09/16/2026
🔔 Diez y Seis de Septiembre. Here is the history often overlooked when reviewing this day.
Before dawn on September 16, 1810, a parish priest in the town of Dolores rang his church bell and called his congregation to revolt. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was not a soldier. He was a scholar, and his library mattered as much as the bell.
Hidalgo belonged to a generation of educated criollos reading Enlightenment political philosophy, and they had a working example a generation old and just to the north. The American colonies had argued that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed, and then made it stick. That argument traveled.
Two things people usually get wrong.
First, this is not Cinco de Mayo. That is the Battle of Puebla in 1862, a different fight fifty years later.
Second, today does not mark independence. It marks the beginning. The war ran eleven more years, and Hidalgo did not live to see it; he was executed in 1811. He rang a bell knowing roughly what it would cost him.
Eleven years is a long time to keep going on an idea.
That kind of persistence came north with the families who settled Texas, and San Antonio has been running on it ever since: the parishes, the businesses, the neighborhoods held together across generations by people who understood that the work outlasts the person doing it.
Today we mark the bell, and the eleven years after it.
