Hidalgo had power and status and had even worked at one point as a dean in one of the most prestigious schools in the new world: the College of San Nicolas at Valladolid in Michoacan (now Morelia).

Hidalgo had close ties with those the Spanish had ignored: native people, mestizos, and criollos.

Criollos (Spanish people born in Mexico) did not originally intend to include the natives or mestizos in the rebellion. In fact, many of them supported the laws that made it illegal to teach those with "impure" blood how to grow high-profit crops: olives, mulberries and grapevines and to manufacture pottery and leather.

Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the Spanish viceroy, a royal official, punished Hidalgo for teaching natives by destroying his property: his trees, crops and grape vines.

Hidalgo, nearly sixty years old and already in trouble for teaching native Mexicans outlawed arts, gathered together those who had been discriminated against including: the native people and mestizos.

However, Hidalgo was betrayed by someone he never would have expected: a priest who broke the secrecy of the confessional to tell the Spaniards what the criollos had planned.

Hidalgo had to invite the other groups in when the native Spaniards targeted Hidalgo for arrest months before the plans for the revolution were complete: the native people and mestizos.

The native tribes attacked the Spanish army with primitive weapons: clubs, slings, axes, knives, and machetes.

Hidalgo and Allende (one of his fellow revolutionaries) led the natives while carrying an image of a beautiful saint named: the Virgin of Guadalupe.

What followed was a bloodbath: natives massacred Spaniards and then the Spanish returned in force to wipe out the revolutionaries.

About a year after starting the 1810 revolution, Hidalgo was executed by: the Spanish.