Yes
ervando Teresa de Mier, one of the main protagonists in the emergence of the Mexican nation, was born on October 18, 1763 in Monterrey, then part of the province of Nuevo Santander. He completed his first studies in Monterrey and at the age of 16 he moved to Mexico City to pursue an ecclesiastical career. At the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico he received a doctorate in Theology in 1792. He entered the Dominican order in 1792, where he taught philosophy.
Fray Servando was a great orator. His sermons gained fame. On December 12, 1794, his life would take a turn when he gave a famous sermon at the Collegiate Church of Guadalupe, where he presented a very controversial interpretation of the image of the brown Virgin. Fray Servando stated that the image of the virgin had not been printed on the tilma of the Indian Juan Diego, but on the cloak of Saint Thomas. He had protected it from the idolatry of the indigenous people, who mistreated it and wanted to erase it, until in 1531 he gave it to Juan Diego to show it to Archbishop Zumárraga asking for a temple to be erected in Tepeyac. The image was a painting from the early years of Christianity. Another reckless claim by the friar was that Quetzalcoatl, the famous Toltec god-king, was actually the apostle Saint Thomas, who had come to America to preach the Christian faith.
That sermon caused a scandal in the Church. It was inferred that the evangelization of the friars in New Spain in the 16th century, the main justification for the conquest, was not the first, but the second. The indigenous inhabitants had first learned of Christian doctrine through an apostle in the 1st century and not from the conquistadors in the 16th century. An ecclesiastical process for heresy was immediately initiated against him, and he was suspended from preaching and confessing. He was sentenced by the Inquisition to 10 years in prison in the monastery of Nuestra Señora de las Caldas, in Cantabria, but before that he was imprisoned for two months in San Juan de Ulúa.
Fray Servando escaped from the monastery and headed to Burgos. He then moved to Paris, where he met Simón Rodríguez, Simón Bolívar’s teacher, with whom he started a language school. In 1802 he moved to Italy, where he requested his discharge as a friar. He returned to Madrid in 1803, where he was arrested for his subversive activities and imprisoned in the Los Toribios prison in Seville. He escaped again and headed to Lisbon in 1805, where he remained three years.
In 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and deposed the Spanish monarch. The Iberian people took up arms against the French. Servando joined the Spanish liberation struggle in Valencia, but was captured and imprisoned in Zaragoza. Once again he escaped and moved to Cádiz. There he was able to observe the debates of the deputies of the Cortes and reaffirmed his conviction of making New Spain independent.
In order to collaborate with the independence of his homeland, he went to London. In that city he wrote the first history of Mexican Independence, in 1813, called History of the New Spain Revolution. There in 1815 he met another prominent compatriot, the young Lucas Alamán, who would be the main ideologue of the conservative group after Independence was achieved. Later, he made friends with the young Spanish guerrilla Xavier Mina, exiled for fighting the absolutism of Ferdinand VII. Both decided to move to New Spain to collaborate with the insurgent movement. They arrived in Soto la Marina, Tamaulipas, in April 1817, and began to fight against the royalist forces. However, Servando was captured in June of that year and imprisoned in the Holy Inquisition prison in Mexico City. Mina was defeated and shot on November 21, 1817. Mier was imprisoned while the independence for which he had fought so hard was experiencing its last stage. In 1820, he was transferred to the San Juan de Ulúa prison and exiled again to Spain. However, in February 1821, upon arriving in Havana, he was once again able to escape and headed to Philadelphia, where he remained until 1822.
He returned to the new Mexican nation. Preceded by well-deserved fame, he was a deputy to the first Mexican Constituent Congress. He was a very prominent legislator and one of those who most opposed Iturbide being invested as emperor. When Iturbide dissolved Congress, he imprisoned the deputies, including Servando.
When the Casa Mata rebellion overthrew Iturbide, Mier gained his freedom. He was part of the Congress that was reinstated and the second Constituent Congress, which would draft the first Constitution of the Mexican Republic. There, he spearheaded a position that proposed gradual federalism. In recognition of his merits, the first Mexican president, Guadalupe Victoria, granted him a pension and assigned him a room in the National Palace. This illustrious patriot lived his last years there, who died in his rooms on December 3, 1827.
*Director of the National Institute of Historical Studies of the Revolutions of Mexico
