HTY 300:Revolution; Professor Moon's Library Instruction: Cristero Rebellion

The Cristero movement is an essential part of the Mexican Revolution. When in 1926 relations between Church and state, old enemies and old partners, eventually broke down, when the churches closed and the liturgy was suspended, Rome, Washington and Mexico, without ever losing their heads, embarked upon a long game of chess. These years were crucial, because they saw the setting up of the contemporary political system. The state established its omnipotence, supported by a bureaucratic apparatus and a strong privileged class. Just at the moment when the state thought that it was finally supreme, at the moment at which it decided to take control of the Church, the Cristero movement arose, a spontaneous mass movement, particularly of peasants, unique in its spread, its duration, and its popular character. For obvious reasons, the existing literature has both denied its reality and slandered it.

Dr Butler 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). This book puts religion at the heart of our understanding of the revolt by showing how peasantallegiances often resulted from genuinely popular cultural and religious antagonisms. It 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 Michoacan inwestern-central Mexico, the volume seeks to integrate both cultural and structural lines of inquiry.First charting the uneven character of Michoacan's historical formation in the late colonial period and the nineteenth century, Dr Butler shows how the emergence of distinct agrarian regimes and political cultures was later associated with varying popular responses to post-revolutionary stateformation 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 ofsacramental 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 thefires of revolt burned all the more fiercely because they inflamed a countryside which - then as now - was deeply divided in matters of faith as well as politics.Based on oral testimonies and careful searches of dozens of ecclesiastical and state archives, this study makes an important contribution to the religious history of the Mexican Revolution.