Aztec Rage

EL GRITO DE DOLORES

  (THE CRY OF DOLORES)

  EIGHTY-ONE

  I REALIZED AFTER midnight that we’d crossed the Rubicon. That we crossed it in Dolores was fitting: In our poignantly poetic Spanish tongue, dolores can convey both pain and sorrow.

  When Marina and I reached the padre’s house, the war council was going full tilt. The padre huddled with two criollo militia officers, Ignacio Allende and Juan Aldama, and the alcalde of the jail in Querétaro, Ignacio Pérez. ¡Ay! The jail master didn’t even give me a second glance when the padre introduced me. Raquel arrived on our heels. En route to visit a friend in Querétaro, she had come directly to Dolores when her amiga warned her away.

  Rumors abounded as to the betrayal of the plan. One person said a foolish friend had confessed the plan to a priest. Another said that a militia officer, whom Allende had recruited, betrayed it to his superiors. Whatever the source, the conspirators had to flee or fight. Flight meant leaving their families, homes, and possessions and turning outlaw.

  “It’s time to fight,” the padre said.

  Captain Allende shook his head. “We’re not ready. We lack sufficient soldiers, training, weapons, supplies—”

  “They’re not ready either. The Spanish regulars are all deployed in Spain fighting the French, not here in the colony. The viceroy has only the militia. When other militia officers hear that you and Captain Aldama are part of the revolt, many of them will join us.”

  “The viceroy has ten thousand militia he can field, perhaps even more,” Pérez said.

  “But not all at once. Isn’t that true, Ignacio?” the padre asked Allende.

  “Our units are scattered all over the colony,” Allende said, “a few hundred here, a thousand there. The viceroy would need weeks to deploy a substantial force. One plan might work.”

  “And that is?” the padre asked.

  “The one you have advocated: your Aztecs. They’re not trained soldiers, but they have courage, and they will follow you. A company of musketeers would cut down a thousand, but ten or twenty thousand . . . ?”

  “How do we know that many will respond?” Aldama asked.

  “They’ve done it before,” Padre Hidalgo said. “Hatred of the gachupines runs deep in the indio. Each time there’s been a spark of resistance, they’ve flocked together by the tens of thousands. Their memories of the terrible punishment meted out to them for objecting to being starved by corn manipulations or other injustices run deep.”

  “My people have only their memories,” Marina said. “Three hundred years of degradation seared into our souls.”

  “I regret that we must rely on untrained indios, but they’ll follow the padre,” Allende said. “I suspect that you already have a significant number waiting for your command.”

  The padre didn’t respond, but I too assumed he did. He and his Aztecs wouldn’t have created that weapons cache if they’d had no way to use them. Furthermore, the padre had needed a small battalion of Aztecs to make those weapons, and those indios would have friends. If a hundred Aztecs had produced the weapons, a hundred times that number could be ready and waiting.

  It surprised me that men like Allende and Aldama, who served the viceroy and had so much to lose, would plot against the government. I didn’t personally know either of them, but Allende’s name was known to me. He had a reputation throughout the Bajío as a fearless hombre, a caballero who earned his spurs in the saddle, not at fancy balls. It surprised me that men who had spent most of their lives wearing the fancy military uniforms of the viceroy would have enough depth of character and social awareness to demand social change. The fact that Allende had well-thought-out suggestions, ideas that even the brilliant and courageous priest lent an ear to, was not something I expected from a career officer of a militia that was known to be lackadaisical and incompetent.

  Other than occasional pirate attacks along the coast, which the militia defended against poorly, and occasional riots by the poor, which the militia put down brutally, in three centuries there had been little to defend against. Despite many threats, there had never been a serious invasion of the colony. The distances and terrain an invading army would have to cover, with the core of the wealth and population occupying the high plateau in the middle, made the colony an undesirable place for foreign powers to invade. Since much of the colony’s wealth ended up being shipped to Spain, it was much easier to lie in wait for Spanish ships sailing from Veracruz.

  “But what will happen when the viceroy fields eight to ten thousand trained troops?” Pérez asked. “Remember the great Cortés conquered millions of indios with a few hundred Spanish soldiers.”

  “Cortés had thousands of indio allies,” the padre said, “and the Mejica were poorly led. If they had had a competent military leader instead of the confused and superstitious Montezuma, the war would have gone the other way.”

  “If we raise ten thousand indios—enough to overwhelm the few hundred troops the viceroy has in the Bajío—our fellow criollos will flock to our cause,” said Allende. “I know militia officers and caballeros. They won’t risk their lives and property until they smell victory. But when a militia officer joins us, he’ll bring fifty or a hundred trained soldiers with him. Once we have two or three thousand trained troops, backed by our Aztec multitudes, the viceroy and his gachupines will have to give up the fight.”

  “And we will collect the gachupines and ship them back to Spain,” Aldama said.

  The padre stood up. “Then it’s time.”

  “Time for what?” Aldama asked.

  “To go forth and seize the gachupines.”

  I saw fear, wonderment, and even puzzlement on the faces of the men in the room. Only the padre and Allende appeared to be in total command of their emotions and resolve. They were the leaders, the two men of vision. The resolve of the others depended upon them.

  Well before dawn, the bell of the Church of Our Lady of Sorrow rang. A church bell was not just an invitation to a religious service; it could also be a call to arms. From the time the church built the first missions, its priests relied on the mission walls and loyal indios for protection. In rural areas like Dolores, where an indio village had grown into a small town, the church bell was still a summons for help. When danger threatened, the priests rang the bell repeatedly, and those indios loyal to the mission, who often worked the nearby fields, gathered to defend it.

  In a church whose name evoked sorrow and pain, the padre now tolled the bell as a call to arms. The date was September 16, 1810.

  When light of the new day glowed in the east, we gathered in front of the church to wait for the padre to step out and announce why he had sounded the alarm. Besides those who had been at the council of war, at least a hundred peons had gathered.

  The padre came out and spoke in a strong, firm voice: “My good friends, we have been owned by faraway Spain and treated as mindless children to obey and do the bidding of the gachupines sent to govern us, to pay taxes without representation, to be lashed when we question their actions. But in all families, the children grow up and must find a path in life that suits them.

  “They force our indio americanos to pay a shameful tribute that arose as a tax on a conquered people by a merciless despot. For three centuries that tax has been a symbol of tyranny and shame. During that same time, africanos have been kidnapped and brought to the colony to work as slaves.

  “No one born in the colony has been treated with the rights and dignity to which all men are entitled under God, not even those with Spanish blood. Instead, spurwearers are sent to rule us, to collect unjust taxes, to stop us from developing crafts and trades that would bring us prosperity. We stay as bonded servants to feed their bottomless greed.

  “Now that the French have usurped the throne of Spain it won’t be long before the godless Napoleon sends a viceroy who speaks only French to rule us, to collect tribute from all of us. When the French seize us, they’ll destroy our churches and trample our religion.”

  His voic
e rose in intensity, his features growing dark with the knowledge of injustice. My vaqueros would say that there was fire in his belly, the kind of fire that gives a champion bull the courage and determination to charge.

  “The gachupines have failed in their duties. They rule and rob us and give nothing in return. The time has come when we must no longer be subjected to these bandidos who come over from Europe and whose only interest is to steal our wealth, tax us, and force us to serve them.

  “The time has come for us to keep the French from seizing the colony, to force the gachupines to return to Spain, and to rule the land ourselves, in the name of Ferdinand VII, the rightful King of Spain.”

  He paused. Not one among us stirred, no one spoke. We were mesmerized by the power, the grand design of the man and his words.

  “All people are equal! No one has the right to bloody us with spurs! No one has the right to steal the bread from our mouths, education from our children, to deny opportunities for all!”

  He raised his fist and shouted, “Long live America for which we will fight! Long Live Ferdinand VII! Long live the Great Religion. Death to Bad Government!”

  A shout went up, then a great roar from those assembled. I looked behind me. It seemed like only moments ago a hundred stood behind me. Now there were at least three times that many.

  “It is time to seize the gachupines and take back our land!” he shouted.

  Marina grabbed me, tears flowing down her cheeks. “Did you hear it, Juan! Did you hear it! The padre said we’re free. We’re equal to Spaniards. Our children will go to school; we’ll have jobs, businesses, dignity. We’ll determine who governs us, and thereby we will govern!”

  I stared around at the people. All but the padre’s few amigo conspirators were poor Aztecs and mestizos. Among that laboring class called peons, faces glowed with wonderment.

  “But first we must fight.”

  I wasn’t sure who spoke the words.

  Perhaps they came from me.

  EIGHTY-TWO

  WAR OF INDEPENDENCE,” is how I heard the leaders refer to the rebellion they were starting. That’s also what the Spanish called their war against Napoleon in Spain. And while Father Hidalgo and Allende had been born in the colony and called themselves americanos, both were Spaniards by blood and heritage. So as far as the leaders were concerned, it would be a war of brother against brother.

  But as I thought about it, these men did not consider this rebellion as being against the Spanish people in general but against a small group of greedy men who wore the same spurs I once wore and bloodied everyone else in the colony with them. Allende had insisted that the insurrection be in the name of Ferdinand VII, who was presently a captive of Napoleon. It was wise to use Ferdinand’s name because criollos had much to lose if peons suddenly were the ruling class. By stating that the Spanish king would still rule, it created a sense of stability for criollos.

  My impression was that Allende was sincere about forming a government in the name of the king, but I was just as certain that a tyrannical king was not part of Hidalgo’s concept of government by the people. To the padre, “the people” did not mean only the prescribed few but all people. He also had cleverly portrayed the rebellion as an act to protect the religion that dominated life in the colony.

  In Spain, the great battle against the invaders was being fought by the common people who had taken matters into their own hands after their leaders failed them. Of those who immediately answered the padre’s call to arms, almost all were poor peons—again, an army of the people—and the focus of their hostility was again “foreign” invaders, those who came to the colony for a few years to stuff their pockets and leave behind a wake of poverty and misery, not unlike what the French were doing in Spain.

  Ay! Was there something wrong with me? Was it possible for a man to fight in two wars of independence in such a short space of time? A more important question was whether Señora Fortuna would permit me to survive a second war. Maybe that fickle bitch would decide I had used up too much of the luck she had doled out already.

  The padre ordered our first assault the moment his speech had ended: We were to take Dolores.

  I watched the preparations quietly, with dark forebodings. The padre ordered a predawn roundup of Dolores’s gachupines and a search of their homes for weapons. We emptied the local jail of all prisoners sentenced for minor offenses, mostly political crimes—an indio who refused to pay tribute, a mestizo who insulted a gachupine—and filled it with gachupines, some still in bedclothes, all shocked and angry.

  A small detachment of soldiers was deployed in the town, no more than a dozen men, a unit of the same San Miguel regiment to which Allende belonged. Used to obeying an officer, when Allende and Aldama entered their barracks and told them they were to grab their weapons and supplies and fall in, they did so without question. I wondered if any of them realized they had joined a rebel army and might one day face a firing squad.

  Within a few hours we had seized the town without firing a shot—and achieved the first objective on the long road to independence. I was surprised at how quickly the conspirators moved. The indios, however, seemed surprised by nothing, including the hundreds of crudely manufactured weapons now being passed out. Word of revolution had obviously been sizzling among them.

  I still was not impressed by the padre’s cache of weapons. He had perhaps twenty muskets stored away, but they were old and inferior. As to his wooden cannons, I could only hope I wasn’t near one when it was fired. The only serviceable weapons I saw were the personal weapons of Allende, his criollo amigos, a few local criollo volunteers, the barracks-soldier conscripts, and of course, my own. But a couple dozen well-armed men were not the essentials of a revolution.

  Once the padre’s small supply of lances, slings, and other crude weapons were distributed, most of his “army-of-the-poor” would still be pathetically ill-equipped. Many had no better weapon of war than a kitchen knife or an improvised wooden club.

  When these poor devils charged into synchronized volleys from musketeer firing lines or into cannon shot, I shuddered to imagine their fright, their panic, the bloody casualties they would take.

  True, the revolt leaders expected to seize the San Miguel armory, with which Allende was intimately familiar, and its large stock of arms and munitions, but I doubted the commanders there would simply abandon their weapons, especially when news came that a large force was marching on San Miguel.

  Allende also expected the viceroy’s colonial militia in San Miguel and ultimately those throughout the colony to desert and join the ranks of the rebels. Most of the viceroy’s forces were units composed of gachupines as commanding officers, criollos as lower-ranking officers, and mestizos and other castes as foot soldiers. Indios were exempt from having to serve, but a few did so voluntarily.

  Because criollos universally hated the gachupines, Allende believed that they would flock to the insurrection, bringing with them money, effective weapons, and their own mounts.

  “I hope they get their wish,” I told Marina and Raquel, as people around me excitedly jabbered about the birth of the revolution.

  “You have a funereal face,” Marina chided. “Start smiling or people will think you know some terrible secret.”

  Putting aside my own thoughts on what appeared to be an outbreak of insanity around me, I grinned at her. “I will smile for you.”

  I couldn’t get out of my mind thoughts of the courageous sacrifices I saw all around me. The criollos taking up the fight were risking their lives and everything they owned, all that their families had accumulated over decades. The poor Aztec and other peons, if they lost, the viceroy’s men would burn their fields, rape their women, and starve their children.

  I rode away ahead of the main unit, but I had to keep turning and looking back at the people we called Aztecs and the castes called mestizos. Peons, their hats in their hands, had listened to the passions of a priest. Now they marched, men, women, babes in arms.


  I remembered the war horrors I had seen and heard about, of what a bucket of nails blazing out of the barrel of real cannon did to a column of men, shredding flesh and splintering bone, of what volleys of musket balls did to ranks of men. I thought about war without quarter, to “the knife,” and the bayoneting of wounded men as they lay on the ground and stared up at another human being who was about to stick a long blade in them, murder in cold blood.

  The padre and Allende were not thinking about the horrors of war but of the freedoms that only fighting man to man with the viceroy’s forces and winning could bring. They had hope, courage, and enthusiasm for a better world.

  I thought about the sacrifices that Hidalgo, Allende, Aldama, Raquel, Marina, and others who possessed property and status were making. These brave people had comfortable lives but were willing to risk their lives and everything that their personal worlds had consisted of: homes, fortunes, and the very welfare of their families. That they were putting their own lives on the line to fight for millions of other people told of their supreme courage. The Spanish guerrillas fighting the French also had that kind of courage. I personally risked nothing but a life that only I found any value in possessing; I had no meaningful possessions, family, or even an honorable name.

  I told the padre that I would fight for him, Marina, and Raquel. Now that I watched the faces of the leaders and the indios, their glowing pride and great expectations, I felt envious of them. They had a dream they were willing to fight and die for.

  As we began the march out of the city, the padre and the criollo officers on horseback led the way. Behind them came the “cavalry” of the new army, a troop of men on horses and mules, mostly vaqueros from nearby haciendas who had abandoned their herding of cattle to join the padre’s army, and the few criollos from Dolores who had decided to join. Many of the horsemen were mestizos, although there were a few indios among them. Next came the foot soldiers, almost all Aztecs, hundreds of them, with their machetes, cooking knives, and wooden cannons.