May the peoples of Anáhuac reflect on, confront, and apply these truths, may they look attentively at the terrifying aspect that the Republic presents in all its affairs; confidence has fled, and peace is about to flee a country that seeks it and roots out all of its supports. Already Europe, which had admired us, announces our downfall; and the complexity and clashes of our affairs and the scorn in which the laws are seen must hasten it. Our independence is threatened, our liberty abused, our property badly secured, and we sleep in a fatal confidence! But there is still time to save the patria that appeals forcefully to us. Let us not feign ignorance because time flies, and if we do not make the most vehement efforts and all the sacrifices it demands of us, a piercing regret will torment us much more than the loss of the precious goods of which we are going to be stripped.
[print edition page 100]
| LORENZO DE ZAVALA |
Lorenzo de Zavala (1788–1836), a politician and historian, was born in Yucatán. He studied in the city of Mérida at the seminary of San Ildefonso. He became active in revolutionary politics, and in 1814 he was imprisoned by the Spanish authorities. Once released, Zavala returned to Yucatán, where he edited a newspaper. He was elected deputy for Yucatán to the Spanish Cortes1 in 1820 and took his seat in 1821.
However, he promptly returned to Mexico, where the military leader (and later emperor) Agustín de Iturbide (1783–1824) had won independence for Mexico after entering Mexico City with his troops on September 27, 1821. Zavala was a member of the first constituent congress, in 1822, and was elected senator in 1825. He was active in the founding of the Lodge of York in Mexico. In 1827 Zavala was elected governor of the state of Mexico. In the 1828 election the yorkino candidate, General Vicente Guerrero (1782–1831), lost the election. Nevertheless, Zavala and others maneuvered to seat Guerrero in the presidential chair, and subsequently Guerrero appointed Zavala as a minister in his cabinet. When an opposing faction deposed Guerrero in 1830, Zavala went into exile in the United States and Europe. While in exile he wrote Ensayo histórico de las revoluciones de México, desde 1808 hasta 1830. A changing political situation allowed him to return to Mexico and reassume his office as governor in 1833.
Zavala worked with the reformist administration of Gómez Farías, and when the government was toppled at the end of 1833 went again into exile in Europe. Later, he returned to America and went to Texas, where he had land grants. There he sided with the colonists and supported Texas’s independence from
[print edition page 101]
Mexico. He signed the Texas declaration of independence and was elected vice president in 1836.
We present the introduction and conclusion of Zavala’s Ensayo histórico as well as his individual vote in Congress regarding the separation of Guatemala from Mexico.
[print edition page 102]
| 1 | Introduction to Historical Essay on the Mexican Revolutions from 1808 to 1830 * |
In undertaking the publication of Ensayo histórico de la últimas revoluciones de México, I intend to elucidate the character, customs, and different situation of the people involved rather than to create weary narratives in which, as Mr. Sismondi says so well, one encounters only a repetition of the same acts of cruelty, evil deeds, and baseness that fatigue the spirit, cause boredom in the reader, and, in a certain way, degrade the man who spends a large amount of time going over the horrors and havoc of parties and factions. “The history of peoples,” says this same writer, “commences only with the beginning of life, with the spirit that animates nations.” As the time prior to the events of 1808 is a period of silence, sleepiness, and monotony, with the exception of some glimmers that appear from time to time breathing liberty, the interesting history of Mexico truly commences only in that memorable year. But it is more advisable that readers, in order to begin reading this Ensayo histórico with understanding, be instructed about the customs of the inhabitants and of their condition before the referenced epoch.
The discovery of the Americas that Christopher Columbus made at the end of the fifteenth century and the conquest of those regions carried out a short time later are among those events that, to a large degree, have contributed to changing the political course of societies. My goal is not to speak of the influence these events have exercised on Europe, but rather of the course that political matters in the ancient empire of the Aztecs have taken, not in the time immediately subsequent to the conquest, regarding which various Spanish and foreign scholars have already written. In their writings, one can encounter repeated facts that will confirm those that form the picture I am going to present to my readers and which, perhaps, will shed more light on important political
[print edition page 103]
questions which will doubtless recur successively in the course of the coming times. Is it not true that the heterogeneity of the elements that have made up European societies in different epochs has entered into the calculations and measures of their legislators and leaders in organizing their progress? The history of the middle age, of this period of grand vices and heroic virtues, of ignorance, energy, and universal upheaval, teaching statesmen what the basic parts that make up the nations they governed have been, showed them at the same time the different sources that are the basis of the rights or the aspirations of each class, of each hierarchy, of each family. In Spanish America, where there were no other foreign invaders, nor that tumultuous invasion of semisavage nations, we must assume that the conquistador laid down the law without conditions, and peaceably used the right of force with no restrictions except those to which he would subject himself.
The historians of the conquest of Mexico have given to their accounts an air of exaggeration that has been the origin of many ridiculous fables and amusing romances. The most judicious writers have not been able to protect themselves from giving credit to some entirely false and even absurd facts, which has led them into errors of great consequence. We can affirm that no history has been more adorned with illusions, hyper-bole, romantic stories, and episodes than that of those far-off lands, the distance and isolation in which the policy of the Spanish government maintained them causing almost the same results as those the heroic times produced. Cortés himself, in his letters to Carlos V, paints pictures so flattering, so poetic and extraordinary of what he had seen and conquered with his fearless companions, that it was difficult not to believe oneself transported to a new world, to a land similar to and even superior to the imaginary Atlantis, or to those lands of gold, incense, and aromas of which Eastern writers speak. Magnificent palaces covered with gold and silver; kings and emperors richer than the most powerful potentates of Europe; temples comparable to those of ancient Greece; rivers that carried grains of the most precious metals and emeralds and diamonds instead of stones; extraordinary birds, monstrous quadrupeds; men of different physiognomy due to their features, color, lack of beard, and bristly hair; climates in which one breathes a fiery atmosphere or in which a perpetual spring