Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: In the early hours of September 16, 1810 Father Miguel Hidalgo led a mass of mostly mestizo and Indian peasants to revolt against their oppressors and thus begun the war of Mexican independence. Within six months Hidalgo’s forces were being pursued north by the Spanish Royal army. Hidalgo attempted to flee north, to the United States, confident that he would gain support from the United States. He was ultimately captured, but the revolutionary embers would not be smothered so quickly.

It was one of these embers in the person of José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara that was finally able to fulfill Hidalgo’s desire. Gutiérrez de Lara had been deputized as ambassador to the U.S. only weeks before Hidalgo’s capture by the Royal forces. Himself pursued by the Royalists, Gutiérrez de Lara set out to the U.S. on his own. Gutiérrez de Lara was one of the first Spanish Americans to travel from Texas through Louisiana, the Natchez Trace, and on to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia, before returning via ship to New Orleans and Texas. He returned armed with proclamations, manifestoes, and pamphlets calling for the independence of Mexico.

Little is known of Gutiérrez de Lara’s own education. But on that trip to D.C., he took with him a small notebook in which he detailed his experiences. As he proceeds to describe in detail the people he encountered and the state of political-economic development along this quickly developing western frontier, something overtakes Gutiérrez de Lara’s narrative. The language of visuality slips in and begins to suffuse his writing. It is the sublimity of the visual that begins to enact a transformation in Gutiérrez de Lara’s subjectivity.

If at the beginning of his diary Gutiérrez de Lara repeatedly resorts to the lexicon of monarchical government in describing politics, by the end his language transforms to reveal an adherence to republican political thought. This paper will offer a close reading of his diary, and will demonstrate that Gutiérrez de Lara’s vivid descriptions of industrialization and development initiate his political education.