INDEPENDENCE CONFLICTS ON THE NORTHERN FRONTIERS

By Juan Montoya

Although the movement for Mexican independence from the royal Spanish government in Mexico had started in 1810 by Father Manuel Hidalgo who captured Guanajuato and other cities west of Mexico City, it did not die with his execution in Chihuahua in 1811.

The banner was taken up by José Morelos y Pavón, a parish priest turned military leader who continued the struggle against the royal government until 1815, when he was also captured and executed.

But Hidalgo's Grito de Dolores had ignited the hopes and aspirations of thousands of natives and mestizos, lured by the call for equality under the law for all despite the rigid colonial caste system, the abolition of slavery, the end of paying tribute to the crown's bureaucrats, and a return of their native lands.

Carried by Catholic clergy, these promises resonated not only in Central Mexico, but across the entire country, including the northern states like present-day Tamaulipas, Nuevo Santander, and then-Coahuila-Texas. 

Ironically, the clergy's call to independence did not include rebellion against King Fernando VII in Spain, but rather against the colonial government administered by peninsulares, that is, native born Spaniards who kept criollos, mestizos, natives, and black slaves subjugated through colonial laws.

And just like in Guanajuato, where Hidalgo's rebellion for independence began, the cry in the northern states was: "Viva la America! Viva Fernando VII! Muera el mal gobierno! 

The call for independence was carried by clerical propagandists who administered to the natives in the isolated missions in Nuevo Santander – between Nuevo Leon and Texas – like the ones in Camargo, Tamaulipas, where as early as 1812, the royal armies had to move to quell rebellion among the Indians.

One such case involved the rebellion carried out in Camargo by a native leader named Julian Canales who had listened to the insurrection message and believed it. So did soldiers with the royal forces, many of who left their ranks and joined the insurgent movement. In her book Cartas y Documentos del Capitan Pedro Lopez Prieto, Dr. Clotilde P. Garcia, writes how Prieto, the military commander of Reynosa and its cavalry, wrote his commander, Lt. Col. Joaquin Arredondo, about the events leading to the confrontation with the natives who rose against the crown upriver in the Villa de Camargo.

In his April 3 report to Arredondo, Prieto wrote how Canales had been jailed, but somehow escaped capture with the aid of other Indians and sympathetic royal troops. When Prieto sent troops to recapture Canales and they arrived at the mission, a large number of natives warned them that if he was arrested, they would burn the entire Villa of Camargo to ashes.

Prieto convinced Canales that by joining the insurgency and fighting the royal representatives, he was being disloyal to King Fernando VII and to the crown. An uneasy peace was established, but not without casualties among the troops and royal government officials whose homes were surrounded and some  prisoners taken and killed. In the siege that followed, both Indians and gachupines and criollos died as the loyalties of the natives and criollos wavered the king and the colonial officials.

(Prieto was successful for a time and expected to be named commander for his work, but vile tongues whispered in the ears of the viceregal powers that be about land grants that he and his family owned in what is now Cameron County, the San Martin and Santa Isabel land tracts. Discredited, his military career fizzled.)

And so an uneasy peace prevailed in Camargo and in the northern provinces following this violent insurrection that would erupt intermittently throughout the years before the colonial government was removed following a revolt against the crown in Spain. 

It wasn't until 1821, with the Plan de Iguala when conservative Mexican leaders begin plans to end the viceregal system and separate their country from the mother land.

Mexico became an independent country ruled as a limited monarchy, with the Roman Catholic Church as the official state church and equal rights and upper-class status for the Spanish and mestizo populations, as opposed to the majority of the population, which was of Native American or African descent, or mulato (mixed). 

In August 1821, the last Spanish viceroy was forced to sign the Treaty of Córdoba, marking the official beginning of Mexican independence.

(P.S. Dr. Clotilde Garcia, the author of Cartas and Documentos, was the sister of Dr. Hector Garcia, the founder of the G.I. Forum, and first wrote of the insurgency in Camargo for the Southwest Historical Quarterly. A medical doctor, educator and Mexican-American activist, she married and had one son, José Antonio "Tony" Canales, one of the first Tejanos appointed to the U.S. Attorney's Office.)