Do You Know Your Mexican History?

True or False

An Austrian Prince, Maximillian ruled Mexico for a time in the 1800s?

Read on to find out…

For hundreds of years, relatives and friends of Hernán Cortés ruled the area around Oaxaca City. Cortés was the successful explorer/conquerer (remember him from grade school history?) who worked for the Spanish Empire. He conquered the Aztecs because the very powerful Aztec King believed that the Europeans were gods. Cortés defeated their army though he was outnumbered by thousands. The Aztecs had been ruling over central Mexico and their influence was evident over the declining Zapotec empire. So, when Cortés started settling areas of Mexico with Spanish implants, the area of Oaxaca was included in that territory. In fact, Cortés loved the state of Oaxaca and wanted it for himself.

Early on, he staked out the Valley of Oaxaca as his personal domain. Time and again during the 1520s he ordered the settlers evacuated from the City (an area called by the indigenous folks, Huaxyacac) , only to find a year of two later that they had returned. During Cortés’s absence on an expedition to Honduras, the settlers petitioned for and received a charter from King Carlos V for their town, which they christened Antequera after the old Roman city in Spain. Determined not to be out maneuvered, Cortés personally went to Spain to plead his case and returned triumphant with the royal title of Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca. This included a grant of hundreds of thousands of acres and rights to the labor of thousands of indigenous subjects in a grand checkerboard domain stretching from the Valley of Mexico to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Cortés’s lands surrounded the settlers’ entire town of Antequera. In desperation, the townspeople petitioned the queen of Spain for land on which to grow vegetables: They were granted a one-league square in 1532, now the core of the modern city of Oaxaca. For hundreds of years, Cortés’s descendants reigned; the townspeople prospered, the church grew fat, and the natives toiled—in corn, cattle, cane, and cochineal (that famous beetle that makes a beautiful red dye…see previous post).

In contrast to its neighbors in the state of Guerrero, conservative Oaxaca was a grudging player in the 1810-1821 War of Independence. But as the subsequent republican tide swept the country, local fervor produced a new state constitution, including a state legislature and governmental departments, such as public instruction and the Institute of Arts and Sciences.

By the 1850s, times had changed. Oaxacans were leading a new national struggle. Benito Juárez (pictured above), a pure Zapotec native Mexican, was rallying liberal forces in the Civil War of the Reforms against the oligarchy that had replaced the colonial rule. Born in Guelatao, a mountain village north of the Valley of Oaxaca, Juárez at age 12 was an orphan sheepherder (reminds me of St. Patrick at this stage in his life). A Catholic priest, struck by the boy’s intelligence, brought him to the city as a servant and taught him Spanish in preparation for the priesthood.

Instead, Benito became a lawyer. He hung out his shingle in Oaxaca, as a defender of the poor. He then became state legislator, governor, chief justice, and finally the president of Mexico. In his honor, the city’s official name was again changed—to Oaxaca de Juárez—in 1872.

In 1861, after winning the 3-year civil war, Juárez’s Reformista forces had their victory snatched away. France, taking advantage of the preoccupation of the US with its own civil war, invaded Mexico and installed an Austrian Hapsburg prince as Emperor Maximilian of Mexico.
It took Juárez 5 years to prevail against old Max and his conservative Mexican backers.

Although Maximilian and Juárez paradoxically shared many of the same liberal ideas, Juárez had Maximilian executed after his defeat and capture in 1867…(that’s the way they took care of those royal twits back in the old days) Juárez bathed Mexico in enlightenment as he promulgated his Laws of the Reform (which remain essentially in force). Although the country rewarded him with reelection, he died of exhaustion in 1871.

Credit for most of this…goes to the Moon Handbook on Oaxaca, author Bruce Whipperman.