What Is El Grito de Independencia?
El Grito de Independencia is Mexico's annual independence ceremony, held on the night of September 15th, in which the President of Mexico stands on the balcony of the National Palace, rings the Independence Bell, and calls out the names of the founding heroes of the 1810 revolution. The crowd — hundreds of thousands packed into the Zócalo — responds with ¡Viva! to each name. It is one of the largest civic rituals in the Americas, and it happens every year, without fail, the night before Mexican Independence Day.
Every September 15th, at exactly 11 p.m., the President steps onto that central balcony, which faces the Zócalo at the heart of Mexico City. Hundreds of thousands of people are gathered below, waving flags, wearing green and white and red, and waiting. The President rings a bell that has hung there since 1896 — the same bell Miguel Hidalgo rang in the parish church of Dolores in 1810 to call his congregation to rise. And then the President shouts.
The crowd shouts back.
This is el Grito de Independencia. And it happens the night before Mexico's Independence Day because the moment the story begins — the moment Hidalgo rang the bell and cried out — was the night of September 15th, not the morning of the 16th.
Why the Night of September 15th
The grito de Dolores — Hidalgo's original cry — happened in the early hours of September 16th by most historical accounts, somewhere between midnight and dawn. But Mexican tradition places the commemoration on the evening of September 15th, so that the bell rings, the shout goes up, and then the morning of the 16th arrives as Independence Day proper. You celebrate at midnight, and you wake up to the fiesta.
It also means the ceremony happens when Mexico is alive and watching — not at 2 a.m., but at 11 p.m. on a national holiday eve, when families are gathered and the Zócalo is packed. The timing is intentional: the Grito is meant to be witnessed, shared, answered.
The Bell of Dolores
The Campana de la Independencia — the Independence Bell — is not a metaphor. It is an actual cast-iron bell that hung in the parish church of Dolores Hidalgo in Guanajuato for more than a century before President Porfirio Díaz had it transported to Mexico City and installed above the balcony of the National Palace in 1896, in time for the eighty-sixth anniversary of independence.
When it was moved, it became a relic. Historians debate whether this exact bell was the one Hidalgo rang in 1810 — the historical record isn't unambiguous. But the Mexican people decided it was, and in that decision, the bell became sacred. You don't need to verify the provenance of a thing that carries the weight of a nation's founding. You ring it, and everyone understands what the ringing means.
According to Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), the Independence Bell arrived at the National Palace on September 15, 1896 — the same night as the Díaz government's first public Grito ceremony from the balcony. The tradition has continued every year since.
The Words of the Grito
The original words Hidalgo spoke on the night of September 15-16, 1810 are not precisely known. Contemporary accounts differ. Some say he invoked the Virgin of Guadalupe. Some say he named specific enemies. The Grito de Dolores was not scripted — it was a priest calling his people to revolution at the last possible moment.
The modern version is formalized. The current President's Grito — which varies slightly depending on the President — generally includes:
¡Mexicanos! ¡Vivan los héroes que nos dieron patria y libertad!
¡Viva Hidalgo! ¡Viva Morelos! ¡Viva Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez! ¡Viva Allende!
¡Vivan los héroes de la Patria!
¡Viva la independencia nacional!
¡Viva México! ¡Viva México! ¡Viva México!
Each ¡Viva! from the President is answered by the crowd. The names change slightly depending on which historical figures a particular president chooses to honor.
Who Was Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez — And Why Her Name Is Shouted
The inclusion of Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez — La Corregidora — became standard in more recent iterations of the Grito. She was the wife of the local magistrate of Querétaro, and she was part of the independence conspiracy. When royalist forces discovered the plot in September 1810 and moved to arrest its members, she was placed under house arrest before she could warn anyone.
She found a way anyway. Locked in her room, she found a messenger — accounts say it was a guard she had befriended — and got word to the conspirators in time for Hidalgo to make the decision to act immediately rather than wait and be captured. Without her improvised warning, the movement might have been crushed before it started.
La Corregidora died in 1829, having spent years after the revolution imprisoned by the same Spanish authorities she'd helped defeat. Her name was added to the Grito not because the history books gave her credit first — they didn't — but because the community eventually demanded she be named. Her inclusion is a correction: the revolution was not won by men alone.
How Communities Across the Diaspora Do It
Mexican consulates in the United States hold their own Grito ceremonies on the night of September 15th, open to the community. Mexican mayors and governors hold ceremonies in their cities. Community organizations set up events in parks and plaza-equivalents in neighborhoods where the population is large enough to fill them.
In the absence of a formal ceremony, families do it themselves. Someone calls out the names. Someone rings whatever they have — a cowbell, a hand bell, the heel of a boot on the floor. The crowd, even if it's just a kitchen full of cousins, shouts back: ¡Viva!
You have done this. Or you have watched the people you love do this and felt something — pride, or the particular tenderness of watching your family be fully, unselfconsciously themselves. The Grito crossed the border a long time ago. It lives wherever Mexican and Mexican-American people gather on the night of September 15th and choose to remember what the bell means.
The ceremony in the Zócalo is broadcast live by Televisa and TV Azteca every year, and increasingly via YouTube and social media, so that the diaspora can watch it in real time from Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, New York. You can see the fireworks. You can see the crowd. You can shout back from your kitchen.
¡Viva México!
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Keep reading: El Dieciséis de Septiembre: The Real Mexican Holiday We've Always Celebrated | Hispanic Heritage Month: The Real History Behind September 15th