José Bernardo Maximiliano Gutiérrez de Lara (August 20, 1774 – May 13, 1841) was an advocate and organizer of Mexican independence and the first constitutional governor of the state of Tamaulipas, and a native of Revilla, today Ciudad Guerrero, Mexico.
[1] Gutiérrez was obsessed with the idea of freeing Mexico from Spain, and he began by recruiting and arming twenty-one men in Spanish Texas.
In The Herald, a newspaper out of Alexandria, Louisiana, he published notice on August 31, 1812, of what he called the “Republicans of Nacogdoches" to recruit volunteers.
Warned of these developments, José Joaquín de Arredondo, whose forces were quartered in the Valley del Maíz, marched to engage Gutiérrez, collecting men and material on the way through Nuevo Santander.
A few weeks later, on 13 August 1813, Arredondo himself defeated the insurgents, now under the command of José Álvarez de Toledo y Dubois, who had replaced Gutiérrez, at the Battle of Medina.