The Revolutionary Priest

Miguel Hidalgo y Castilla was born on this day in 1753 in Corralejo, New Spain (Mexico).

An ethnic Spaniard, the son of a hacienda manager in Guanajuato, Hidalgo entered the Jesuit College of San Francisco Javier in Valladolid, but barely received two years of schooling when King Charles III of Spain banished the Jesuits from New Spain and confiscated all of their property. Switching to the diocesan College of San Nicolas Obispo in Valladolid, Hidalgo studied rhetoric, Latin and theology as well as Indian languages, and was finally ordained as a priest in 1778. He stayed to teach at the College, becoming its rector, but he earned a reputation for freethinking and unorthodoxy, and was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1800 on charges that he read banned books and kept a mistress. The charges were never proven.

In 1803, Hidalgo left Valladolid to accept the small parish of Dolores, where he began to busy himself with improving economic conditions among his parishioners, introducing new industries (tile making, tanning, beekeeping) and debating local ethnic Spaniards about questions of social philosophy, largely influenced by the writings of Francisco Suarez. His debating activities grew into the formation of the Queretaro Literary Society, among whose members were Ignacio Allende, a 35 year-old cavalry captain; Juan de Aldama Gonzalez, another soldier; Miguel Dominguez, a former government official; and Miguel's wife Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez.

Together the Literary Club, bristling at Spanish rule under Joseph Bonaparte, hatched a plot for separating New Spain from Spanish rule, to be executed on December 8, 1810 with a stow of arms and ammunition they horded at the house of Epigmenio Gonzalez. The plot was leaked to the authorities in Mexico City, and on September 13 the arms were seized, and warrants were put out for the arrest of Hidalgo, Allende and Aldama. Hidalgo rang the church bells to bring his parishioners to mass early on September 16, and when they assembled at the church in Dolores, Hidalgo sermonized on revolution, urging them to join him in armed struggle against Spain.

With an enthusiastic but rag-tag band of poorly armed mestizos and Indians, Hidalgo traveled to San Miguel, picking up recruits along the way. At Atotonilco, Hidalgo seized the banner of the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadelupe and adopted it as the emblem of his crusade, and it became an important recruiting tool as he combed the countryside. Hidalgo's army seized a number of towns without much effort, but Hidalgo's inability to control his army meant that every battle was followed in victory by Hidalgo's Indians violently pillaging the houses of the local ethnic Spaniards.

Within a month they had captured Guanajuato, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi and Valladolid, and planned a march on Mexico City. Outside of Mexico City, Hidalgo won a decisive victory over the smaller army of government soldiers at Monte de las Cruces, and Mexico City seemed to be ready for the taking. Hidalgo worried, however, that his uncontrollable army would destroy the City, and ordered a retreat over the objections of Allende. Many of his rebels, sensing that the opportunity had been lost, deserted; and while Hidalgo traveled North, the government regrouped and defeated Hidalgo's forces at Puente de Calderon.

Fleeing to Texas, Hidalgo and Allende were captured by the Spanish in March 1811. Allende was immediately executed, but Hidalgo was returned to the Inquisition, which found him guilty of treason and heresy, defrocked him and turned him over to the government for execution by firing squad on July 31, 1811. His corpse was decapitated and Hidalgo's head was stuck on a pole and displayed as a warning to the Indians.

Although Hidalgo's rebellion was unsuccessful in turning out the Spanish, he did manage to undo 300 years of stability and complacency among the Spanish in Mexico in 120 days. He failed due to bad military judgment, but he is nonetheless worshipped as the patron saint of the birth of the Mexican nation, something which was not to come until 11 years after his death. No one else played as much of a role in inspiring people with the credibility of Mexican independence. The day Hidalgo rang the church bells, September 16, is now celebrated as Independence Day in Mexico.

Posada's Calaveras

Jose Guadalupe Posada was born on this day in 1852 in Aguascalientes, Mexico.

The son of a baker, at 16 Posada became an apprentice to a local printer, Jose Trinidad Pedroza, from whom he learned engraving on wood and metal and lithography. At 19, he began to contribute lithographed satirical cartoons about the local jefes to Pedroza's journal, El Jicote, which became so popular that each edition which contained Posada's work sold out as quickly as it could be printed. The more popular El Jicote became, the less welcome Pedroza and Posada were among the local jefes, so a year later they moved to the town of Leon de los Aldamas. There Posada ran Pedroza's print shop and eventually bought it from him, eking out a living through commercial assignments such as cigar and liquor ads and labels, as well as contributing traditional drawings and lithograph reproductions of paintings to local publications.

In 1888, Posada lost his shop in a disastrous flood and moved to Mexico City, where he hooked up with Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, a national publisher of broadsides and chapbooks. The literary content of Vanegas Arroyo's publications was pure pulp, and Posada indulged the words by providing garish lead-engraved or zinc-etched cartoons of grisly crimes, violent riots and disasters, depictions of physical deformities and supernatural phenomena, and bustling social and political reportage. He worked quickly, briefly studying a text and then rapidly sketching out his illustrations, producing a printing plate as little as an hour after conceiving his designs.

Posada's on-the-spot inspirations were nourished by the deeply-rooted imagery and attitudes of his country: his most famous illustrations, known as calaveras, emerge from the bemused Spanish/Mexican stoicism regarding death and the sights associated with the celebration of All Saints Day (the Day of the Dead) each year on November 2. Posada's calaveras were prints in which skeletons mime (sometimes gleefully) a variety of ordinary daily activities, from selling newspapers to dancing and drinking to courting and seducing; yet Posada took his skeleton drawings a few steps further, responding to the emerging Mexican thirst for revolution against the Diaz dictatorship by showing skeletons as Zapatistas doing battle with the cavalry or triumphantly leading bloody revolt (such as in the Oaxaca calavera, 1903) or even as ghastly historical portraits (The Calavera of Senor Madero, 1913) -- in effect, using the culturally rich details of the Day of the Dead as a medium for expressionist social commentary.

Although he was sometimes jailed for the brutal honesty of his work, he toiled on humbly and indefatigably, producing more than 20,000 engravings before dying in poverty and obscurity, at the age of 61, on January 20, 1913 in Mexico City.

Mexican artists of the next generation saw him as their precursor: Rivera revered him, putting him in a place of honor in his mural for the Hotel del Prado in Mexico City, with Posada's own Calavera catrina on his arm; and Orozco was moved to say: "Posada is the equal of the greatest artists, an admirable lesson in simplicity, humility, equilibrium and dignity. A strong contrast, indeed, to the hatred and the servile attitudes so common today."

The Devil's Lexicographer

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."

Ambrose Bierce -- misanthrope, hack journalist, critic and the devil's lexicographer (as author of The Devil's Dictionary, 1881-1906) -- was born on this day in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio.

He disappeared in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. He was last heard from in December 1913 in Chihuahua, where he was covering Pancho Villa and his army. In one of his last letters, the 71-year old Bierce wrote: "Good-by — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia."