| | |  Travel & Outdoors 
Mexico’s Freedom Trail - Part 2
 Jonathan Kandell - travel.nytimes.com
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August 28, 2010
| | Exhibitions about the life of Father Miguel Hidalgo are at the Museo de la Independencia Nacional. Father Hidalgo was the patriot who is said to have uttered the Grito de la Independencia, the famous cry for independence, on Sept. 16, 1810. (Ann Summa/New York Times) | |
My own tour began at Hidalgo’s mustard-and-ocher-walled residence on Calle Morelos, a block south of the main plaza. Built in 1779, the house was damaged and looted during the independence wars, and decreed a museum in 1863.
On display are independence-era documents and religious articles said to have belonged to Hidalgo. Visitors can also look out at an interior patio off the living room, where Hidalgo staged European music recitals and native dances to which upper-class whites, middle-class mestizos and humble Indian artisans — men and women — were invited. In other rooms, he held smaller, clandestine meetings to discuss books and political tracts banned by the Spanish authorities.
Returning to the plaza, I headed a block west to the former prison, now the Museo de la Independencia Nacional, where the Hidalgo saga comes to life most vividly. At the entrance of the single-story, dark-yellow building I lined up behind 100 or so blue-uniformed schoolchildren about the same age I was on my own independence outing. "Are you ready to go to jail?" asked their teacher-guide.
Inside, in a dark room on the right, we were greeted by life-size polyurethane effigies of Hidalgo proselytizing to two slightly bewildered prisoners. The scene recounts a key incident that began the independence revolt on that September morning 200 years ago: Hidalgo visited the Dolores prison, where he was father-confessor to the convicts, and persuaded the 80 prisoners to rebel against the jailers and heed his call for a colonial uprising.
From the former jail, I followed the school tour to the parish church on the plaza, the next stop in Hidalgo’s revolt. There, the priest rallied his band of freed convicts to climb its triple towers and ring the bells to gather a greater crowd. Once assembled, Hidalgo urged them, too, to join his rebellion, promising an end to taxes, plus modest rewards — a peso daily for those who came on horseback and half that for those on foot. The church, completed in 1778, is considered one of finest examples of colonial architecture in Mexico. Next to its stone portal richly carved with saintly reliefs, an electronic clock counts off the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the 200th anniversary of Hidalgo’s cry for independence on the very spot.
With his army of ragged parishioners wielding machetes and spears, Hidalgo then headed — on foot — 12 miles southeast to one of the colony’s largest pilgrimage sites, the cavernous church known as the Santuario de Atotonilco. I traveled the route by bus, surveying the semi-arid countryside that in some respects remains unchanged since Hidalgo’s time. With the June rains, the craggy, crenellated mountains sprouted green tufts. On fields bordered by cactus and aloe, campesinos gripped plows pulled by oxen or horses. Cows grazed in a dry riverbed as vultures circled above.
Founded in 1750 atop thermal springs used by Chichimecas, Otomís and other tribes for their religious rituals, in Hidalgo’s time the Atotonilco sanctuary drew multitudes of Indians and mestizos, who proved ripe recruits for his crusade.
Today, pilgrims still pour into Atotonilco, a village of only about 600 permanent inhabitants, dominated by its enormous sanctuary. Built in the colonial Baroque style with a blue-tiled dome rising behind high walls, it was named a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2008. The day I arrived it was crowded with several hundred pilgrims of all social classes, all men; next week would be reserved for women. In the nave of the sanctuary, they gazed up at murals and frescoes depicting the life of Christ and walked past an alcove with a particularly bloody wooden sculpture of the flayed Jesus. The more severe penitents wore crowns of thorns and flagellated themselves with leather thongs.
More than satiated with religious art and fervor, I boarded another bus for the five-mile ride south from Atotonilco to San Miguel de Allende, which I used as a base for my visit to other points in the state of Guanajuato. San Miguel, with about 60,000 inhabitants, is a richer, more attractive town than Dolores. In a valley bounded by mountains and a lake-size reservoir, it also draws some 10,000 more or less permanent American, Canadian and European residents, who spend several months a year or enjoy full-time retirement here.
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