8 Reales Oaxaca - Insurgent Coinage

When Morelos captured Oaxaca in November 1812, the insurgents needed functioning currency immediately — both to pay troops and to demonstrate administrative legitimacy against the royalist government in Mexico City. The Oaxaca mint, one of the few facilities the insurgents ever controlled with actual silver-working capacity, was pressed into service producing these crude but official issues.

The workmanship is deliberately rough by any standard, a product of improvised dies and interrupted supply chains rather than incompetence. Morelos held Oaxaca for less than two years before royalist forces retook the city in 1814.