Grito de Dolores: Mexico's Independence Ignited

Father Miguel Hidalgo rang the church bell in the small town of Dolores before dawn on September 16, 1810, summoning his parishioners not for mass but for revolution. The speech he delivered that morning, known as the Grito de Dolores, called on the people of New Spain to rise against the Spanish colonial government and fight for their land, their liberty, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. The date became Mexico’s Independence Day, and Hidalgo’s cry is reenacted every year by the president from the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City. Hidalgo was an unlikely revolutionary. A sixty-year-old Creole priest with a taste for French Enlightenment philosophy and a talent for winemaking, he had joined a conspiracy of disaffected Creole elites who resented their exclusion from power by peninsular-born Spaniards. The plotters had planned to launch their revolt in December, but the conspiracy was betrayed to colonial authorities in early September. Facing arrest, Hidalgo decided to act immediately. The movement he unleashed was far more radical and chaotic than the genteel political revolt the conspirators had envisioned. Hidalgo’s followers, drawn primarily from Indigenous and mestizo communities, swelled into an army of tens of thousands within weeks. They swept through the Bajio region, capturing Guanajuato in a bloody assault on the Alhondiga de Granaditas, a fortified granary where Spanish forces and Creole families had barricaded themselves. The massacre that followed alienated many of the Creole elite whose support the revolution needed. Hidalgo’s army marched to the outskirts of Mexico City but turned back without attacking, a decision that remains one of the great mysteries of Mexican history. Royalist forces regrouped, and by early 1811, Hidalgo was captured, defrocked by the Inquisition, and executed by firing squad. His head was displayed in an iron cage at the Alhondiga for ten years as a warning. Yet the movement he started could not be extinguished. Other leaders, notably Jose Maria Morelos and later Agustin de Iturbide, carried the fight forward until Mexico finally achieved independence in 1821. Hidalgo is remembered as the Father of Mexican Independence, and September 16 remains the country’s most celebrated national holiday.