New Spain Spain, at 42d north (now the northern boundary of the U.S. states of California, Nevada, and Utah). In the 1821 Declaration of Independence of the Mexican Empire, both Mexico and Central America declared their independence after three centuries of Spanish rule and formed the First Mexican Empire, although Central America quickly rejected the union. After priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla's 1810 Grito de Dolores (call for independence), the insurgent army began an eleven-year war. At first, the Criollo class fought against the rebels. But in 1820, a military coup in Spain forced Ferdinand VII to accept the authority of the
Latin American wars of independence movement against their colonial master, finally ended as a full-fledged civil war. Traditionally, the process is divided into three stages: Patria Vieja, Reconquista, and Patria Nueva. The first uprising against Spanish rule took place in 1809, and criollos in Ecuador set up a junta on September 22, 1810 to rule in the name of the Bourbon monarch; but as elsewhere, it allowed assertion of their own power. Only in 1822 did Ecuador fully gain independence and became part of Gran Colombia, from which it withdrew in 1830. At the Battle of Pichincha, near present-day Quito, Ecuador on May 24, 1822,