The Contributions of Mexico's First Black Indian President, Vicente Guerrero

Abstract

Theodore G. Vincent * This article surveys the contributions to the political foundations of Mexico by the general and president Vicente Guerrero, 1781-1831. Guerrero was of African, Indian, and Spanish heritage, and he was raised in a colonial setting in which anyone African in Mexico was subjected by the Spaniards to special legal disadvantages, including the stipulation that only Africans could be made slaves. Guerrero's life shows a consistent struggle to achieve equal rights for Afro-Mexicans, and also for those on the Indigenous side of his family. Guerrero is called "the consumator of independence" for his role as commander in chief of the Mexican army during the last years of the 1810-1821 war with Spain; and he is called the Mexican "Abraham Lincoln" for issuing his country's presidential slavery abolition proclamation. He is also credited with creating a grass roots-oriented political tradition. A century after Guerrero's 1810 struggle for independence, there came the 1910 Mexican social revolution associated with Emiliano Zapata, for which Guerrero was the posthumous leader emeritus; according to historian Rafael Ramos Pedrueza, who declares in his book, Vicente Guerrero: Precursor del Socialismo, that Guerrero was "the brother of the workers--of the thought and the action of that fertile laboring class ... (for whom) his sturdy Sureno machete had been flashed many a time." Guerrero was at the root of the 1910 struggle because "he was the precursor of the agrarianism that redistributes the land to the enslaved peasant." Guerrero would also appear t o have a link with the Zapatista rebels of the 1990s in Chiapas, who claim to struggle for the goals illuminated in 1910. (1) For his accomplishments Guerrero has a state in his name, one of only four citizens so honored in Mexico. And yet biographical study of Guerrero is scant. In this article we will survey his contributions in two parts; one, the specific life and times of Guerrero, and then the expression of his ideas carried forward by his voluminously published literary grandson Vicente Riva Palacio after Guerrero's tragic assassination in 1831. Guerrero's African root appears to have come mostly from the future president's father Pedro, who was in the almost entirely Afro-Mexican profession of mule driver. Vicente's mother Guadalupe was known for her light complexion. Vicente's political career appears to have started with his baptism. He was born in a period of quiet resistance to Spain's caste system: its occupational discriminations and racially different tax rates, military obligations, degrees of punishment for criminal offenses, etc. Acts of resistance to caste included poor record keeping. For instance, the priest of Guerrero's town of Tixtla broke caste rules and omitted racial designations on baptism certificates during the year of Vicente's birth. A year after Vicente's birth Father Saucedo Caballero was replaced in Tixtla by a priest who reinstated the required racial labeling on new baby records. In addition to priests who failed to record race, there was resistance against the Spanish racial census takers in this period. In the 1791-179 3 census, for instance, there were villages where Indigenous, Blacks and mixes thereof banded together to intimidate the census taker into declaring everyone "Spanish," thus avoiding taxes, military duty, etc. Some villagers hid when the head counter arrived, as reflected in the census' remarkably high number of Afro-Mexican "widows." (2) Vicente's father Pedro Guerrero was an intense opponent of slavery. One of the customers on Pedro's mule runs was Gabriel Yermo, who owned one of the biggest slave plantations in Mexico. In 1790 Yermo celebrated the birth of his first child by freeing all of his more than 400 slaves. Pedro Guerrero was elated. Apparently, he made such a fuss over the matter that some early biographers of President Guerrero reported that Yermo had freed Pedro. …