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Mexico Travel :: The Colonial States

State of Guanajuato

The earliest developed society in Guanajuato was the Chupicuaro Culture that lasted from 500 BC to AD 200. The Chupicuaro buried their dead with elaborate offerings of pottery, figurines and dogs (perhaps to guide the dead to the underworld). After AD 1400, Tarascans from Michoacan conquered the territory and made it part of their empire. The first Spaniard to explore Guanajuato was the conquistador, Cristobal de Olid, who in 1522 passed through on his way to the Pacific. Later, Spanish expeditions and Augustinian friars entered the state and founded settlements in Acambaro and Apaseo.

They were accompanied by Otomi Indians, early converts to Christianity, who helped populate new Spanish towns like Celaya and Salamanca. In 1553, the great silver and gold mines of Guanajuato were discovered and this discovery led to the rapid creation of Spanish presidios, haciendas, ranches and roads in the state. The Chichimecs attacked the colonizers but were gradually pushed back. In 1589, the Colegio de la Purisima was founded by the Jesuits and soon Guanajuato became a center of the missionary effort. In the early 19th century, Guanajuato, San Miguel and Dolores were centers of the anti-Spanish conspiracy led by Miguel Hidalgo, Ignacio Allende, the Aldama brothers and Mariano Abasolo.

Early on September 16, 1810, Hidalgo, a radical priest, gave the Grito de Dolores—the 'shout' for the beginning of the rebellion—in the little town of Dolores. His little band of Indian and mestizo followers marched south, picking up recruits along the way, and captured and pillaged San Miguel that same night. In less than two weeks, Hidalgo had a ragged but enthusiastic army of 25,000 behind him and was at the gates to Guanajuato. He demanded the surrender of the Spanish administration and of the wealthy citizenry barricaded in the fortified Alhondiga de Granaditas (the public granary). The Spanish refused and, after hours of bloody assaults, a rebel named Pipila set fire to the gates and the insurgents poured in behind him. Hundreds of Spaniards were massacred and the town was sacked, extinguishing any hope of a peaceful settlement and causing wealthy Mexicans to side with the colonial administration. Hidalgo, Allende and other rebel leaders were finally captured and executed in Coahuila; for the next ten years, their severed heads were displayed on poles over the Alhondiga. In 1858, Benito Juarez, then head of the Supreme Court, went to Guanajuato and declared himself President, a right granted him by the Constitution. This act led to the outbreak of the liberal-conservative war of the late 1850s. Perhaps the bloodiest battle in Mexican history occurred outside Celaya in April 1915, when in wave after wave of suicidal cavalry charges, Villa's troops threw themselves against the barbed wire and entrenched soldiers of Obregon's position, only to be finally defeated.

Leon was a center of the Cristero rebellion in 1926 and 1927, and in 1937, the Union Nacional Sinarquista, a militant, rightist Catholic party, was founded there. Today, the state is one of the manufacturing centers of Mexico; Irapuato and Salamanca have heavy industries and Leon is the shoe-making capital of the world.

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