^TM

Mexicanos, Viva Mexico

By Craig Lancto

For many Americans, Cinqo de Mayo is a good reason to hoist a margarita or two in honor of Mexico. Few of them could explain that the date marks the Battle of Puebla in 1862, when Mexican defenders killed more than 1,000 French troops who had attacked their fortifications in that city.

While Mexicans might observe Cinqo de Mayo, their preeminent national holiday is September 16, a day that more closely approximates our own Independence Day.

The national celebration begins at 11:00 PM on September 15, when the president of Mexico steps onto a balcony of the national palace in Mexico City, rings a church bell and cries “Mexicanos, Viva Mexico!” The crowd assembled in the plaza below returns the cry, known as El Grito de Dolores, and fireworks light the sky. The scene is repeated in cities and towns across the country.

The bell that the president rings comes from the city of Dolores in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, less than 300 miles north of Mexico City. Early in the morning of September 16, 1810, Father Miguel Hidalgo rang the same bell in the church tower where he had long served his beloved congregation of Indians and Mestizos (people of mixed Indian and Hispanic blood). Summoning his flock in the predawn hours, Father Hidalgo ordered the arrest of the Spanish residents and called upon his people to follow him in seeking independence from the oppression of the Spanish rulers.

Father Hidalgo was one of the leaders of a conspiracy to shift the military’s allegiance from the Spanish-born elite who treated those born in Mexico as inferiors and create an independent state. Hidalgo’s efforts to help the native-born  improve themselves had been contemptuously thwarted by the Spanish Viceroy.

Earlier on the morning of the sixteenth, Captain Ignacio Allende, a military officer and  another of the conspiracy’s leaders, raced to Dolores to warn Father Hidalgo that the Spanish authorities had ordered his arrest on charges of conspiring to overthrow Spanish rule.

Hidalgo and about fifty followers began their march on Mexico City, more than 250 miles south. In the 60 miles to Guanajuato, the capital city of the state of the same name, Hidalgo’s ragtag army had grown to close to 50,000.

Hidalgo and his followers attacked Alhóndiga de Granaditas, a solidly constructed granary that served as the Spanish stronghold in Guanajuato. Their knives and machetes were no match for the firearms of the Spanish soldiers, and Hidalgo’s men were doomed to failure, when Juan José de los Reyes Martínez, a silver miner called Pipila for his freckles, strapped a huge rock to his back to shield him from the Spanish guns, and made his way to the door of the granary. Pipila set fire to the door, and when it collapsed, Hidalgo’s men swarmed the Spanish troops and took the granary, the first Mexican victory in the long fight for independence from Spain. In this picture, Pipila’s  doorway is behind the soldiers at an Independence Day celebration.  A statue of El Pipila overlooks the city.

Within a year, however, Hidalgo, Allende, and other leaders were ambushed and beheaded. For ten years, until Mexico achieved independence, their heads were displayed in cages that hung from the four outside corners of the granary. Every year, the governer of Guanajuato state lays a wreath at the eternal flame dedicated to the four heros inside the granary.

On September 16, government employees parade through the streets and people celebrate this national fiesta with fireworks, dancing and Mariachis and food.

Back to TravelLady Magazine