Miguel Ramos Arizpe

Don Miguel Ramos Arizpe (February 15, 1775 in Valle de San Nicolás, (near Saltillo) Coahuila – April 28, 1843 in Mexico City) was a Mexican priest and politician, and known as "the father of Mexican federalism."

Ramos Arizpe was born near Saltillo, Coahuila, in colonial Mexico's Eastern Provincias Internas in 1775. He studied in a seminary in Monterrey, with the usual curriculum of Latin, philosophy, and moral theology. He went on to study in Guadalajara, where he earned his bachelor's degree studying philosophy and law. He was ordained a priest in 1803, returning to Monterrey, and held a number of ecclesiastical positions in the area. He earned his doctorate in canon law in 1807. He served in the court at Cádiz, Coahuila, where "he demanded equality between Europeans and Americans." During the Bourbon reforms of the late eighteenth century, the Spanish crown had begun systematically privileging peninsular-born Spaniards over American-born criollos, so the demand for equality of these elites was in opposition to crown policy.

During the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula when the Bourbon monarch was replaced by Napoleon Bonaparte's brother Joseph and the legitimacy of the ruler challenged in Spain and Spanish America, a parliament or cortes was convened. Ramos Arizpe was elected as a representative to the cortes, where he advocated for the rights of American rights. He established the structure for the provincial deputation, which sought home rule for provinces. The Cádiz Cortes wrote and promulgated the Spanish Constitution of 1812, which created a constitutional monarchy, as a way to curb the power of the monarchy. When Napoleon was defeated and the Bourbon monarch Ferdinand VII returned to Spain in 1814 after having declared his allegiance to the new constitution, he abolished the constitution. He jailed a number of people involved in the constitutional process, including Ramos Arizpe, who was imprisoned until the 1820 coup against the monarch in 1820 that restored the constitution. The cortes reconvened and Ramos Arizpe was again a delegate from New Spain. He pressed for a better status for Spain's components of its overseas empire, proposing commonwealth status for them.

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