What Actually Happened During The Mexican War Of Independence
Most people think the Mexican War of Independence was a single rebellion that lasted twelve years. It wasn't. It was three separate uprisings, overlapping conspiracies, regional wars, and a lot of people who wanted independence for completely different reasons. The timeline runs from 1810 to 1821, but those dates barely mean anything if you read them as a straight line. The first phase under Hidalgo collapsed fast. The second under Morelos was far more organized and actually had a constitution. The third phase dragged on as a guerrilla war with changing alliances until Iturbide basically took over and forced the whole thing into a monarchy instead. I spent a lot of time digging through primary sources for a paper I wrote on the political fragmentation during the independence period, and the main problem I ran into was trying to find consistent documentation between regional leaders. The Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City has the bulk of the material, but it's scattered across legajos, many of which weren't properly catalogued until the 1990s. What I ended up doing was cross-referencing the correspondence from Morelos's campaign with the colonial administrative records from Guanajuato and Michoacán, which gave me a much clearer picture of how supply lines and regional loyalties shifted month to month. The published editions of Morelos's writings help, but they leave out half the letters that were intercepted by royalist intelligence before reaching their intended recipients. One counter-intuitive thing about the independence movement that textbooks gloss over: the criollo elite, the wealthy landowners and merchants who eventually backed independence, were not primarily motivated by liberal ideals. They wanted control over colonial trade and the political institutions that kept them locked out despite their wealth. The peninsulares, people born in Spain who held the top administrative positions, were the actual barrier. This is why Iturbide's Plan of Iguala in 1821 won over so many conservatives — it guaranteed the privileges of both the Church and the landed classes. The real radical elements, the indigenous militias, the freed people, the urban workers, got written out of the settlement almost entirely.
Another detail that doesn't get enough attention is how the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808 destabilized the entire colonial administrative structure overnight. When Napoleon placed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne, colonial officials in New Spain had no clear authority to recognize or resist. The real question was who spoke for the legitimate king, and that ambiguity is what allowed Hidalgo to trigger his revolt in September 1810. Most participants at the start didn't even want full independence. They wanted the removal of the corregidores and local Spanish officials. The demand for independence itself came later, and even then it was fragmented across different regions with different timelines. The economic dimension matters more than usually credited. The silver mining regions of Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and Guanajuato were the financial engine of the viceroyalty. Royalist forces could fund their campaigns from those areas, but insurgent control of certain mining districts at various points cut off revenue streams that Madrid depended on. By 1817, royalist military operations were hampered by lack of pay and supplies, not just by continued guerrilla resistance. That's a structural point that changes how you read the later phases of the conflict. If you're looking at primary documents or trying to piece together the chronology, the biggest pitfall is assuming that leadership was continuous. Hidalgo was executed in 1811. Morelos was captured and executed in 1815. Between those dates, the movement fractured into dozens of regional caudillos who sometimes cooperated and sometimes fought each other. Vicente Guerrero and Guadalupe Victoria held out in the southern mountains, but they weren't coordinating with Bustamante's forces in the center, and neither side saw themselves as part of the same war for most of that period. The unification under the Plan of Iguala was basically a political coup by Iturbide that absorbed the remaining guerrilla forces rather than a military victory.
The Treaty of Córdoba in August 1821 formalized independence, but it was signed by Agustín de Iturbide and the last viceroy, Juan O'Donojú, who had arrived in Veracruz with no real authority to negotiate. O'Donojú recognized the terms almost immediately because Spain had lost the financial and military capacity to send reinforcements. The treaty itself was drafted in a hurry and contained contradictions — it called for a constitutional monarchy but didn't specify which European prince would take the throne. That gap led directly to the brief empire under Iturbide himself, which lasted less than a year before being overthrown in 1823. For anyone trying to trace specific events or locate sources, the most reliable starting point is still the compilations of documentos published by the Mexican government in the 19th century, particularly the series tied to the Archivo Nacional. Modern digital archives like Escrito Público have digitized portions of these, but the coverage is uneven and the search interface is frustrating. The works of scholars like Enríquez flux and Cocho have updated the historiography significantly, but the basic documentary record remains the foundation. Regional state archives sometimes hold material that never reached the capital, especially correspondence from Guerrero and Oaxaca that documents the final guerrilla campaigns in detail.
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