The independence of Mexico, like that of Peru, the other major central area of Spain’s American empire, came late. As was the case in Lima, Mexican cities had a powerful segment of Creoles and peninsular Spaniards whom the old imperial system had served well. Mexican Creoles, like those in Peru, had the spectre of a major social uprising to persuade them to cling to Spain and stability for a while longer. For many of the powerful in Mexican society, a break with Spain promised mainly a loss of traditional status and power and possibly social revolution.
What was unique to the Mexican case was that the popular rebellion that exploded in 1810 was actually the first major call for independence in the region. Between 1808 and 1810, peninsulars had acted aggressively to preserve Spain’s power in the region. Rejecting the notion of a congress that would address the question of governance in the absence of the Spanish king, leading peninsulars in Mexico City deposed the viceroy and persecuted Creoles. They then welcomed weaker viceroys whom they knew they could dominate. Peninsulars’ efforts could not, however, prevent the emergence of an independence struggle. In 1810 the Bajío region produced a unique movement led by a radical priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. When officials discovered the conspiracy that Hidalgo and other Creoles had been planning in Querétaro, the priest appealed directly to the indigenous and mestizo populace. A rich agricultural and mining zone, the Bajío had recently undergone difficult economic times that hit those rural and urban workers particularly hard. Thus many of them responded eagerly to Hidalgo’s famous Grito de Dolores (“Cry of Dolores”). Although framed as an appeal for resistance to the peninsulars, the Grito was in effect a call for independence.
The enthusiasm that Hidalgo stirred among Indians and mestizos shocked and frightened both Creole and peninsular elites. Under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the movement’s ranks swelled rapidly. Hidalgo’s untrained army grew to have some 80,000 members as it conquered towns and larger cities and ultimately threatened Mexico City itself. During their campaign the members of this force attacked the persons and property of peninsular and Creole elites. The movement for independence was becoming a race and class war.
Perhaps fearing the atrocities his troops might commit there, Hidalgo prevented the movement from entering Mexico City. Shortly afterward troops of the viceregal government caught up with the rebels. After a dramatic military defeat, Hidalgo was captured in early 1811 and executed.
The death of its first leader did not mean the end of Mexico’s first independence campaign. Soon another priest, the mestizo José María Morelos y Pavón, took over the reins of the movement. Under Morelos the rebellion gained clearer objectives of independence and social and economic reform as well as greater organization and a wider social base. With the defeat and death of Morelos in 1815, the potential national scope of the movement came to an effective end. Although smaller forces under leaders like Vicente Guerrero and Guadalupe Victoria (Manuel Félix Fernández) continued to harass the powerful through guerrilla warfare in several regions, the popular movement for independence in Mexico was no longer a grave threat to elite power.
Final independence, in fact, was not the result of the efforts of Hidalgo, Morelos, or the forces that had made up their independence drive. It came instead as a conservative initiative led by military officers, merchants, and the Roman Catholic Church. The liberals who carried out the 1820 revolt in Spain intended to eliminate the special privileges of the church and the military. Anxious over that threat to the strength of two of the pillars of the Mexican government and newly confident in their ability to keep popular forces in check, Creoles turned against Spanish rule in 1820–21.
Two figures from the early rebellion played central roles in liberating Mexico. One, Guerrero, had been an insurgent chief; the other, Agustín de Iturbide, had been an officer in the campaign against the popular independence movement. The two came together behind an agreement known as the Iguala Plan. Centred on provisions of independence, respect for the church, and equality between Mexicans and peninsulars, the plan gained the support of many Creoles, Spaniards, and former rebels. As royal troops defected to Iturbide’s cause, the new Spanish administrator was soon forced to accept the inevitability of Mexican independence. A year later, in 1822, Iturbide engineered his own coronation as Agustín I, Emperor of Mexico.
The following year, a revolt that included the former insurgent Guadalupe Victoria (who, like Guerrero, had abandoned the cause of a popular independence) cut short Iturbide’s tenure as monarch. The consequences of that overthrow extended from Mexico through Central America. In Mexico the rebellion ushered in a republic and introduced Antonio López de Santa Anna, who occupied a central place in the nation’s politics for several decades. The provinces of the Kingdom of Guatemala—which included what are today the Mexican state of Chiapas and the nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica—had adhered to Iturbide’s Mexico by 1822. With the exception of Chiapas, these Central American provinces split off from Mexico in the wake of Iturbide’s fall. They formed a federation, the United Provinces of Central America, which held together only until 1838, when regionalism led to the creation of separate countries in the region. Brazil
Brazil gained its independence with little of the violence that marked similar transitions in Spanish America. Conspiracies against Portuguese rule during 1788–98 showed that some groups in Brazil had already been contemplating the idea of independence in the late 18th century. Moreover, the Pombaline reforms of the second half of the 18th century, Portugal’s attempt to overhaul the administration of its overseas possessions, were an inconvenience to many in the colony. Still, the impulse toward independence was less powerful in Brazil than in Spanish America. Portugal, with more limited financial, human, and military resources than Spain, had never ruled its American subjects with as heavy a hand as its Iberian neighbour. Portugal neither enforced commercial monopolies as strictly nor excluded the American-born from high administrative positions as widely as did Spain. Many Brazilian-born and Portuguese elites had received the same education, especially at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. Their economic interests also tended to overlap. The reliance of the Brazilian upper classes on African slavery, finally, favoured their continued ties to Portugal. Plantation owners depended on the African slave trade, which Portugal controlled, to provide workers for the colony’s main economic activities. The size of the resulting slave population—approximately half the total Brazilian population in 1800—also meant that Creoles shied away from political initiatives that might mean a loss of control over their social inferiors.
The key step in the relatively bloodless end of colonial rule in Brazil was the transfer of the Portuguese court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. The arrival of the court transformed Brazil in ways that made its return to colony status impossible. The unprecedented concentration of economic and administrative power in Rio de Janeiro brought a new integration to Brazil. The emergence of that capital as a large and increasingly sophisticated urban centre also expanded markets for Brazilian manufactures and other goods. Even more important to the development of manufacturing in Brazil was one of the first acts undertaken there by the Portuguese ruler, Prince Regent John: the removal of old restrictions on manufacturing. Another of his enactments, the opening of Brazilian ports to direct trade with friendly countries, was less helpful to local manufacturers, but it further contributed to Brazil’s emergence as a metropolis.