In the three ages into which the history writing of the Mexican Revolution is divided (the amateur, 1920–40; the statist, 1940–68; and the revisionist, dating from the late 1960s), aside from some notable exceptions, the religious conflict has been treated as a question of high-level Church and state relations. However, as the prominent revisionists Alan Knight and Jean Meyer pointed out, this failed to explain the heterogeneity of Catholic resistance. In order to understand this, they recommended focusing on three variables: the Church's grassroots organisation, local religiosity, and forms of revolutionary mobilisation in the different regions. In response to this challenge, there emerged at the very end of the twentieth century what seemed to be the fourth historiographic age, the nueva historia cultural or posrevisionismo, adopted by a wave of young researchers to which the majority of the contributors to the volume under review can be said to belong.
The presence of Knight and Meyer in this book is no coincidence. In the opening chapter, Knight explores revolutionary anticlericalism. He believes that achieving a fuller picture of this phenomenon entails going over the background since the late colonial period and mapping its geography. He observes how northern Mexico was characterised by heterodoxy and high levels of anticlericalism, the centre-north was more clerical, and the south saw the evolution of a popular Catholicism with syncretistic and ethnicist overtones. Adrian A. Bantjes also deals with anticlericalism. In opposition to those (such as Peter L. Reich) who maintain that there was no such thing, Bantjes shows that it was around for a quarter of a century (1914–38) and shook the entire country. This question needs to be explored more fully, and the ‘culturalist model’ is suited to the task (p. 125).
Knight's invitation to adopt a longue durée approach and to map the multiple political and religious cultures in play is taken up by almost all the contributors to the book. Hence, Fernando Cervantes demonstrates that the motives behind many communities' support for either liberals or conservatives, revolutionaries or Cristeros, corresponded to a shared overarching logic: the defence of local identities in the face of external threats.
Jean-Pierre Bastian, Keith Brewster and Claire Brewster address non-Catholic religious sociabilities. Bastian considers that the Protestant networks engaged the broad mass of people more than those of the spiritists – who were more elitist in tone – and that they featured throughout the revolutionary process, as well as in the development of educational and anticlerical policy. In their study of General Marcial Cavazos in Hidalgo, the Brewsters draw attention to the importance of spiritism as regards the ideals and actions of various revolutionary leaders, including such figures as Madero, Calles, Vasconcelos and Almazán.
Eight of the 13 chapters of the book are regional studies, covering urban Catholicism in Jalisco (Robert Curley) and Mexico City (Matthew Butler and Cristina A. Boylan) and differing Catholicism trends in Oaxaca (Jean Meyer, Edward Wright-Rios and Benjamin Smith), Campeche (Ben Fallaw) and Tabasco (Massimo De Giuseppe). Curley and Butler, respectively, explore the urban Catholic movements against anticlericalism, in terms of the emergence of a new citizens' movement in which modern agents used secular methods in their activities, even though the objective was to preserve traditions. Examining the peregrinations to promote the cult of Christ the King in 1926–8, Butler identifies genuine plebiscites against the regime. Through the pilgrimages the bishopric also wanted to reaffirm the discipline of the Catholic community, despite the fact that the organisation and logistics manifested a growing laicisation of religious authority, the dangers of which grew for the Episcopate with the assassination of Alvaro Obregón – which occurred in July 1928 and not in August as Butler erroneously states (p. 160). In turn, Boylan, looking at the cases of divorce and bigamy that reached the Matrimonial Tribunal of the Archdiocese of Mexico, notes that the litigants, mainly women, adopted a pragmatic approach, being prepared to use both the state and the Church to achieve the desired result (to get married or to get divorced).
In Oaxaca, Meyer notes the predominance of widespread passive (and peaceful) resistance in preference to its active (violent) counterpart, and the way this overwhelmed all efforts by the state to contain it. In Huajuapam de León, Smith traces the way that local cultures underpinned the social roots of the political parties. So, the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN, founded 1939) in the region is shown to have been based on a close alliance of ranchers, ethnic groups and the Church that went back to the Porfiriato. Wright-Rios analyses the movements surrounding a Marian apparition in Ixpantepec (to the indigenous girl Nicha) and also in Juquila, and their crushing by the Church and the menfolk of these communities. A major error in these cases was the bypassing of male leadership.
Finally, the cases of Campeche and Tabasco offer other variants of ‘folk’ Catholic resistance. In Campeche, observes Fallaw, the ‘civilising’ and ‘defanaticising’ crusade of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), supported by the leadership of the Partido Socialista Agrarista (Socialist Agrarian Party, PSA), gave rise in some regions to a highly peculiar coalition of ‘socialist caciques’ leading PSA supporters and Catholics (mainly Maya peasants), who blocked the policies of the SEP. De Giuseppe ends the book with an analysis of the forms taken by indigenous resistance – particularly on the part of the Choles who embraced the apostolate of the indigenous catechist Gabriel García in opposition to garridista anticlericalism, the fiercest of the revolution.
The case studies presented deal predominantly with the southern states, with a few from the centre and none from the north. However, I believe that these suffice to illustrate the panorama for research opened by post-revisionism (the construction of regional matrices of complex variables based on gender, ethnic, socio-political and cultural lines). These studies are bringing about a reinterpretation of the nature of the revolution and the structuring of the state and the Church itself (both institutions being marked by myriad power games and examples of local resistance). As Butler states with conviction (p. 15), ‘the Revolution was not so much God's funeral, then, as a period of religious change and effervescence’.
