Dolores Hidalgo. The heart of the struggle for independence. It was here in the early morning hours of September 16, 1810 that parish priest Father Miguel Hidalgo summoned his flock with church bells. When they arrived, he called them to arms against oppressive Spanish tyranny and towards an independent Mexico.

It was in this unassuming house that the plot was hatched hours before.




Miguel Hidalgo, outcast of the Catholic Church, found a home for his ideas amongst the people of the state of Guanajuato. It was here that he formed a alliance with Ignacio Allende. It would be this alliance that would become the catalyst for the movement towards Mexican Independence.

This is the church that 195 years ago Hidalgo made El Grito de Dolores, "¡Mexicanos, viva Mexico!"


Their first order of business was to arrest the Spanish representative and the Spanish tax collector, who lived in this house across the plaza from the church.


They marched under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe... the apparition of an indigenous Virgin Mary that appeared to the indigenous Juan Diego 300 years prior just outside of Mexico City and was the main catalyst for conversion amongst the many native tribes throughout Mexico.


A new flag was soon developed, a tri-color bandera symbolizing green for Hope, white for Life and red for the Blood of the Heroes, with the seal in the middle symbolizing the mythical story of the founding of Tenochtitlan by the Mexica-Azteca.


The independence leaders.


In Dolores Hidalgo, renamed for Father Hidalgo, the most revered figure in Mexican history, there is a statue in his honor in the middle of the zocalo.


There are museums and murals throughout the city in honor of these heroes of the struggle for independence.






History tells us the unhappy outcome of the War for Independence. Within a year, most of the early leaders of the war were either captured, killed, or like Hidalgo, both. The new leadership did not believe in the same egalitarian world that Hidalgo was fighting for... a world where Criollo (a Spaniard born in the Americas), Mestizo (of mixed blood), African, and Native could fight together to throw off the yoke of a common oppressor.



Soon the struggle was co-opted by individuals who were bent not on overthrowing oppression, but on replacing the oppressor. By the end of 1821 Mexico was an independent nation, but it would be another 35 years before it had a democratically elected government, and over 90 years before the cause of indigenous rights and recognition would even begin to permeate the halls of power.

The struggle for independence remained incomplete, just as the struggle for revolution a century later.