Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico

by Ben Fallaw

The religion question—the place of the Church in a Catholic country after an anticlerical revolution—profoundly shaped the process of state formation in Mexico. From the end of the Cristero War in 1929 until Manuel Ávila Camacho assumed the presidency in late 1940 and declared his faith, Mexico's unresolved religious conflict roiled regional politics, impeded federal schooling, undermined agrarian reform, and flared into sporadic violence, ultimately frustrating the secular vision shared by Plutarco Elías Calles and Lázaro Cárdenas.Ben Fallaw argues that previous scholarship has not appreciated the pervasive influence of Catholics and Catholicism on postrevolutionary state formation. By delving into the history of four understudied Mexican states, he is able to show that religion swayed regional politics not just in states such as Guanajuato, in Mexico's central-west "Rosary Belt," but even in those considered much less observant, including Campeche, Guerrero, and Hidalgo. Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico reshapes our understanding of agrarian reform, federal schooling, revolutionary anticlericalism, elections, the Segunda (a second Cristero War in the 1930s), and indigenism, the Revolution's valorization of the Mesoamerican past as the font of national identity.

Ben Fallaw is Associate Professor of History and Latin American Studies at Colby College. He is the author of Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán, also published by Duke University Press, and a coeditor of Peripheral Visions: Politics, Society, and the Challenges of Modernity in Yucatan.

"This important book forces a rethinking of the efficacy and influence of agrarian and cultural revolutions not only in Mexico but throughout the world. In what is nothing short of a massive reappraisal of the pivotal presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, Ben Fallaw demonstrates how conservative Catholic opposition at the local and state levels consistently obstructed Cardenista reform. Based on his detailed reconstruction of circumstances and events in four very different Mexican states, he reminds us that conditions differed enormously among locales, even between two villages in the same state. His research is blockbuster in every possible way."—Terry Rugeley, author of Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876

"Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico should establish itself as a key text in Mexican revolutionary history. The author has done a prodigious quantity of research and organized it expertly, producing an original and convincing analysis of a major theme: Church-state conflict in the postrevolutionary period. The issue permeated Mexican politics and its exploration opens a window onto a variety of other themes, including state building, education, land reform, gender, ethnicity, violence, and local politics and elections."—Alan Knight, author of The Mexican Revolution

Genres: History

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This abundantly researched monograph argues that the role of Catholicism and Catholic opposition to the postrevolutionary state and its policies have been overlooked in scholarly work. By examining the Mexican state’s attempts to implement its revolutionary project – consisting of agrarian reform, federal “socialist” education, and anticlericalism – in the states of Campeche, Hidalgo, Guerrero, and Guanajuato – including in-depth examinations of some of those states’ subregions, Fallaw comes to the conclusion that the state could not effectively enforce its agenda due to Catholic opposition. This opposition came not only from the institutional Church, but more importantly from lay Catholics organized often without direct church oversight, in a “radial strategy” that mobilized civic action and subverted state surveillance. A key distinction Fallaw makes is that the Church did not seek to impede the state’s ability to govern but rather to block particular state policies it found objectionable. The overarching argument is therefore that due to Catholic action the revolutionary project was stymied in many areas, calling into doubt scholarship that concludes that Cárdenas succeeded in created a strong postrevolutionary state via popular consensus through that same revolutionary project.

While extremely useful in terms of the research acquired and now made accessible, it felt like this was material searching for an argument and the argument did not fit particularly well. Based on the evidence presented, it appears that Catholic opposition was merely one factor of many – including SEP ineptitude, bickering at the federal level, and vested wealth and power at the regional levels – that impeded the state’s more radical reforms. What the research seemed to be getting at, but what was not made plain, is that it was Catholicism more as an organizing and motivating belief rather than a formal institution that motivated effective action, with the institution and its actors behaving often as intermediaries between its more radical base and the revolutionary state with whom it sought some accommodation. In several examples, Fallaw points to Catholics voting in favor of gubernatorial candidates endorsed by the president as an example of subverting postrevolutionary state formation. It is not clear how a candidate that Calles selected winning an election with the help of Catholics makes the point that Catholics undermined Calles’s project. Overall, there is a lack of attention to power disputes at the federal level, an overinflation of the SEP with the entire state apparatus, overvaluation of the PNR as a democratic institution, and no transnational analysis outside of edicts from the Vatican (e.g., the need to consider the role of transnational fascism in right-wing opposition to the state). While containing a wealth of useful information, I am thus skeptical of the interpretative argument put forward by the author.