Don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (8 May 1753 – 30 July (1811) was the chief instigator of Mexico's war of independence against Spain.
Of pure Spanish criollo descent, Hidalgo was the parish priest of Dolores Hidalgo, a small town in the modern-day central Mexican state of Guanajuato. Alerted by Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez ("La Corregidora") that his revolutionary plot had been discovered, he brought his plans forward and, with the Grito de Dolores delivered from the belfry of his parish church on the night of 15 September 1810, called for a revolution to depose the country's foreign overlords.
