The story
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You are on Calle Mariano Abasolo, in the historic center of Oaxaca, a few blocks from the church of Santo Domingo. Most people walk this street without wondering about its name. Yet that name holds one of the strangest stories of Mexico's War of Independence: the story of the rebel leader who did not die in front of a firing squad.
Mariano Abasolo was born in Dolores in seventeen eighty-three, into a well-off family. In September eighteen ten, when Miguel Hidalgo called the people of Dolores to revolt, Abasolo was given a concrete task: to seize the weapons and ammunition stored in Dolores. He was less a great strategist than one of the men who kept the movement going with his money.
Even so, he fought at Monte de las Cruces, at Aculco and at the Bridge of Calderón, and he was named a field marshal. On March twenty-first, eighteen eleven, at Acatita de Baján in Coahuila, the insurgent leaders were captured. Hidalgo, Allende and Jiménez were tried and shot.
Abasolo was not. The sources credit his survival mainly to the efforts of his wife, María Manuela Taboada, whose family had connections high in the colonial government. Historians disagree on his exact sentence: some say ten years in prison, others say life.
What is certain is that he was sent to Spain and locked up in the castle of Santa Catalina in Cádiz. Manuela stayed with him to the end. Abasolo died there of a lung disease on April fourteenth, eighteen sixteen, only thirty-three years old, an ocean away from the independence he had helped to begin.
If you follow this street to where it crosses the pedestrian street of Macedonio Alcalá. There stands the church of the Precious Blood of Christ. Before it was a church, the site was the city's main cemetery, until the middle of the seventeenth century; the church was consecrated in sixteen eighty-nine, and in Holy Week the traditional Procession of Silence sets out from here.
Right beside it, on the second block of Abasolo, between Cinco de Mayo and Alcalá, is the Jardín Antonia Labastida. It was once called the Little Square of the Blood of Christ, and later the Little Square of Order and Liberty; today it often fills with crafts and with paintings by Oaxacan artists. And a few blocks away, in the former convent of Santo Domingo, built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Museum of the Cultures of Oaxaca keeps the treasure of Tomb Seven of Monte Albán: some six hundred pieces of gold, silver, turquoise and amber that the archaeologist Alfonso Caso brought to light in nineteen thirty-two.
So the next time you read this street's sign, remember the man it is named for: the rebel who escaped the firing squad, but not the prison.
That was Calle Mariano Abasolo, Oaxaca. Avsha tells a story like this about wherever you are — any street, in your language.
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