Colonial Governor General

caudillo and general during the Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821) was born in the small town of San Francisco in the modern state of Jalisco, Mexico, in 1789. He and his parents, Pedro de Santiago Guzmán and Estéfana de Jésus Cano, were labeled mulatos (people with European and African ancestry) by Spanish officials and local hacendados (hacienda owners). Spanish bureaucrats classified people in this manner during the colonial era (1521–1821) to separate people with European ancestry from their indigenous and Afro-Mexican counterparts. Such racial classifications formed the basis for three centuries of European domination.

Guzmán spent his formative years working as a laborer on various sugar haciendas in the Sayula District in southern Jalisco Sayula dominated the regional economy until the mid eighteenth century when the nearby city Zapotlán assumed economic predominance This was due to the large number of Creoles American born persons of ...

whose campaigns were decisive in the struggle for independence in Argentina, Chile, and Peru, was born on 25 February 1778 in Yapeyú, in the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata—today the province of Corrientes (Argentina)—the youngest of five siblings born to don Juan de San Martín and Gregoria Matorras, both of Spanish descent. In Argentina he is recognized as the “Padre de la Patria”(Father of the Nation) and the “libertador” (liberator), and is revered as the main hero and dignitary of the national pantheon. In Peru he is remembered as the “Fundador de la Libertad del Perú” (Founder of the Liberty of Peru), the “Fundador de la República” (Founder of the Republic), the “Generalísimo de las Armas” (Generalissimo of the Arms), and the “libertador” of the country. The Chilean army recognizes him as a captain general.

In 1783 when he was 4 years old San Martín traveled to Spain ...