Towards a Social History of Insurgent Violence: The Hatred of gachupines

The rebels’ justification discourse was built based on a triad: respect of monarchical dominion, defense of religion, and hatred of Gachupines / defense of the fatherland. The latter element distinguished the rebellion, since the royalists could not turn to it. Moreover, it was a concrete feeling that turned a specific group into the scapegoat for every misfortune in the world, as Furet would say. In this way, a convenient enemy was created, an enemy to blame, to fight, and who allowed the construction of an effective defensive ideology that would lay the foundations for the incipient Mexican nationalism, as Brading indicated. Thus, rebel violence not only found its object of hostility par excellence, but also its justification: while an antigachupín imaginary was being built, expressed in edicts, proclamations and manifests, a violence materialized in murder, ransacking, and destruction appeared here and there. The insurgent antigachupinismo revealed very interesting aspects of a social and cultural history of the war of independence —a kind of small scale French terror deployed at times by the insurgency, or the relationship between rumors and violence—, which will be discussed in this paper