“Unknown Heroes?”: Insurgent “Ringleaders” in Zacatecas, 1810–1813 (English translation) by Hector Sanchez Tagle
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“Unknown Heroes?”: Insurgent “Ringleaders” in Zacatecas, 1810–1813
Héctor Sánchez Tagle
Autonomous University of Zacatecas
Known by the rather pejorative term “cabecillas,” the insurgent commanders came from very varied social backgrounds. Some came from small towns and were of modest origins, while others arose from the rural middle classes or even from the “marginal elite” of the provinces. Most of them appeared suddenly on the public stage and disappeared just as suddenly, some swallowed up by the whirlwind of civil war, others retiring to their places of origin, perhaps with a document of pardon in their pockets.
The “cabecillas” shared certain characteristics that distinguished them from ordinary rebels. They formed a group of leaders that was very difficult to organize and control by what we might call the “national leadership.” They were very quarrelsome and frequently fought among themselves to achieve preeminence and obtain men and resources. At times they disputed with their superiors or subordinates, and some were even wounded or killed in these quarrels. A typical example was Rafael Iriarte, shot by López Rayón, supposedly for treason.
The “cabecillas” represented a very unstable leadership, since they were constantly renewed within their bands and territories or allied themselves with other rebel groups.
The local “cabecillas” generally came from rural environments or small towns. Most were middle-class creoles, although there were also Indians and mestizos. Their occupations reflect their social surroundings well. This is a small representative sample of “cabecillas” scattered throughout the territory of the viceroyalty:
Manuel Navarrete, from Jilotepec, muleteer; Ignacio Santana Osorno, from Tulancingo, farmer; José María Cirilo de Campos, from Guadalajara, small merchant; Juan José Méndez, from Ixtlán near Chapala, weaver; Vicente González, from Zimapán, mine worker; Claudio Marmolejo, from Guadalajara, pharmacy assistant; Ignacio Serna, from Guanajuato, muleteer; José María González, from Sierra Gorda, tailor; the Nájera brothers, from Aguascalientes, farmers.
When they rose in arms, the activities of the “cabecillas” were often much closer to banditry than to revolutionary war, and much of what they collected simply became part of their personal fortune.
José Antonio Sandi played the leading role in a romantic adventure in the midst of civil war. He was a native and resident of Aguascalientes and was 24 years old at the time of his arrest. In his statement, he said he had been a corporal in the Regiment of Dragoons of Nueva Galicia; but when the officers fled, the troops had decided to join the insurgent forces of Rafael Iriarte.
He had served in the rebel armies for five months. He had been in the battles of Santiaguillo, Piñones, and Maguey. Sandi stated that he had been assigned to plunder the property of Felipe Pérez Terán and other Spaniards, but that he had opposed the assignment. He said that in Mazapil he learned that six Spaniards were prisoners, interceded for them, and managed to save Pascual Rivas.
He maintained that he had only been present at the sackings of Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí, but had kept nothing. He had bought some looted items and had not killed anyone.
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The romantic story was told by his beloved, María de Jesús Moreno, a young woman from Fresnillo. According to her testimony, when Iriarte’s insurgent army arrived at that mining town, Captain Sandi became captivated by her and proposed marriage. She fled with him, and for two weeks accompanied him on several missions through the northern part of the intendancy. They then went to Zacatecas, where Sandi left her at the house of her uncle Tomás Martínez, a blacksmith. To her he entrusted the proceeds of his raids and her share of the booty.
Later, Sandi went to Saltillo with Iriarte’s army and returned to Zacatecas with López Rayón’s army. He went south with the latter and was at the Battle of Maguey. Defeated, he returned to Zacatecas to look for her. When he found her, without even getting down from his horse, he told her that everything was lost, that she should forget him, and he left.
The young woman said she knew that Sandi had been in the battles of Fresnillo, Piñones, and Maguey; that she had only seen him plunder in Mazapil, although he told her he had been present at the sackings of San Luis and Zacatecas; and that she did not know whether he had killed anyone.
After the Battle of Maguey, Sandi joined a small band of twelve men commanded by José Manuel Luévano, and with them he wandered for some time in the region of Teocaltiche. Later, Sandi fled to Cañada Honda, where he was arrested by a sergeant from San Luis Potosí while taking refuge in the house of Vicente Martínez, a former comrade in arms. Sandi and Martínez were taken to Aguascalientes, sentenced to death, among other things, as deserters, and executed by firing squad on June 22, 1811.
The insurgent captain José Manuel Luévano, a creole born in Tepezalá and living in Zacatecas, was 36 years old when he was captured in the summer of 1811. He was a farmer by trade. He had joined Rafael Iriarte’s forces in Lagos in October 1810. He had received a commission to recruit a band whose function would be to capture Spaniards.
In carrying out his mission, he came to have thirty-five men under his command, and with them committed several robberies of money and cattle belonging to “gachupines,” meaning peninsular Spaniards. The “cabecilla” Luévano took and sacked the Real de Asientos, went to Saltillo with Iriarte, and on returning was under López Rayón’s orders. While in Zacatecas in April 1811, Luévano handed several Spaniards, including Domingo Vega, over to Víctor Rosales, but Rosales freed them.
When Calleja’s army approached the city, Luévano left with the rebel army. He was at the Battle of Hacienda del Maguey, from which he escaped with a group of twelve men, among them José Antonio Sandi, Juan Villalpando, Luis Caledonio, and his brother-in-law Andrés. They went to Teocaltiche and then dispersed. However, Luévano was captured and executed in Aguascalientes on July 22, 1811. His head was displayed in his native Tepezalá as a warning to potential insurgents.
Another protagonist of a romantic story was Joaquín Cárdenas, a native of Guadalajara and a law student. He studied in Mexico City and became an assistant in the office of the prestigious lawyer Primo de Rivera, one of the leaders of the autonomist city council of the capital in 1808.
In the autumn of 1809, in Mexico City, he met Rafael Iriarte and his family, who were going through a difficult situation. He gained Iriarte’s trust. When Iriarte left for Acámbaro in August 1810, he entrusted his family to Cárdenas. Cárdenas helped the Iriartes reach their father in the Bajío. Cárdenas carried out Iriarte’s errands very willingly because, in reality, he had fallen in love with Iriarte’s daughter, María Antonieta.
Unable to resist her charms any longer, Cárdenas followed her to the Bajío only two weeks after Father Hidalgo’s uprising. Since his future father-in-law had already joined the insurrection, Cárdenas entered it in order to become his aide. In addition to joining him in all his campaigns, Iriarte entrusted him with several delicate missions.
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According to Cárdenas’s statement, he was commissioned to enter Zacatecas under a flag of truce to negotiate with the rebel authorities of the city for the entry of Iriarte and his army. In the meeting with the city authorities, Cárdenas offered that the Spaniards should not fear the arrival of the insurgents because only criminals would be pursued.
This bothered Iriarte, because leniency toward peninsular Spaniards was contrary to the insurgents’ ideas, and because Iriarte considered the “gachupines” the greatest enemies of the Spanish empire and of King Ferdinand VII, since they “wanted to hand the Kingdom over to France.”
When Iriarte was captured in Saltillo by López Rayón, Cárdenas tried to help him escape but failed. Cárdenas abandoned the insurgent army and went to Mexico City, where, he said, he would request a pardon. On the way, he could not avoid passing through Pinos, where Iriarte’s family and his beloved María Antonieta had taken refuge. There he was captured and sent to San Luis Potosí, where he was tried on accusations including having confiscated Spaniards’ property in Jerez and having been Iriarte’s spy. He was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad in San Luis Potosí on April 19, 1811.
The most important Zacatecan “cabecilla” was undoubtedly Víctor Rosales. He acted both inside and outside the intendancy of Zacatecas. When the local insurgent movement declined, he, together with his brother Juan, moved to the south of the viceroyalty, where he continued his rebel activities until 1817, while Juan remained in the fight until 1820. Here we present some aspects of the public life of Víctor Rosales as developed in Zacatecas.
Rosales was a middle-class creole born in the capital of the intendancy in 1776. He was a mining worker and owner of a small bakery. When the insurgency broke out, he was serving on the city council of Zacatecas, which he had done since 1808, and he was assigned to the administration of the public granary. He left the city, leaving an unsettled account of two thousand pesos, which later councils would demand from him.
Apparently, he went to Guanajuato and there joined Father Hidalgo’s movement in the forces of Rafael Iriarte. He entered the city of Zacatecas with Iriarte in early November 1810 and accompanied him to San Luis Potosí. He marched to Saltillo with Father Hidalgo and returned to Zacatecas as one of López Rayón’s lieutenants.
When General Calleja approached the city, López Rayón left Rosales in charge of arms with a small garrison and with the instruction that, if he could not fight, he should abandon the city.
Instead, Rosales surrendered the city, while accepting the pardon offered by Calleja. In fact, Rosales acted as an intermediary so that other insurgents who had remained with him could obtain it as well. Since the civil war continued actively in the intendancy of Zacatecas, particularly in the region of the Cañones, Rosales and his brother Juan were arrested and accused of conspiring so that the insurgents would retake the capital. Although no evidence was provided to prove their participation in the conspiracy, he was kept under arrest.
Shortly afterward, a supposed courier named José Antonio Nieva was detained. He was allegedly the link between the insurgents and the prisoner Rosales. To conduct the proceedings in the case, several people close to Rosales were arrested, all supposedly implicated in the “conspiracy.”
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Rosales’s correspondence was seized, but no letter was found connecting him with the insurgents of the Cañones. What was found, among other documents, was the pardon granted to him by General Calleja and the instructions López Rayón had left him when he abandoned the city of Zacatecas. The house of Vicente Camacho, a supposed accomplice of Rosales, was also searched, but no evidence of conspiracy was found.
In January 1812, Rosales submitted a request to the Security and Requisition Board of the city of Zacatecas asking that, in view of his very fragile health after several months of imprisonment, he be released on bond. The request was denied, although some measures were taken, such as allowing a family member to assist him inside the prison, so his health might improve. Nevertheless, two months later the Rosales brothers were released by order of José de Peón Valdés, interim intendant.
Later, in May 1812, the Rosales brothers disappeared from the city of Zacatecas. The Security Board therefore began inquiries to find their whereabouts, since there was suspicion that they had “joined the insurgent bands wandering around Huejúcar and Juchipila.” Among others, the wives of both men, their mother, Fray José Rosales, their brother and a conventual in Aguascalientes, and the Juanino friar Manuel Sánchez, a friend of theirs, were questioned.
The only thing that became clear was that the Rosales brothers had left together on May 12 with a pass from José María Joaristi, but no one knew their destination. In reality, they had gone to Michoacán and joined the forces of their former leader Ignacio López Rayón. News of Víctor Rosales was heard again in October 1812, when, according to commander José de la Cruz, he had participated in an insurgent attack on Uruapan.
In March of the following year, Rosales was already near the intendancy of Zacatecas and exploring the possibility of an insurgent invasion. According to a report by Intendant Irisarri, Rosales had entered the intendancy with a force that ranged between three hundred and four hundred men. However, he was soon repelled.
After several attempts, Rosales finally managed to penetrate the intendancy of Zacatecas and decided to launch an attack on its capital on September 25, 1813. He believed he would find support from the population and trusted that he could hold the city. It was not so. Rosales’s attack was reduced to a raid of a few hours in which he was unable to dislodge either the Battalion or the Patriots from their barracks. There were six dead on the insurgent side and one on the side of the defenders.
The insurgents were pursued by the counterinsurgent cavalry and had another encounter in which, according to Irisarri’s report, seventeen rebels died. A rumor spread that Rosales’s son, Timoteo, only eleven years old, had been present in the skirmish and had been captured. This rumor reached Commander José de la Cruz, who requested reports on the matter. However, Irisarri made no mention of the incident in his following reports.
After this raid, Rosales no longer approached the capital of the intendancy of Zacatecas. In fact, as far as the city of Zacatecas is concerned, we may say that this action closed the military phase of the insurgency there.
One of the first insurgent “cabecillas” to rise in arms in the region of the Cañones, and one of the first captured by counterinsurgent forces, was José Daniel Camarena. Although he gained great regional notoriety in his short career as a rebel leader, little is known of him except what is provided by his judicial proceeding of February 1811.
Camarena was originally from and a resident of Nochistlán and was 31 years old when he was tried. He came from a modest family. He operated between the city of Zacatecas and the city of Guadalajara from late 1810 to early 1811. He knew well the terrain and the Indian towns of northern Nueva Galicia and southwestern Zacatecas. He joined Rafael Iriarte’s ranks almost from the beginning of the insurrection and was commissioned to spread rebellion in the Cañones of Juchipila and Tlaltenango.
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In his judicial statement, Camarena admitted having carried out, by order of Hidalgo, extensive campaigns of confiscation of Europeans’ property in Nochistlán, Juchipila, Jalpa, and other towns of the Cañones. In Juchipila he seized the wealth of Clemente Miranda and delivered it to Father Hidalgo.
In October, he managed to capture Francisco Rendón, intendant of Zacatecas, when Rendón was trying to flee toward Guadalajara. He confiscated jewelry, money, and clothing from him. After holding him captive for several weeks and once the insurgents had taken Guadalajara, he delivered him to Father Hidalgo in that city.
Some of the trunks of clothing seized from the intendant he gave to the priest of Jalpa. He stated that nothing had remained in his possession; that the jewels he seized from Intendant Rendón he gave to his superiors; and that later, in Guadalajara, he saw them being used by José María Chico and Mariano Abasolo. He saw that Marroquín’s wife, known as “La Fina,” wore clothing confiscated from the intendant.
When suspected of having taken part in the mass killing of Spaniards ordered by Father Hidalgo and Agustín Marroquín in Guadalajara, Camarena confessed that he had been present at some executions, but that he had not participated in any of them.
Camarena is a good example of the “cabecilla” who sought to enrich himself. Indeed, one witness stated that he had not squandered the goods he had seized, but had kept them. Among these were 1,500 pesos in cash, a small shop in the town of Tabasco valued at approximately 1,000 pesos, two ranches in Juchipila, a fully equipped mule train, a carriage with six mules, 111 head of cattle, a flock of goats, and a good quantity of silverware and fine cloth.
According to the statement of Ignacio Durán, several residents of Nochistlán commissioned him to present a complaint before the Count of Santiago de la Laguna because of the outrages and robberies committed by Camarena in that town. The Count, for his part, commissioned him to look for goods confiscated and supposedly hidden by Camarena. However, Durán was only able to find grain valued at one thousand pesos and some mules.
Finally, Camarena participated in the Battle of Puente de Calderón in January 1811. After the defeat, he fled toward the Cañones, but was captured on February 18 in the town of Jalpa in the company of José Antonio Durán, Pablo María, José Sandoval, and others.
He stated that he did not resist arrest because he had gone to Jalpa to request a pardon. His captor was Antonio Garcilazo, who transferred him to Lagos, where the general headquarters of Calleja’s army was located. After a summary trial, he was shot in the main plaza of Lagos on February 22, 1811.
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The case of Father Juan Pablo Calvillo is better known. He was parish priest of Colotlán at the moment of Father Hidalgo’s insurrection and soon led the rebellion of the Indian towns of the Cañones. The soldiers of the Company of Colotlán, who had gone to Zacatecas after being summoned by the Count of Santiago de la Laguna, rebelled, expelled their officers, and joined Father Calvillo.
He participated in Iriarte’s campaigns and was with him in Zacatecas. Unlike Iriarte, Calvillo went to Guadalajara and was at the Battle of Puente de Calderón. When Father Hidalgo marched to Saltillo, Calvillo returned to the Cañones, where he coordinated some insurgent bands of the region.
Many of the insurgents scattered after the Battle of Hacienda del Maguey joined Calvillo in Teocaltiche. During the insurgent campaign that later developed in the Cañones, apparently Calvillo came into conflict with the “cabecillas” of the region, mainly Rafael López de Oropeza, because he opposed the banditry that many of them practiced.
In July 1811, Calvillo retired to the Hacienda de la Labor, where he stayed at the house of José María de Medina, and processed his pardon before Felipe Pérez de Terán, commander of arms of Aguascalientes. There he received an insulting letter from the “cabecilla” López de Oropeza. From that point on, there is no news of Father Calvillo’s insurgent activities.
It is unfortunate that we know so little about the life of Rafael Iriarte, undoubtedly the insurgent leader of greatest influence in the intendancy of Zacatecas. Iriarte was a creole born in San Luis Potosí and must have been a little over forty years old at the start of the insurrection. He was a student at the Seminary of Guadalajara, but did not complete his studies. For some time he worked at the Hacienda de Bledos and performed military service, as a corporal, in the Royal Brigade of San Luis Potosí, commanded by General Calleja.
During this period he acquired the nickname “Cabo Leyton,” by which he was known in the insurgent ranks. He may have been involved in the conspiracies of the Bajío, since at that time he lived in Acámbaro, and may have known Father Hidalgo.
Rafael Iriarte was one of the first insurgent “cabecillas” to receive a commission from Hidalgo. His mission was to take Aguascalientes, which he did at the end of October 1810. He became the principal insurgent figure in Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí between November 1810 and January 1811.
He suffered a serious defeat near Fresnillo at the end of December 1810. He had serious disagreements with Allende, when Allende had become commander of the insurgent armies, partly, it was said, because Iriarte had not gone with his army to the Battle of Puente de Calderón.
He was the only insurgent leader who managed to escape at Acatita de Baján, the ambush where the principal rebel leaders, including Hidalgo, were captured in March 1811. This raised suspicion of treason. After presenting himself voluntarily in the camp of López Rayón, commander of what remained of the insurgent army, he was arrested and executed, supposedly in compliance with a previous order from Allende himself.
There were many other insurgent leaders who would fall into the category of “cabecillas,” such as Antonio Abad de Miramontes, Gregorio Márquez Toral, the bachelor Ignacio García Ramos, Rafael López de Oropeza, José María Flores Alatorre, and José María Hermosillo. All of them led insurgent bands in the region of the Cañones, but unfortunately they remain almost anonymous.
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Nevertheless, the sample of “cabecillas” presented here can give a good idea of the insurgent military leadership in the intendancy of Zacatecas. These rebel chiefs played a role of mediation between the popular combatants and the national leadership of the movement, which was predominantly creole. Apparently, they had interests of their own that distinguished them both from their subordinates and from their superiors. They could even come into conflict with them.
The “cabecillas” were a stratum made up of bold and unpredictable men, always prone to indiscipline, who bore on their backs all the risks of the hazardous guerrilla struggle.
The revolutionary whirlwind unleashed historical forces and tendencies that had lain latent for centuries of colonial domination. When this system faced a severe crisis in the second decade of the nineteenth century, the most disadvantaged masses emerged onto the political stage and fought to improve their situation.
Thus developed a conflict that confronted the dispossessed with the property-owning classes. It cannot be said, however, that the former constituted or were led by a homogeneous social group. In reality, they did not manage to articulate their own political discourse and became intertwined with the ideological position of creolism, which challenged the privileges of the peninsular Spaniards and its own exclusion from colonial political power.
If anything characterized the insurgent rebels and their sympathizers, it was their great heterogeneity, which was undoubtedly a reflection of the complex social, cultural, and ethnic structure of New Spain. From there arose one of the strengths of the insurgent movement, since it became the crucible that integrated all kinds of marginalized people and united them in pursuit of an ideal, without distinction of race, birth, or legal status.
In short, the insurgents and their sympathizers constituted a group of men whose potential came from their great diversity. All of them faced the dilemma of rebelling in order to take their own destiny into their hands, or allowing others, the same people as always, to continue determining it for them.
For perhaps the only time in their lives, they were in a position to imagine and build a new world, different from the one known until then. However, reality turned out to be much harsher to transform, and little by little it imposed itself upon them. Even so, these men were, if only for a moment, the “subjects of history.”
Source: Héctor Sánchez Tagle, “¿Héroes desconocidos?: ‘Cabecillas’ insurgentes en Zacatecas, 1810–1813,” in Memoria XVIII Encuentro Nacional de Investigadores del Pensamiento Novohispano, Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, 2005, 452–458.
Additional tags: José Antonio Sandi, María de Jesús Moreno, Fresnillo, Rafael Iriarte, Aguascalientes, Regiment of Dragoons of Nueva Galicia, Santiaguillo, Piñones, Maguey, Mazapil, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Pascual Rivas, Felipe Pérez Terán, Saltillo, López Rayón, Teocaltiche, José Manuel Luévano, Cañada Honda, Vicente Martínez, José Antonio Durán, Pablo María, José Sandoval, José Daniel Camarena, Jalpa, Lagos, Calleja, Nochistlán, Juchipila, Tlaltenango, Guadalajara, Puente de Calderón, Víctor Rosales, Juan Rosales, San Luis Potosí, Acámbaro, Guanajuato, Hidalgo, Allende, Saltillo, Pinos, Joaquín Cárdenas, María Antonieta Iriarte, Primo de Rivera, Real de Asientos, Domingo Vega, Tepezalá, Juan Villalpando, Luis Caledonio, Andrés Luévano, José Antonio Nieva, Vicente Camacho, José de Peón Valdés, José María Joaristi, Michoacán, Uruapan, Santiago de Irisarri, José de la Cruz, Timoteo Rosales, José Daniel Camarena, Francisco Rendón, Clemente Miranda, Father Hidalgo, José María Chico, Mariano Abasolo, Agustín Marroquín, La Fina, Ignacio Durán, Count of Santiago de la Laguna, Antonio Garcilazo, Juan Pablo Calvillo, Colotlán, Company of Colotlán, Hacienda de la Labor, José María de Medina, Felipe Pérez de Terán, Rafael López de Oropeza, Antonio Abad de Miramontes, Gregorio Márquez Toral, Ignacio García Ramos, José María Flores Alatorre, José María Hermosillo, Nueva Galicia, Nueva España, Cañones de Juchipila, Cañones de Tlaltenango
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