8 Reales Pattern, J. Guerrero, Silver

Mexico's first post-independence coinage was a genuine institutional crisis. The new republic needed a national coin type but lacked consensus on imagery, and several competing patterns were submitted in 1823. José Guerrero was among the engravers working at the Casa de Moneda in Mexico City during this transitional period, and his pattern represents one of the rejected proposals from that design competition — the type that lost to what became the iconic eagle-and-serpent series formally adopted later that year.

Pattern pieces from this contest survive in extremely small numbers, most traceable to institutional collections.