Mexican Independence Day

At around half past two on the morning of 16 September 1810, in the small town of Dolores in Guanajuato, a parish priest named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla ordered the church bells rung and gathered his startled congregation in the dark. Flanked by the soldiers Ignacio Allende and Juan Aldama, he delivered the speech that would become known as the Grito de Dolores, the Cry of Dolores. Its exact words are lost, reproduced in nearly as many versions as there are historians to argue over them, but its effect is not in doubt: it called for an end to three centuries of Spanish rule, and it set a country in motion.

Mexican Independence Day, observed every 16 September, commemorates that pre-dawn summons. It is the most important patriotic date in the Mexican calendar, and it marks not a triumph but a beginning, the first reckless step of a war that would take more than a decade to win.

Where the day comes from

Hidalgo was an unlikely revolutionary, a creole priest in his late fifties who had read widely in Enlightenment thought and chafed under the rigid hierarchy of colonial New Spain. The plotters around him in the Bajío region had intended to rise later in the year, but the conspiracy was discovered, and Hidalgo gambled on acting at once rather than waiting to be arrested. The Grito was that gamble made audible.

The crowd that answered was not an army but a swelling mass of Indigenous people and mestizos, the labourers and farmhands of the region, marching under a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Their grievances were concrete: land, racial inequality, and the contempt of a Spanish-born elite. That the nation now dates its freedom from the moment of the call, rather than from the eventual settlement, tells you a great deal about how Mexico chooses to remember itself, by the courage of the start rather than the negotiation of the finish.

History

The rising spread with frightening speed and then faltered. Hidalgo’s forces swelled to tens of thousands and took Guanajuato and other towns, but the movement was undisciplined and its violence alarmed many of the very creoles who might have joined it. Within a year Hidalgo was captured, defrocked and executed by firing squad in 1811, his head displayed in a cage in Guanajuato as a warning. The warning failed.

Leadership passed to another priest, José María Morelos, a far more capable strategist who gave the insurgency coherence and a political programme before he too was captured and executed in 1815. For years the struggle guttered on as scattered guerrilla resistance, kept alive by figures such as Vicente Guerrero in the south. The decisive turn came not from the insurgents but from within the royalist camp: in 1821 a former royalist commander, Agustín de Iturbide, switched sides and allied with Guerrero under the Plan of Iguala. Their combined force brought the colonial government down, and independence was formally declared on 28 September 1821, eleven years and twelve days after Hidalgo rang his bell. The man who began it lived to see almost none of it.

Why it matters

For Mexicans the day is a clear assertion of sovereignty and of national identity forged from a patchwork of peoples and regions. It honours those who challenged an entrenched colonial order, and it deliberately centres the common people who first answered Hidalgo rather than the generals who finished the job. The names of that founding generation are everywhere in Mexico, on streets, on currency, on the maps of states and cities, and the annual ritual keeps them in circulation.

The day’s emphasis on a beginning rather than a victory is itself meaningful. It frames freedom as something claimed and then renewed, an ongoing act rather than a finished possession. That places it alongside the wider family of national foundation days, the same impulse seen in Brazilian Independence Day just nine days earlier in September, when another Latin American nation marks its break from a European crown. The two cases are instructive opposites: Brazil’s separation was led from the top by a prince and achieved with relatively little bloodshed, whereas Mexico’s began from the bottom, with a priest and a crowd of farmhands, and was paid for over eleven brutal years.

There is also a deliberately popular character to the Mexican commemoration. The day does not chiefly honour treaties or statesmen; it honours a man who acted on impulse and the ordinary people who followed him. Schoolchildren learn the Grito, the bell is rung in every town hall, and the whole nation is invited, on the same night, to perform the same shout in unison. Few national days are quite so participatory. Independence is presented not as something handed down but as something the people themselves once claimed and are asked, symbolically, to claim again every year.

How it is celebrated

The festivities begin on the evening of 15 September. In Mexico City the president steps onto the balcony of the National Palace, rings the historic bell associated with Hidalgo, and leads an enormous crowd in the Plaza de la Constitución, the Zócalo, through a recitation honouring the heroes of independence, ending with three thunderous cries of Viva México. Governors and mayors perform the same ceremony in plazas across the country. Fireworks fill the sky, bands play, and the streets stay loud well into the night.

The following day, 16 September, brings military and civic parades, with troops, bands and floats moving through the capital and provincial towns alike. Homes, balconies and public buildings are draped in green, white and red, and the tricolour is worn, waved and strung across whole streets.

Around the world

Wherever Mexican communities have settled, the day travels with them. Cities across the United States host substantial celebrations, reflecting deep family and historical ties, with parades, music and food that double as affirmations of belonging far from home. These gatherings have grown into significant cultural events in their own right in places with large Mexican populations, many of them in the very territories that were Mexican before the borders moved. That tangled history is its own commemorated date elsewhere; Texas Independence Day marks the 1836 break of Texas from Mexico, a reminder that the lines on the map shifted more than once in the decades after Hidalgo’s cry.

One persistent confusion is worth correcting. Abroad, the day is frequently conflated with Cinco de Mayo, the 5 May commemoration of the 1862 Battle of Puebla. The two are entirely distinct, and within Mexico the September independence day is by far the more important; Cinco de Mayo is a relatively minor occasion there, observed far more vigorously in the United States than in Mexico itself. The Battle of Puebla, for the record, was a victory over an invading French army half a century after Hidalgo’s cry, and has nothing to do with the break from Spain.

The figures behind the date

Part of what gives the day its weight is the cast of characters it keeps alive. Hidalgo is the father of the nation, but the founding generation was crowded. Ignacio Allende, the trained soldier who stood beside Hidalgo at Dolores, had wanted a more disciplined military rising and was uneasy about the chaotic mass movement that resulted; he too was captured and executed in 1811. José María Morelos, the muleteer’s son turned priest turned general, gave the insurgency its clearest political vision before the royalists caught and shot him. Vicente Guerrero kept the flame alight through the lean years and later became one of independent Mexico’s early presidents. Even Agustín de Iturbide, the royalist turncoat who finished the war, went on to crown himself emperor of a short-lived Mexican Empire before being overthrown and, in 1824, executed. The roll-call is unusually bloody, and the fact that so many of its members died violently is part of why the day insists on remembering the beginning, when the outcome was still open and the cost not yet counted.

Symbols and traditions

The tricolour flag dominates, but food carries much of the meaning. The signature dish of the season is chiles en nogada, a stuffed poblano chilli topped with a creamy walnut sauce and scattered with pomegranate seeds, its green, white and red mirroring the flag, and its appearance tied to the late-summer harvest. Pozole, tamales and other dishes feed the family gatherings, while mariachi music and folk dancing supply the soundtrack. The ringing of bells deliberately echoes the original summons of 1810, turning every plaza into a small re-enactment of that night in Dolores.

Fun facts

• The bell Hidalgo rang in Dolores was later moved to the National Palace in Mexico City, where the president sounds it each year on the eve of the celebration.
• The town of Dolores was renamed Dolores Hidalgo in the priest’s honour and is now a place of pilgrimage.
• No reliable record of the Grito’s actual words survives; the version officials recite today is a later, standardised composition.
• Independence was ultimately secured by Agustín de Iturbide, a former royalist who had fought against the very insurgents he ended up joining.
• The whole war lasted eleven years, and the man who started it, Hidalgo, was dead within one of them.

A closing reflection

There is a particular kind of honesty in marking a nation’s birth by its most uncertain moment rather than its most triumphant one. The priest who rang the bell at Dolores could not have known how the story would end, and in fact it ended without him, in a settlement he might not have recognised. Yet it is his cry, not the signatures of 1821, that the country chooses to repeat each September. Perhaps that is the right instinct. A finished victory can be filed away and admired; an unfinished beginning has to be answered again and again, by each generation that decides to shout back.