"This book is the first to demonstrate the crucial role that the urban masses played in shaping political change as Mexico struggled to become a stable, independent nation state in the nineteenth century. Richard A. Warren examines the political world of Mexico City during the first tumultuous decades of the nineteenth century, from the abdication of Spain's King Ferdinand VII in 1808 to the end of Mexico's first federal republic in 1836.

He shows that the relationship between elites and the urban masses was central to Mexico's political evolution during the struggle for independence and in the decades thereafter."--BOOK JACKET.