Mexico's founding father was a rule-breaking priest who taught villagers to farm silkworms
Miguel Hidalgo was a priest who read banned French philosophy, questioned papal power and clerical celibacy, and fathered several children. In Dolores he set up brickworks and vineyards for the poor until Spanish officials shut them down. On 16 September 1810 his call to revolt launched Mexico's war of independence.
Born on 8 May 1753 to a criollo hacienda manager in Michoacán, Hidalgo studied with the Jesuits in Valladolid until their expulsion in 1767, then trained for the priesthood. Classmates called him the Fox for his cleverness. Besides the usual Latin and logic, he learned indigenous languages such as Nahuatl and Purépecha, plus French and Italian, rare in Mexico then. French gave him access to Enlightenment writings that the Church there forbade.
Ordained at 25 in 1778, he taught at the Colegio de San Nicolás Obispo and rose to become its head in 1790, only to be ousted in 1792 for reshaping traditional teaching and for irregular handling of funds. He challenged the absolute authority of the Spanish king, doubted the virgin birth, owned three haciendas and had children with several women. The Inquisition examined him but did not convict. As parish priest he opened his house to indigenous people and mestizos as well as criollos.
In Dolores from 1803 he left most church duties to a vicar and turned to economics. He promoted beekeeping, silkworms and grape growing, and set up workshops making bricks, pottery and leather, aiming to make local people self-reliant. Colonial rules protecting Spanish producers banned such competition, and he was ordered to stop. When drought caused famine in 1807 and 1808, merchants held back stored grain to push up prices, and his protests got nowhere.
Napoleon's seizure of Spain unsettled the colony, and a conspiracy in Querétaro recruited him. Fearing arrest, he had eighty prisoners released on the night of 15 September 1810 and at Mass the next morning urged his parishioners to rise, nominally in the name of the captive King Ferdinand VII. Estimates of his peasant army range from about 40,000 to nearly 90,000. It came close to Mexico City but, poorly trained and armed, was beaten at Calderón Bridge. Betrayed while fleeing north, Hidalgo was executed on 30 July 1811.
Source: Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla
