As with all questions about why something DIDN’T happen, there are an infinite number of possible answers. I suppose my answer to this question is “because that’s not really how the Spanish Empire worked, especially in the sixteenth century, and that’s also not how independence worked when it did come.” There was not a sense of latent Mexican-ness, just like there wasn’t a sense of Brazilian-ness, Argentine-ness, Honduran-ness, etc. These were all concepts that had to be constructed, which wasn’t completed until the 20th century. Nations are, according to Benedict Anderson, imagined communities. Through the colonial period, no one was imagining a Mexican community.

Instead, Mesoamerica before and after contact contained hundreds of “micropatriotisms,” meaning an intense focus on one’s community. In Central Mexico, the community was the altepetl, the basic unit of social and political organization, which could be built into “bundles” of communities to form empires (like the Aztecs) or could simply subsist as small, independent “city-states.” After the Spanish invasion, the monarchy was mostly just an abstract idea, not a rigid reality; no Spanish monarch ever visited the Americas. The closest a person would get to the King, or really any Spaniard, was probably a priest, a low-ranking government official, or a landowner. Most of the day-to-day administration of the empire fell to not-very-important people. The empire was extremely fragmented. The Spanish military presence was tiny. Most people were not very Spanish and not very Christian. Change came very gradually. Spanish populations were minuscule; indigenous populations were colossal; African populations grew eventually; and they all mixed in complex ways. Even though it was riven by unequal power dynamics, empire--at the end of the day--became something that they co-constructed together, with limited oversight from the distant crown.

When people did object to “Spanish” rule, and this did happen hundreds and thousands of times, they were usually small objections against local injustices or excesses. Most “rebellions” were not rebellions at all. Rather, they used the Spanish legal system to force changes. When objections did lead to violence, generally, rebellions were not huge, popular outpourings of united anger that drove Spaniards out of a province, let alone shared across all of Mexico. Instead, uprisings were more focused on the local issues, which reflected the organization of the Spanish Empire by falling mostly at the local level. These rebellions were won or lost on the ability to mobilize other “micropatriotisms” to feed or quell the revolt. While Spanish rule was fragmented, its strength came from its ability to wield alliances between the state, local officials, and communities and use them for their collective interests, in this case towards resolving rebellions.

What you’ll also notice is that silver had virtually nothing to do with it. Silver mining did not get going until the second half of the sixteenth century. Silver sent back to Spain paid for European wars, and it circulated in transatlantic merchant networks. When silver caused inflation or bankruptcy, these were distant concerns. They were not major shocks to a united people who were already stewing under oppression of the monarchy. It was not a spark to a powder keg because there was not powder keg. Power simply wasn’t distributed like that, and therefore when shocks happened, they were absorbed by the flexibility of the structure. If the armada sank or if it won, it didn’t really matter to an indigenous farmer in Oaxaca. If the crown ran out of money fighting the Dutch, a textile weaver in Zacatecas might never have noticed. And the local government official probably wouldn’t have cared much either because he got most of his profit off of her labor, not off a high, regular Spanish royal salary.

Why did independence happen when it did? That question has filled hundreds of monographs for centuries. For a long time, historians said it was because a sense of national identity did eventually develop, at least among a select, elite group of creoles who became disillusioned with being locked out of certain positions in the Spanish government. I find it more convincing that Napoleon’s invasion caused a vacuum that they filled by improvising. At first, they tried to keep things mostly the same, until it became clear that the old system was dead. Then, they set about building new political entities, a long and winding process which eventually became the nation states we ended up with. These nation states were the long-term end result, not the original goal, of independence.