Banner of Hidalgo
Eighteenth century, used 1810
On the morning of the sixteenth of September 1810 the parish priest Miguel Hidalgo rang the church bell in the town of Dolores and called the people to rise against colonial rule. As his growing army marched towards San Miguel and Guanajuato, it needed a flag, and Hidalgo took an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe from a nearby sanctuary and raised it on a pole. The painted canvas you see here is the banner that tradition identifies with that moment: a faded image of the dark skinned Virgin standing on a crescent moon surrounded by golden rays.
The picture itself is a modest eighteenth century devotional painting, the kind that hung in thousands of churches and homes across New Spain. Look closely at the wear along its edges and the traces of the fittings that once attached it to a staff. It was chosen not for its art but for its meaning: the Virgin of Guadalupe was the one figure that indigenous people, mestizos and creoles all revered, and under her image an uprising became a national movement. The insurgents' cry was for the Virgin and against bad government.
The banner was captured by royalist forces when the insurgent army was destroyed in 1811 and was taken to Spain as a trophy. It stayed there for more than a century until the Spanish government returned it to Mexico in 1929. It has been displayed in the National Museum of History since the museum opened, in a dimmed and climate controlled case because of its fragile state. Few objects in the country carry so much symbolic weight, and you will often see visitors fall silent in front of it.
Did You Know? The banner spent over a hundred years in Spain as a war trophy before it came home to Mexico in 1929.
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