Vicente Guerrero - Early Life

Early Life

Guerrero was born in Tixtla, a town 100 kilometers inland from the port of Acapulco, in the Sierra Madre del Sur, son of Juan Pedro Guerrero and his wife, María de Guadalupe Saldaña. However, the Guerreros were accounted "españoles americanos" ("American Spaniards", i.e. criollos), in a contemporary census of Tixtla. His family consisted of landlords, rich farmers and traders with broad business connections in the south, members of the Spanish militia and gun and cannon makers. Probably, these were the reasons why the criollo status of the Guerreros was respected, although Vicente was of Spanish descent only on his father's side and of mixed Amerindian, African and Spanish descent on his mother's. This fact would be used later by his enemies to attack him politically through ad hominem and even racist arguments. As President of Mexico, Guerrero expressed amusement rather than annoyance on such arguments, as contrary to the expectations of his conservative supremacist detractors and competitors, such attacks secured him the support and sympathy of the liberal party (composed of high class Criollos and Mestizos like Guerrero), and more importantly, the support of the largely majoritarian popular class composed of poor Amerindians and Mestizos who adopted him as one of them. Notice however that Guerrero did not seem to identify himself with any of the previous ethnicities and colonial castes, as he quitted his American Spaniard status during the Mexican Independence War declaring himself only an "Americano", as he also called the former Colonel of the Royalist Army and subsequent ally Agustín de Iturbide (in turn a Criollo). This usage of the term Americano as something distinct from European, Amerindian, African and their admixtures, roughly corresponds to its current usage in Latin America.

Vicente’s father, Pedro, supported Spanish rule, whereas his uncle, Diego, had an important position in the Spanish militia; however, Vicente was opposed to the Spanish colonial government. When his father asked him for his sword in order to present it to the viceroy of New Spain as a sign of goodwill and surrender, Vicente refused, saying, "The will of my father is for me sacred, but my Motherland is first." "My Motherland comes first" is now the motto of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, named in honor of the revolutionary.

He married María de Guadalupe Hernández and their daughter María de los Dolores Guerrero Hernández married Mariano Riva Palacio, who worked for the Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico in Querétaro, and had Vicente Riva Palacio.