Anticlericalism and Public Space in Revolutionary Jalisco

Abstract

The anticlerical attacks of radical nineteenth-century liberals provoked the Church and aided the rise of confessional politics from continental Europe to revolutionary Mexico. In the European case, Stathis Kalyvas has recently proposed that such anticlerical liberalism was often moved by two distinctive motives, one narrow and political, the other broad and institutional. These motives can be associated with the concepts of tactic and strategy as laid out by Michel de Certeau. Working from both conceptual pairings, we can characterize anticlericalism sometimes as a political tactic, responding to conjunctural circumstances, and other times as an institutional strategy, plotting out a terrain and a path on which to forge present and future power relationships. This sort of conceptualization, I believe, is also well-suited to analyses of revolutionary Mexico. Nonetheless, for the distinction between “political-tactical” and “institutional-strategic” to be helpful, historians also need to place anticlericalism within the confusing logic of destruction and reconstruction inherent to Mexico's revolutionary process.