Was It Really Independence?
Post Independence:
After the Spanish Crown was overthrown by Napolean Bonaparte in 1810, the Spanish colonies weakened. As tensions between the wealthy Europeans and the laboring Natives grew, a war for independence became evident.Independence, however, was merely an idea. Although the country became technically free from Spanish rule in 1821, elites who came from Spanish ancestry continued a strong hold over power and wealth. These families, known as the "Fourteen Families", followed the previous Spanish reign with "a series of european influenced dictatorships" (1).
The native peoples, who now were a combination of mixed races and Pipil ancestry, were almost exclusively agricultural laborers who had little to no upward social mobility. This extreme economic divide based on ethnicity created tensions that lead to future conflict and instances of extreme violence towards the peasant native workers.
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