page_title: Mazatlán
section_title: Independent Mexico
hierarchical_section_title: Mazatlán / History / Independent Mexico
context_page_description: Mazatlán is a city in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. The city serves as the municipal seat for the surrounding municipio, known as the Mazatlán Municipality. It is located at 23°13′N 106°25′W on the Pacific coast, across from the southernmost tip of the Baja California Peninsula.
  Mazatlán is a Nahuatl word meaning "place of deer." The city was founded in 1531 by an army of Spaniards and indigenous settlers. By the mid-19th century, a large group of immigrants arrived from Germany. Together with the hard work of the Natives, they were able to develop Mazatlán into a thriving commercial seaport, importing equipment for the nearby gold and silver mines. It served as the capital of Sinaloa from 1859 to 1873. The German settlers also influenced the local music, banda, with some genres being an alteration of Bavarian folk music. The settlers also established the Pacifico Brewery on March 14, 1900.
  With a population of 438,434 and 489,987 as of the 2010 census, Mazatlán is the second-largest city in the state. It is also a popular tourist destination, with its beaches lined with resort hotels. A car ferry crosses the Gulf of California, from Mazatlán to La Paz, Baja California Sur.
context_section_description: Among the first decrees that the legislature enacted was that the addition of each of the eleven districts, and this union, corresponding to the Union Villa Mariano Balleza, be given the name of one of the leading insurgents, parish priest Dolores Hidalgo, on the night of September 15, 1810.
  In 1813, the Cadiz constitution came into effect. Article 310 of that constitution provided for the installation of local councils in towns that had more than 1,000 inhabitants. In 1814, Fernando VII repealed that constitution but it was later reinstated in 1820, and the first municipalities in Sinaloa were founded.
  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Mazatlán was a native fishing village located north of Cerro de la Aduana. In 1821, it was declared the first port of Mazatlán on Mexico's Pacific coast.
  Jurisdictionally, Mazatlán remained dependent on the sub-delegation of San Sebastian, unaffected by the divisions between the states of Sonora and Sinaloa. In 1824, they got together to form the Western State. After the imposition of new internal divisions of five departments and municipalities divided into parties, Mazatlán was in the department of San Sebastian, which was formed with the parties of its name, San Ignacio and the Rosary, and it extended to the River of Reeds.
  In 1830, the Western State was divided into two states. The first constitution of the state of Sinaloa, promulgated on December 12, 1831, divided the territory into eleven districts with their respective parties, leaving the district town of La Union separated from Concord and San Ignacio.
  According to the French navigator Abel Aubert du Petit-Thouars, a Spanish banker named Machado, through his commercial activities, gave impetus to the village of Mazatlán in 1836, then a village of four to five thousand people. It subsequently became the largest port on the Mexican Pacific coast.
  In 1846 during the Mexican-American war, Mazatlán was invaded and occupied by the U.S. military as part of the U.S. Pacific Coast campaign. In 1859, the port was blockaded by Captain Sidney Grenfell of the British steamship H.M.S. Amethyst.  On November 13, 1864, the French Army and the Imperialist forces took possession of Mazatlán, until they were deported on November 13, 1866 by General Ramón Corona's forces. After customs officials seized twenty-three ounces of gold from the British warship Chanticleer on June 18, 1868, which at the time was blockading the port, its captain, William H. Bridge, threatened to bomb the city on November 22.
  During the California Gold Rush, fortune hunters from the United States' East Coast sailed from New York Harbor and other Atlantic ports to Mexican ports in the Gulf of Mexico. After landing, the aspiring miners travelled over land for weeks to Mazatlán, where they would embark from the port to arrive in San Francisco in another four to five weeks.
  When Félix Zuloaga Tacubaya proclaimed the Plan of Ignoring the Constitution of 1857, the garrison of the Plaza de Mazatlán did not remain outside this proclamation, and on the first of January, 1858, the Plan of Mazatlán was proclaimed, which followed Zuloaga's Plan.
  The capital of Sinaloa, until the year 1853, had been Culiacán. However that year, the capital was transferred to Mazatlán. On July 22, 1867, the federal government passed a law that forbade state capitals to also act as ports. As a result of this law, on September 20, 1873, the State Legislature decreed that Culiacán would be the state capital again.
  The Siglo XIX constitution of 1852 decreed a new internal division in Sinaloa, which reduced it to nine districts by removing San Ignacio, which had been annexed to the Cosalá, and Choix, which had been annexed to El Fuerte. It also amended the name of the district from Villa de la Union to the port of Mazatlán. That same constitution also decreed the headquarters and council facility policies in each district.
  In 1861, the political headquarters were removed and turned into prefectures, and the same year the State Legislature adopted the Act on Municipalities. In 1868, the dist
caption: Lithograph of Mazatlán in 1845
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