CARDENISMO AND THE SECOND CRISTERO REBELLION IN THE GRAN NAYAR, 1935–1940

2021 ◽  
pp. 214-262
Keyword(s):  
Cristero Rebellion

Magical Habits

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Huerta
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Cook County ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Award Recipient ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Book Award ◽  
Mexican Government ◽  
Duke University ◽  
Cristero Rebellion

In Magical Habits Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with both the afterlives of history and racial capitalism. Whether dwelling on mundane aspects of everyday life, such as the smell of old kitchen grease, or grappling with the thorny, unsatisfying question of authenticity, Huerta stages a dynamic conversation among genres, voices, and archives: personal and critical essays exist alongside a fairy tale; photographs and restaurant menus complement fictional monologues based on her family's history. Developing a new mode of criticism through storytelling, Huerta takes readers through Cook County courtrooms, the Cristero Rebellion (in which her great-grandfather was martyred by the Mexican government), Japanese baths in San Francisco—and a little bit about Chaucer too. Ultimately, Huerta sketches out habits of living while thinking that allow us to consider what it means to live with and try to peer beyond history even as we are caught up in the middle of it. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Student Politics, National Politics: Mexico’s National Student Union, 1926–1943

2006 ◽  
Vol 62 (04) ◽  
pp. 533-562 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Espinosa
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Private School ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
National Politics ◽  
School Students ◽  
The Government ◽  
Cristero Rebellion ◽  
Del Rio ◽  
Church Affiliation ◽  
The University

In 1926 students enrolled in Mexico City’s exclusive Catholic preparatory schools faced a crisis that threatened to ruin their academic careers. They were in a serious quandary because officials at the government-supported National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) were placing what were viewed as unfair obstacles to their plans of matriculating into the university, thereby threatening the aspirations that these students and their parents had for their futures. Their predicament was directly related to the deteriorating political climate that would soon produce the religious civil war known as the Cristero Rebellion of 1926-1929. These students were being victimized by pro-government UNAM officials because of their Catholic Church affiliation; this at a time that the Church was locked in a bitter struggle with President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1928). The heart of the conflict was Calles’s steadfast determination to enforce the anticlerical provisions contained in the Constitution of 1917. This landmark document encapsulated many of the central demands of the men and women who, like President Calles, had fought in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). Calles was a dedicated anticlerical who believed that the nation’s social, political, economic, and educational development required a dramatic reduction in the Roman Catholic Church’s influence within Mexican society. By mid 1926 these affected students had organized themselves into a citywide student group, the Union of Private School Students, with the goal of defending themselves from what they perceived to be the arbitrary, ideologically driven actions of university officials. However, the evolution of this nascent student organization changed dramatically when its activities drew the attention and interest of the country’s most important Catholic official, the Archbishop of Mexico José Mora y del Río.

The Changing Church in Mexico and Its Challenge to the State

1981 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 540-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claude Pomerleau
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
Cumulative Process ◽  
Cristero Rebellion ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Church

Since the nineteenth century, Mexican history has encompassed many social conflicts that range from local rebellions to full-scale revolutions. Church-state relations have been closely related to, and affected by, these conflicts. The struggle between church and state led to the War of the Reform (1858) and to the Cristero Rebellion (1926). Both of these armed conflicts were resolved through an improvised and cumulative process that eventually did as much to obscure the causes of conflict as to remedy them. After independence, the liberals initiated the first phase of conflict, a conflict eventually extended into the twentieth century by various advocates of a strong, secular state. The conflict began as a resistance to the efforts to reform the church and to give the state a neutral orientation and subsequently escalated into a divisive cultural war. Conservative politicians and religious leaders took up the liberal challenge with a doctrine justifying a specific political order at almost any price, thereby involving the church and the state in a mutually destructive and increasingly bitter struggle.

Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Butler
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Popular Piety ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
Religious Cultures ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Institutional Conflict ◽  
Cristero Rebellion ◽  
Social Catholicism

This book provides a new interpretation of the cristero war (1926–29), which divided Mexico's peasantry into rival camps loyal to the Catholic Church (cristero) or the Revolution (agrarista). It puts religion at the heart of our understanding of the revolt by showing how peasant allegiances often resulted from genuinely popular cultural and religious antagonisms. The book challenges the assumption that Mexican peasants in the 1920s shared religious outlooks and that their behaviour was mainly driven by political and material factors. Focusing on the state of Michoacán in western-central Mexico, it seeks to integrate both cultural and structural lines of inquiry. First charting the uneven character of Michoacán's historical formation in the late colonial period and the nineteenth century, the book shows how the emergence of distinct agrarian regimes and political cultures was later associated with varying popular responses to post-revolutionary state formation in the areas of educational and agrarian reform. At the same time, it is argued that these structural trends were accompanied by increasingly clear divergences in popular religious cultures, including lay attitudes to the clergy, patterns of religious devotion and deviancy, levels of sacramental participation, and commitment to militant ‘social’ Catholicism. As peasants in different communities developed distinct parish identities, so the institutional conflict between Church and state acquired diverse meanings and provoked violently contradictory popular responses. Thus the fires of revolt burned all the more fiercely because they inflamed a countryside that — then as now — was deeply divided in matters of faith.

Father, Where Art Thou? Catholic Priests and Mexico's 1929 Relación de Sacerdotes

2018 ◽  
Vol 98 (4) ◽  
pp. 635-667
Author(s):  
Matthew Butler ◽  
Kevin D. Powell
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
Cristero Rebellion ◽  
Religious Crisis ◽  
The Catholic Church

Abstract This article studies an ecclesiastical census, the Relación de sacerdotes, that was compiled by the Secretariat of the Interior during Mexico's Cristero War in 1929. We propose that this statistical device ultimately helped the Catholic Church and the Portes Gil government to plot a way out of the religious crisis. It did so by providing a mutually acceptable means for priests to register with the postrevolutionary state and by providing a discursive mechanism for the Catholic clergy to present itself to the regime as a national, less Rome-oriented body. The Relación can therefore give historians insights into the contingent and bureaucratic ways that revolutionary and ecclesiastical elites renegotiated the contours of Mexico's secular order. The second half of the article contains an analysis of the Relación. There we argue that the Relación offers a kind of prosopographical and political snapshot of the Mexican clergy during the Cristero Rebellion.

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