An interpretation of Cueva de la Huachizca, Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacan, Mexico

Cueva de la Huachizca is located in the humid forests of the Municipio of Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán. During the Postclassic period (1300−1520 ad), Santa Clara del Cobre was a part of the Tarascan Señorio. Ethnographic accounts describe the use of Cueva de la Huachizca as a place of refuge during the Cristero Rebellion (1921−1926). Recent investigations suggest a long history of use including graffiti and inscriptions from the 1800s–1900s and a rock art panel. The panel consists of pecked petroglyphs depicting a man facing an eagle, above a spiral motif. Stylistic analysis of the panel suggests that the rock art was created during pre-Hispanic times, likely by the Postclassic Tarascans. As observed in several regions of Mesoamerica, for the Tarascans, caves were also liminal spaces and had an important role in Postclassic Tarascan cosmology. A ceramic resinera, a pine resin pot, an eagle’s feather, and charcoal were also recovered. The resinera age was estimated by researchers at Archaeomagnetic Services, Geophysics Institute at the National Autonomous University of México-Campus Morelia, Michoacán to between 1921 and 1980. Ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts describe caves as houses of fertility and rain deities, an idea that while slightly transformed, has survived over 500 years of colonization, and remains in the communities’ social memories. These findings demonstrate the cave’s significance among the descendent communities and Cueva de la Huachizca as an important sacred site.

Magical Habits

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

Legacies of Resistance: Mobilization Against Organized Crime in Mexico

What are the legacies of armed resistance? Why do some communities engage in armed mobilization in response to violence, disorder, and insecurity, while others under very similar conditions do not? Focusing on mobilization against organized crime in contemporary Mexico, we argue that historical experiences of armed resistance can have lasting effects on local preferences, networks, and capacities, which can facilitate armed collective action under conditions of rampant insecurity in the long run. Empirically, we study the Cristero rebellion in the early 20th century and grassroots anti-crime mobilization in Mexico during recent years. Using an instrumental variables approach, we show that communities that pushed back against state incursions almost a century earlier were more likely to rise up against organized crime in contemporary times.

Conflict with Euro-American Mormon Leadership, 1922–1935

This chapter discusses Margarito Bautista’s efforts as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico from 1922 to 1924, his preaching of unconventional doctrines while there, the fracas that ensued after his return to Salt Lake City over the lack of indigenous leadership in the Mexican Branch, and Bautista’s subsequently diminished influence in the Mormon Church. It argues that Bautista’s meteoric rise through the ranks of Mormon leadership came to a halt as he became increasingly insistent that Mexicans should govern their own congregations. Bautista’s name disappeared from the records of the Mexican Branch at about the same time the company that had employed him prior to his mission went bankrupt. During this period, his nationalism grew as he read about the Cristero Rebellion in Mexico. By 1930, without influence in the Church and unemployed, Bautista took up his pen and began to write.

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

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.