The Mexican Revolution of 1810 and Hispanic Heritage

The year has flown by so fast. The dizzying speed of time that has been true for me recently is a sign that my life is finite. I am conscious of death, as we all must be, but it's still hard to seriously contemplate it. When I'm in the grip of that feeling I fall back on my historical memories. I remember the past, and tell it and teach it to anyone willing to listen to this old man. For me, its vividness allows me to achieve immortality. Every year on September 16 I'm with the Mexican townspeople in the parish church of the village of Dolores. The white-haired priest ascends the pulpit and shouts, "Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe!,'" and the Mexican Revolution of 1810 begins once again. Invoking the Indian version of the Mother of God, Padre Miguel Hidalgo blows the lid off Spanish domination. That invocation is an agonized cry of an oppressed people. It's a cry for freedom, a heart-rending plea for help directed to the Mexican mother-figure, the brown-skinned woman on the hill of Tepeyac, La Virgen de Guadalupe. It's crucial to understand that Guadalupe is ingrained in Mexican psychology, a feminine dimension that has no equivalent in American psychology. And that she begins the cycle. That cycle repeats again and again, becoming mythic time.

The war of liberation begins with that cry in the village named after Nuestra Senora de los Dolores, Our Lady of Sorrows. But it has assumed another meaning, "El Grito de Dolores," literally "The Cry of Pain." Every year the ritualistic myth of origin is reenacted. The president of Mexico stands above the Zocalo, the main Aztec plaza in Mexico City packed with a hundred thousand Mexicans and utters the cry. "El Grito"echoes throughout the land, resonates to the north, crosses the American border and is heard by the 50 million Mexican-origin people, the so-called Hispanics, more appropriately identified as Chicanos, who live in the United States as U.S. citizens. And every year Mexico proper and Mexico abroad collectively hears and screams and feels that painful childbirth.

We have joyful celebrations of Hispanic Heritage Month which begins on September15. And this is a good thing. The occasion is deliberately begun on the anniversary of the start of the Mexican War of Independence. This is rightly so, in recognition of the preponderance of the Mexican origin Hispanic population in the U.S. But to vindicate the value of history, some historical truths must be acknowledged, even if the majority of Hispanics and our Anglo American friends have little awareness of the Mexican Revolution of 1810. This is important because the past still exerts a powerful effect on the present, something not universally accepted in the U.S. The past is much remembered in Mexico, which lives in a much different consciousness of time and memory.This why I say above that El Grito is a mythic reality because in many non-Western cultures myth is understood as more true than "facts." Mexican culture looks back to the past. American culture looks forward to the future. Both ways have their good and bad points. The Mexican Revolution of 1810, Mexico's War of Independence in which the country threw off 300-years of Spanish misrule, was not like the American Revolution against the British empire. Our revolution against Britain was a relatively painless affair compared to the Mexican version. Of course, there was much hard fighting in the American revolution and much blood shed. But it was a war fought by organized armies who more or less observed the laws of war as understood by 18th-century professional soldiers. In contrast, the Mexican War of Independence was a chaotic, bloody, violent uprising more akin to a slave revolt, in which tens of thousands of Indian and mestizo semi-slaves, people held in medieval serfdom, a type of bondage prevalent in the Spanish empire, rose up against their slave masters. When the well-meaning but naive Creole priest Padre Hidalgo, a light-skinned Spaniard born in Mexico and therefore considered inferior in the rigid caste system enforced by Iberian-born Spaniards (probably his personal reason for instigating the revolt), led his Indian masses against the Spanish, he unleashed a race war, a war of massacres and wholesale atrocities as the pent up rage of the Indians and mixed-race mestizos exploded in fury for 300-years of brutal oppression. The "gachupines," Iberian Spaniards, and their allies, the Creoles, fought back and in turn killed thousands of Indians and mestizos.

In spite of all of this I still love history. At midnight on September 15 I will tune in to Univision and watch Claudia Sheinbaum yell El Grito. The victory of the poor people of Mexico will inspire me to continue my joyful journey, thankful that I know something about the past, but that I have history to keep me focused on the  present and the future, not worried about what may come.

Joe Barrera, Ph.D., is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS. He teaches Mexico/U.S. Border Studies and U.S. Military History. He is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.