Digital History

Introduction: From Spanish to Mexian Rule		Next
Digital History ID 543

Spain exercised only a weak and tenuous hold on Mexico's northern frontier. At the end of Spanish rule in 1821, Spain's largest northern settlement, Santa Fe, had just six thousand inhabitants. The next largest towns, San Antonio and St. Augustine, had only 1,500 residents apiece. California consisted of twenty-one missions, four presidios, and three pueblos.

By the early nineteenth century, resistance to Spanish rule was growing throughout Spanish America. When Napoleon Bonaparte turned Spain into a French satellite, wars of independence erupted in Mexico, Central America, and Spanish South America. In 1810, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a Mexican priest, ignited Mexico's struggle for independence against Spain, which was finally achieved in 1821. Given the lack of settlement, trade, and production in the northern frontier, it is not surprising that Mexico was able to wrest the northern frontier from Spain without bloodshed.

The Mexican Revolution had profound consequences for the future of the Southwest. While Mexico was under Spanish rule, Spain had strictly regulated commerce in Mexico's northern frontier. But beginning in 1821 Mexico abandoned Spain's mercantilist policies and opened the region to trade with the United States. Mexican authorities allowed Anglo-American trappers and traders to hunt for beaver in Arizona and New Mexico and to bring their goods into the area. They also opened the Texas and California borders to settlement from the United States.