O Bells of San Blas (part 1.5)

We left San Blas at the turn of the 19th century as a prosperous military port, the final stronghold in the north for the Spanish Empire, and the first point of entry in the Americas for the luxurious items coming from the Philippines; in other words, a town earmarked for glory. So what happened?

Part of the reasons that explain the decay of San Blas in the 19th century to the sad “belltower” depicted by Longfellow start with the conflict that turned the country upside down and whose economic consequences would last until the 1870’s: the Mexican Revolution of Independence. (Why not War of Independence? Yet another debate point)

The thriving Spanish Viceroyalties in the Americas were dependent on an economic model in which they exported precious metals to the Spanish metropolis in exchange for finished goods. When the Industrial Revolution began, the Americas were not able to produce any finished goods, which had taken the prime spot as wealth generators. Therefore, the Spanish dominions started to get impoverished, with silver and gold from the mines in Guanajuato and Potosí now of growing irrelevance against the iron and coal required by factories.

Also, the ports of the Spanish crown in the Americas were only allowed to engage in trade with Spain proper, so there was no way that the ever wealthier ports in the new republic of the United States could trade with their closest neighbor. This mix of economic decay led to the discontent which in turn caused the first uprising of the Revolution on September 16th, 1810, by Miguel Hidalgo, an influential priest who had been the headmaster of the Seminary of Morelia, perhaps the most important higher education institution in Western Mexico.

When the tide of war (and the sheer weight of a rebellion that turned out to be an outright revolution) drove Hidalgo’s troops to siege the second city of the New Spain, Guadalajara, a very young priest (only 29 years old) who was the priest of a minor town in the mountainside of Jalisco, Fr. José María Mercado, went to Hidalgo and asked for permission to spread the cause of independence to San Blas. Hidalgo accepted and Mercado set course, first, to his old curate of Ahualulco, where he gathered 50 men, and, on December 1st, 1810, after taking Tepic with no resistance and growing his army up to more than 1,000 men, he asked (and got) the surrender of the Spanish garrison of San Blas. San Blas, was, after less than 50 years after its foundation, the most important port of the embryonic Mexican state.

Alas, this was not to last…