Dolores antes de la independencia: Microhistoria del altar de la patria, vol. I, and: Dolores antes de la independencia: Microhistoria del altar de la patria, vol. II (review)

This is not a book for the faint of heart, nor for the pressed of time. A professor of history at the Colegio de San Luis Potosí, Ruiz Guadalajara has given us an obsessively detailed, loving, occasionally exasperating, but ultimately brilliant and illuminating reconstruction of the history of the town of Dolores in Mexico’s Bajío region, the “altar of the fatherland,” over some three centuries. The early pages of the first volume trace masterfully the historiographical and political apotheosis of Dolores and its hero, Miguel Hidalgo, which together came to be the political equivalent in the national imaginary of the Cerro de Tepeyac, and conflated with that sacral site through Hidalgo’s fortuitous appropriation as the standard of his movement of a banner with the Virgin of Guadalupe’s likeness on it. Moreover, it is easy to see why the first few pages of the introduction are so celebratory of the late Mexican historian Luis González, really a paean to his enormous historiographical reach and his maxim that microhistory should be small in space and long in time.

The central paradox of the study is that the town of Dolores Hidalgo acquired its immensely freighted historical significance because Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla just happened to be there in 1810; the long-term history of the town was not inherently linked to this happenstance, but would hardly have been worth the attention Ruiz Guadalajara and other historians have lavished upon it were it not for that singular circumstance. The author is essentially reclaiming Dolores for the realm of the ordinary, taking its history up to but not beyond the “Grito” of September 16, 1810 that initiated the Mexican independence movement, and in the process deconstructing much of the historia de bronce that has portrayed it as a poor, rather down-trodden, heavily indigenous pueblo with a radical priest as its curate. A small quibble with the book, in fact, might be that there is so little of explicit comparison with other towns that grew up along the Chichimec frontier, so that we might know what was unique to Dolores and what it shared in common with other population centers. The processes of settlement in the area—the confluence of silver mining, evangelization, and agricultural potential in attracting Spanish colonists—would be substantially familiar to any student of the colonial period, but it is the rescue of the detailed data and the rethinking of their meaning within a wider context (e.g., religious history, European politics, the development of the bishopric of Michoacán) that give the book much of its great value. In a study so detail-rich, so steeped in archival sources and replete with quantitative data (whole censuses of the town are transcribed, for example), useful maps, and striking tipped-in illustrations, the prose in these two long volumes rises to the poetic in many places, while it is salted with an ironic wit and deploys at several points a taste for speculative historical detours.

Formally designated a curacy around 1710 through the influence of an ambitious young priest adept at ecclesiastical politics and angling for preferment within the bishopric of Michoacán (which he died too early to realize), the Congregación de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores had been very sparsely settled by Spaniards, but by the mid-eighteenth century had come to comprise a substantial town with a Creole urban core and an important indigenous (originally Otomí) hinterland. Ruiz Guadalajara refers to it as part of an “urban Spanish circuit” along with several other towns of the region (Celaya, San Miguel, etcetera), downplaying the story of action by...