810.
The leaders of the creole aristocracy, mindful
of its large property interests, did not respond to the
peninsular counteroffensive. The leadership of the
movement for creole control of Mexico’s destiny
now passed to a group consisting predominantly of
“marginal elites”—upper-class individuals of rela-
tively modest economic and social standing—in
the Bajío, a geographic region roughly correspond-
ing to the intendency of Querétaro.
The special economic and social conditions of
this region help explain its decisive role in the fi rst
stage of the Mexican struggle for independence.
It was the most modern of Mexican regions in its
agrarian and industrial structure. There were few
indigenous communities of the traditional type;
the bulk of its population consisted of partially Eu-
ropeanized urban workers, miners, and peons or
tenants of various types. Agriculture was domi-
nated by large, commercial, irrigated estates that
produced wheat and other products for the upper
classes; maize, the diet of the masses, was chiefl y
grown on marginal land by impoverished tenants.
There was an important textile industry that had
experienced a shift from large obrajes using slaves
and other coerced labor to a putting-out system in
which merchant-fi nanciers provided artisan fami-
lies with cotton and wool, which they turned into
cloth on their own looms, “forcing growing num-
bers of artisan families to exploit themselves by
working long hours for little compensation.” Min-
ing was the most profi table and capital-intensive
industry of the region; in some good years, the larg-
est mine at Guanajuato, the Valenciana, netted its
owners over 1 million pesos in profi ts.
The quasi-capitalist structure of the Bajío’s
economy, based largely on free wage labor, pro-
moted a growth of workers’ class consciousness
and militancy. The mineworkers at Guanajuato,
for example, resisted attempts to end their partidos
(shares of the ores they mined over a given quota)
by methods that included a production slowdown;
the employers responded by calling in the militia
to force resumption of full production. The Bajío’s
labor force experienced a decline of wage and liv-
ing standards and employment opportunities in
the last decades of the eighteenth century. These
losses were a result of conditions over which they
had no control: rapid population growth that en-
abled landowners to drive down wages or replace
permanent workers by seasonal laborers; compe-
tition for domestic textiles from cheap, industri-
ally produced imports; and the rising cost of aging
mines. These factors caused deep insecurity and
resentment. Then in 1808 and 1809, drought and
famine again struck the Bajío, further aggravating
the existing tensions and grievances. As during
the earlier drought and famine in 1785, the great
landowners profi ted from the misery of the poor
by holding their reserves of grain off the market
until prices reached their peak. It was against this
background of profound social unrest and a grave
subsistence crisis that the struggle for Mexican in-
dependence began. The Bajío was its storm center,
and the Bajío’s peasantry and working class formed
its spearhead.
In 1810 a creole plot for revolt was taking
shape in the important political and industrial cen-
ter of Querétaro. Only two of the conspirators be-
longed to the highest circle of the creole regional
elite, and efforts to draw other prominent creoles
into the scheme were rebuffed. The majority were
“marginal elites”—struggling landowners, a gro-
cer, an estate administrator, a parish priest. From
the fi rst the conspirators seem to have planned to
mobilize the indigenous and mixed-blood prole-
tariat, probably because they doubted their abil-
ity to win over the majority of their own class. If
the motive of most of the plotters was the hope of