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Vicente Riva Palacio
The grandson of President Guerrero was seeped in the politics of his nation from his birth. He was born October 16, 1832. It was a period of riot and repression in Mexico City. The people of the nation were rising against Bustamante, the president who had overthrown Guerrero.
Grandfather had been assassinated a year earlier. But the grandson of "the first Black President" was well schooled in family politics. Grandmother Guadalupe Hernandez de Guerrero was an activist who had the nick name "La Generala."" Young Vicente’s mother was fond of telling him stories about grandfather, who is considered in the histories to have been a champion of national sovereignty, political democracy, and equality between the races. Grandfather was also an advocate of a leveling of the classes. Grandson’s political and writing career reflected these goals.
At age 23 Vicente Riva Palacio was head of the city council in Mexico City. This was during the revolutionary government of President Juan Alvarez - the second "Black President." Riva Palacio went on to become a state governor, and he was one of the two generals in charge of the Mexican army during the deciding battle in 1867 at which the Mexican’s defeated the forces of the French imperialist Maximillian. The political leader of the fight against Maximilian was President Benito Juarez, the pure Indian from Oaxaca. Juarez assigned Riva Palacio to obtain the colonial records of the Spanish Inquisition and digest them for publication. The Inquisition had been a police agency that engaged in cruel repression of the Mexican people. Juarez believed that the agency’s records would reveal the degree to which Mexico had been held back during the long three centuries of Spanish rule.
Riva Palacio used the Inquisition files, and other records, to create novels, short stories, footnoted historical works, political position papers and more. His novels were serialized in newspapers. The end of one novel would be followed immediately with the beginning of another, the editors fearing an angry public if they did not get their fill of Riva Palacio. In the 1880s Riva Palacio gathered a team of scholars that they produced the five volume MEXICO A TRAVES DE LOS SIGLOS, Mexico through the centuries, which is still going through reprints today, and which can be found in the public library shelves of virtually every public library in the nation. In it he told the story of those who struggled for freedom, from Cuauhtemoc and other Indigenous who fought against the Spanish conquest, through Yanga, and the suffering of the Jewish Carvajal family, through grandfather Vicente Guerrero.
Vicente Riva Palacio died in Spain in 1896. He had been living their in semi-exile due to his opposition to the dictatorial policies of President Porfirio Diaz.