Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America

Epilogue: Toward Unimagined Revolution

Epilogue Toward Unimagined Revolution BeFore 1808 no one in The BaJío imagined the breakdown of the Spanish empire, the Hidalgo revolt, or the social revolution that followed. While provincial elites resented escalating demands for revenues, including the recall of ecclesiastical mortgages in the consolidation that began in 1804, they grumbled, negotiated, and paid. Entrepreneurs struggled during uncertain times, especially in textile markets as years of blockade alternated with periods of open trade. Still, most found profits in an economy driven by silver, population growth, and commercial cultivation. Meanwhile working producers , urban and rural, faced deepening poverty, frustrating insecurities , and threats to patriarchy. But while the economy prospered and the regime held on, few challenged prevailing ways. Revenue demands and economic uncertainties frustrated elites, especially those without the resources of a patriarch like don José Sánchez Espinosa.Worsening poverty, insecurity, and threats to patriarchy angered many in working families, creating tensions revealed in local contests at Puerto de Nieto, La Griega, and other communities. Yet frustrations among provincial elites and producing families remained just that—frustrations lived differently in diverse communities, negotiated within patriarchal hierarchies, and debated within evolving religious understandings. Only after Napoleon invaded Spain, took Madrid in May 1808, and claimed the Crown for his brother, proclaimed José I, did an unforeseen sequence of events set off the conflicts that brought revolution to the Bajío. People in Madrid (memorialized in Goya’s famous Third of May paintings) and across the Spanish countryside resisted Napoleonic 488 epilogue rule. Legitimate sovereignty broke; resistance fighters—guerrillas— rose across the peninsula. Political actors knew that vacated sovereignty reverted to the pueblos—organized communities. They fought to reconstruct sovereignty, first in local councils called juntas, later by calling a Cortes, the Spanish parliament dormant under Bourbon rule but not forgotten by the political classes.What Napoleon envisioned as a conquest of Spain and a taking of its American revenues set off political and social conflicts that led to peninsular campaigns, the liberal constitution of 1812, wars for independence across Spanish America, and social revolution in the Bajío.1 When news of Napoleonic occupation arrived in New Spain in the summer of 1808, the key question was clear to regime officials and colonial elites: how did a colonial kingdom without a legitimate king find, or recreate, sovereignty? The viceroy don José de Iturrigaray and the Mexico city council called for a Mexican junta to join in the reconstitution of sovereignty, and perhaps to rule locally in the interim. The judges of the High Court allied with the merchants of Mexico City’s Consulado to reject that call to participation, demanding instead recognition of the political forces moving toward a Cortes in Spain. They deposed Iturrigaray in a coup that blocked the first movement for Mexican sovereignty. Neither the viceroy nor the city council resisted, surely conscious of Haiti, where elites fighting about rights and liberties began conflicts that led to a transforming popular revolution.2 From the fall of 1808 officials and entrepreneurs in Mexico City negotiated power in the colonial capital while in Spain diverse groups fought Napoleon and struggled toward a liberal regime. Many provincials , however, rejected the presumption that sovereignty and its reconstruction belonged only to the pueblos of Spain. In Valladollid, capital of the Intendency of Michoacán, seat of the bishopric that included the Bajío, landlords, traders, militia officers, clergy, and indigenous notables met to seek a provincial junta that would allow them a part in remaking sovereignty. When authorities broke their movement another appeared at Querétaro, with extensions into San Miguel and Dolores. Again provincial elites met to discuss sovereignty and debate how to proceed. When officials arrested participants at Querétaro in September 1810, allies at San Miguel (don Ignacio de Allende) and Dolores (the priest don Miguel Hidalgo) provoked an insurgency that soon mobilized thousands of estate residents and mineworkers, who asserted their own visions of popular sovereignty. Neither the Hidalgo revolt nor the regional revolution that followed came inevitably out of the capitalist trajectory of Bajío development, nor from the polarization that marked the region after 1770. Only after the mounting grievances generated by long developing social pres- Toward unimagined revoluTion 489 sures and cultural polarization merged with the unprecedented challenge to legitimate sovereignty of 1808, and both mixed with dearth, famine, and profiteering, did the rising that began at Dolores lead to the breakdown of the...