Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s first Black president, was a pivotal figure in the country’s history. Born around 1782–1783 in Tixtla, Mexico, to Juan Pedro Guerrero, a free Afro-Mexican freight business manager who initially supported Spanish colonial rule

and even disowned his son temporarily for joining the independence movement, and María Guadalupe Rodríguez Saldaña (Guadalupe Saldaña), an Indigenous woman who taught him local languages and customs, Guerrero rose from humble, uneducated beginnings to become a national hero.

He joined the Mexican War of Independence in 1810 under José María Morelos, continued the fight after Morelos’s execution, allied with Agustín de Iturbide to secure independence from Spain in 1821, and later served as Mexico’s second president in 1829. In that brief term, he abolished slavery nationwide through the Guerrero Decree, promoted equality and land reform, and made Mexico a refuge for escaped enslaved people.