Vicente Guerrero

Early life[edit]

Vicente Guerrero was born in Tixtla, a town 100 kilometers inland from the port of Acapulco, in the Sierra Madre del Sur; his parents were María Guadalupe Rodríguez Saldaña, and Juan Pedro Guerrero. His father's family included landlords, wealthy farmers, and traders with broad business connections in the south, members of the Spanish militia, and gun and cannon makers. In his youth, he worked for his father's freight business that used mules for transport, a prosperous business during this time. His travels took him to different parts of Mexico where he heard of the idea of independence. There is controversy regarding Guerrero's ethnic origin, with some authors describing him as having both an Indigenous and African background.^[5][6] However, no portraits of him were made during his lifetime and those made posthumously may not be reliable. Fellow insurgent José María Morelos described him as a "young man with bronzed or tanned skin ("broncineo" in Spanish), tall and strong (N.B. "forbid", strapping, muscular), aquiline nose, bright and light-colored eyes and big sideburns".^[7]


Vicente's father, Juan Pedro, supported Spanish rule, whereas his uncle, Diego Guerrero, had an important position in the Spanish militia. As an adult, 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, Vicente refused, saying, "The will of my father is for me sacred, but my Fatherland is first." "Mi patria es primero" is now the motto of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, named in honor of the revolutionary. Guerrero enlisted in José María Morelos's insurgent army of the south in December 1810. He was married to María Guadalupe Hernández; their daughter María Dolores Guerrero Hernández married Mariano Riva Palacio, who was the defense lawyer of Maximilian I of Mexico in Querétaro, and was the mother of late nineteenth-century intellectual Vicente Riva Palacio.