Mexico's early push for racial equality after independence sparked fierce conflicts between elites and ordinary citizens, ultimately derailing the country's first experiment with representative government.
Mexico's independence revolution was also a rebellion against colonial racism. In independent Mexico, racial distinctions were no longer legal, and all males, regardless of race or income, could vote. The new egalitarianism frightened the wealthiest people in Mexico, and they fought to regain their power. Many poor people of different racial backgrounds voted as a way to demonstrate their new equality. Years of conflict eventually brought Afro-Mexican Vicente Guerrero to the presidency. However, the struggle between the advocates of equality and the people who wanted to rebuild hierarchy was so heated that it ended up derailing representative government in Mexico.
Speaker: Peter Guardino
Department of History, Indiana University
Guardino's work focuses on Mexico's impoverished majorities in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. He is interested in social movements, state formation, nationalism and popular political culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico. He teaches graduate courses on colonial history, nationalism, and social movements as well as a variety of undergraduate courses on Mexico, modern and colonial Latin America, world history, and war