José Secundino Figueroa y ParraExpediente xi/iii/2–257, Archivo Histórico Militar de México, as quoted in Hutchinson 1973, p. 277: "José Secundino Figueroa y Parra, or as he normally signed his name, José Figueroa." (1792 – 29 September 1835), was a Mexican military officer and politician who served as governor and comandante general of Alta California from 1833 until his death. A veteran of the Mexican War of Independence, he served as an envoy in the negotiations between Vicente Guerrero and Agustín de Iturbide that preceded the Plan of Iguala which secured Mexican independence. In the decade after independence he held senior military commands in northern Mexico, most notably in the Estado de Occidente, where he campaigned against and then negotiated a settlement with the Yaqui leader Juan Banderas.
Sent to Alta California in 1832, Figueroa ended the 1832–33 split between acting officials in Monterey and San Diego, began implementation of the Mexican secularization laws, issued numerous land grants, placed Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo on the northern frontier opposite Fort Ross, and in 1835 published the Manifiesto a la República Mejicana, the first book-length work printed in California. He died in office at Monterey and was buried at Mission Santa Barbara.
Early life Figueroa was born in 1792 at Jonacatepec, in the southeastern borderlands of the present-day state of Morelos. He had a brother, Francisco, and a sister whose name is not recorded; nothing firm is known of his parents,Hutchinson 1973, p. 277. but it is believed they were of Indigenous origin. Figueroa himself was described as "dark-skinned, short of stature, and proud of his Indian blood." Later California writers repeated the same physical description and his public pride in Indigenous ancestry. On 20 December 1811, at age nineteen and newly married to María Francisca Gutiérrez of Jonacatepec, he joined the southern insurgency of José María Morelos at the head of about twenty men from a local hacienda and was made a captain the same day.
Mexican War of Independence For two years Figueroa served under Morelos's second-in-command, the priest-general Mariano Matamoros, whose parish of Jantetelco lay a few miles from Jonacatepec.Hutchinson 1973, p. 278. He took part in the capture of Oaxaca in November 1812 with the infantry regiment Nuestra Señora del Carmen, and in April 1813 accompanied Matamoros on the campaign toward the Guatemalan frontier that defeated the royalist lieutenant colonel Manuel Servando Dambrini at the Battle of La Chincúa. On 1 January 1813 Matamoros placed him in charge of the military treasury of his division. That service ended when Matamoros was captured after the Battle of Puruarán and executed on 3 February 1814.
Figueroa then served under Morelos's direct command. On 3 December 1814 Morelos appointed him secretary of the Intendency of Tecpan, the coastal province Morelos had created out of the insurgent-controlled territory in present-day Guerrero. After Morelos's capture and execution, Figueroa remained at his post and from 1817 to 1819 served as treasurer of the mobile insurgent provisional government as it moved through the tierra caliente.
In September 1818 he fought under Vicente Guerrero at the Battle of El Tamo, a victory over the royalist colonel José Gabriel de Armijo. On 25 November 1819 Guerrero promoted him to colonel of the Regimiento del Carmen, citing his “honesty, patriotism, knowledge, and the positive services he has rendered the motherland.” Historian C. Alan Hutchinson described Guerrero's relation to Figueroa as that of a "benefactor" and "close friend." Insurgent officers in the western part of the province shortly afterward acclaimed him comandante general of that sector.Hutchinson 1973, p. 279.
Envoy to Iturbide and the Plan of Iguala In early 1821 the royalist commander Agustín de Iturbide, sent south to suppress Guerrero, opened talks aimed at a joint independence. On 10 January Iturbide wrote to Guerrero suggesting he send a trusted intermediary; one of the four names he listed was Colonel Figueroa. Guerrero gave Figueroa full powers. Lucas Alamán, one of Guerrero's biggest detractors, later claimed that Guerrero’s correspondence in which he demanded total independence and citizenship without caste distinction was written by Figueroa.Lucas Alamán, Historia de Méjico, 2nd ed., vol. 5 (Mexico, 1969), pp. 64–65, 69, as cited in Hutchinson 1973, p. 280: "According to the contemporary historian, Lucas Alamán, who did not like Guerrero, his famous letter was written by Figueroa." Iturbide later reported to Viceroy Juan Ruiz de Apodaca that Guerrero himself would not meet him: Not having been able to inspire the necessary confidence in that caudillo to answer with me, we managed to get the individual who deserves all his trust, namely Don José Figueroa, to come. On 24 February Iturbide proclaimed the Plan of Iguala, the political program under which the Army of the Three Guarantees brought the war to a close.Hutchinson 1973, p. 280 Whether Guerrero and Iturbide ever met in person remains disputed. Lorenzo de Zavala and Carlos María de Bustamante popularized a face-to-face embrace, while Alamán held that Figueroa was the insurgent who treated with Iturbide because Guerrero would not appear. Figueroa marched with the newly formed army that triumphantly entered Mexico City on 27 September 1821. Career in independent Mexico Upon Mexico's independence, Figueroa remained in the army and was promoted to brigadier general.Hutchinson 1973, p. 281 On 29 July 1822 the imperial government named him a supernumerary of the Imperial Order of Guadalupe.Hutchinson 1973, p. 280; El Noticioso General (Mexico City), 29 July 1822, as cited in Hutchinson 1973, p. 295, n. 11. After the fall of the Mexican Empire, Figueroa sat in the constituent congress of the State of Mexico. He appeared as a deputy from Cuernavaca when the congress opened on 2 March 1824, served as one of its secretaries, and was president of the congress in August 1824, when he signed the state's provisional organic law on 9 August.Hutchinson 1973, p. 284 Around the same time he presented to the Commission on the Development of the Californias an ambitious and unrealized colonization scheme to be financed by the empresario John Hale, who then went bankrupt.Hutchinson 1973, pp. 284–285.
In December 1824 President Guadalupe Victoria appointed him comandante general inspector of the newly created Estado de Occidente (modern-day Sonora, Sinaloa and southern Arizona). His instructions included peacekeeping with the Indian nations of the north, building new presidios, inspection of mines, and developing an overland route from Sonora to Alta California. He reached his post at Arizpe by June 1825.Hutchinson 1973, p. 285.
Yaqui War, 1825–1827 State legislation that treated Yaqui, Mayo and Ópata communities as taxpaying citizens, together with attempts to raise auxiliary units and survey pueblo lands, provoked a major rising in 1825–26 under Juan Banderas, who appealed to other nations of the northwest and invoked a flag he said had belonged to Montezuma.Hutchinson 1973, p. 288: Figueroa, then on a reconnaissance toward the Gila–Colorado confluence, turned back when the rising spread along the Yaqui and Mayo rivers.Hutchinson 1973, pp. 287–288.
On 6–7 August 1826 Figueroa defeated Banderas near Pitic in a two-day battle. The war continued into 1827. Despite criticism that he was too lenient, and despite a 16 February 1827 order naming Colonel José Joaquín Calvo as his successor, Figueroa closed the first phase of the war before Calvo arrived.Hutchinson 1973, p. 289. On 13 April 1827, at five in the afternoon in the village of Potam near the mouth of the Yaqui River, Banderas and some two hundred men handed over their arms. Figueroa, moved by the condition of the starved and ragged fighters and their families, accepted a settlement rather than the extermination some locals demanded. Addressing his troops the next day he ordered them to “treat our unfortunate compatriots with love and consideration . . . let us treat the Yaquis and Mayos as our beloved President has ordered: like friends in peacetime and enemies in war.” Banderas was granted pardon, recognized as a captain-general of the Yaqui, and was given a salary. He rose again in 1832 and was captured and executed after Figueroa had already left for California.
Later roles and imprisonment, 1827–1832 After the 1827 settlement Figueroa was transferred to Durango as comandante general. President Victoria sent him back to Occidente on 29 April 1828. On 5 September 1828 the state congress declared him a citizen of Occidente and renamed the town of Altar as Altar Villa de Figueroa.Hutchinson 1973, p. 291
In March 1830, after Vice-president Anastasio Bustamante had overthrown Vicente Guerrero, Figueroa was arrested in Mexico City on a rumor that he and others were plotting to restore Guerrero. No evidence of a conspiracy appeared; he was released after about a month in the former Inquisition jail.Hutchinson 1973, pp. 293–294. On 17 April 1832 the Bustamante government appointed him inspector and comandante general of Alta California. On 9 May he was also named jefe político, keeping the joint civil-military command.Hutchinson 1973, p. 294 Alta California governorship
After the overthrow of Manuel Victoria in December 1831, the southern diputación and the Plan of San Diego restored the jefatura política to José María de Echeandía at San Diego and Los Angeles. At Monterey a junta led by Captain Agustín V. Zamorano, Victoria's former secretary, rejected that plan. It declared the diputación's acts illegal and the civil office vacant until the supreme government named a successor; it filled only the comandancia general ad interim, by seniority, with Zamorano.Bancroft 1886, pp. 231–232. "Zamorano, on the other hand, never made pretensions to be gefe politico; in fact, one of the articles of his plan expressly declared that no such officer existed." In May 1832 the two sides agreed to a military partition pending an assignment from Mexico: Echeandía south of San Gabriel, Zamorano north of San Fernando. Figueroa landed on 14 January 1833. Zamorano received him the next day and transferred the northern command; Echeandía then gave way in the south, and the government was reunited.
His instructions from Mexico City included caution toward the growing foreign presence, encouragement of artisans and settlers, exploration north of San Francisco Bay, and construction of a presidio on that frontier as a counter to Fort Ross and the Hudson's Bay Company activity from the Columbia River. To carry out his order to occupy the northern frontier, Figueroa sent Lieutenant Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo north in 1833, granted him Rancho Petaluma in 1834, and on 24 June 1835 named him military commandant and director of colonization of the northern frontier, with instructions to found the pueblo of Sonoma. That commission made Vallejo the principal Mexican authority north of San Francisco Bay for years to come.
Secularization