Mexico's war of independence began with the Grito de Dolores
On this day · 16 September 1810
Before dawn on September 16, 1810, a small-town priest rang his church bell and called Mexico to revolt against three centuries of Spanish rule.
In the pre-dawn hours of September 16, 1810, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the parish priest of the town of Dolores, rang his church bells as if summoning his congregation to Mass. Instead, flanked by the conspirators Ignacio Allende and Juan Aldama, he urged the assembled crowd to take up arms against Spanish colonial authority.
The plot had been betrayed days earlier, so Hidalgo acted before he could be arrested. His call, the Grito de Dolores (“Cry of Dolores”), demanded an end to roughly 300 years of Spanish rule, alongside land reform and racial equality. No transcript survives; scholars reconstruct the words almost as many ways as there are historians.
Thousands of Indigenous and mixed-race followers rallied behind a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe and marched toward Mexico City.
Hidalgo was captured and executed in 1811, and full independence came only in 1821. Yet his uprising is remembered as the spark, and September 16 is celebrated each year as Mexico’s Independence Day.
Sources & references
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