Connected Struggles: Catholics, Nationalists, and Transnational Relations between Mexico and Quebec, 1917–1945 by Maurice Demers

Abstract

Reviewed by: Connected Struggles: Catholics, Nationalists, and Transnational Relations between Mexico and Quebec, 1917–1945 by Maurice Demers Robert Curley Connected Struggles: Catholics, Nationalists, and Transnational Relations between Mexico and Quebec, 1917–1945. By Maurice Demers. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 290. $100.00. ISBN 978-0-773-543560.) Connected Struggles is about Québécois nationalists and their relations with Mexican Catholics during the decade of the 1940s. From the outset, Demers plays with the unlikely pairing these two groups might seem to make. They found themselves at opposite ends of a North American cultural and geographical expanse, but found affinity and forged friendship against the backdrop of the fall of France to Nazi Germany and the "neo-colonial" powerhouses of Great Britain and the United States of America. The author sets out a historical context that ranges broadly, signaling out the importance of social revolution and religious rebellion in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the often tense and uncomfortable relationship between Anglophone Canada and its Francophone minority. This makes for a challenging and complex argument that spends equal time examining the internal politics of two sovereign nations and international relations as imagined, constructed, and played out between subaltern groups within each country. These histories are connected on several levels. First of all, as a study of international relations it consciously shifts the focus from government to organized groups in civil society that crafted policies at the margins of the state with an eye toward the advancement of their own political interests. Demers characterizes French Canadians as Catholics in a nation where Protestant faith and English language were hegemonic in state and society. Similarly, Mexican Catholics were subject [End Page 134] to, or subjects of, a post-revolutionary state that was actively, at times radically, anticlerical in its politics. These two groups built an unlikely friendship and alliance in the 1940s with the dual objective of achieving greater influence at home and channels of cultural diplomacy that might strengthen each one. Chapters 1 and 2 cover the general history of each country during the generation leading up to World War II. This background is crucial because most readers will be familiar with only one national history. The two chapters do a good job of laying out the key moments and figures, as well as a basic historiography for each side. The following three chapters tell separate but intertwined stories about how the two groups forged international bonds of friendship and political alliance with the goal of strengthening their lot domestically. Chapter 3 covers the Union des Latins d'Amérique as it developed a Pan-American Hispanism that relied on Roman Catholic identity and the general idea of a Latin tradition. Latinité might appeal to Quebec and Mexico as a shared "civilization" distinct from and opposite to Anglo-Saxon culture. Chapter 4 tells the story of student exchanges that brought Canadians, particularly young women, to visit Mexico City and its national university, as well as some Mexicans to visit Montreal between 1943 and 1945. Chapter 5 is about the 1945 crowning of Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe as patron saint of the Americas. Canadian Catholics sent a large diplomatic delegation to the jubilee, and the week-long event played out as a test of the relations of good faith between the Catholic Church and Mexico's post-revolutionary state. All these events are meant to tell a more general story about the construction of the modern public sphere in secular society. They show political minorities in both nations as they attempt to practice citizenship in an expanding public sphere. Demers sees them as "stakeholders" who actively play diverse roles in civil society through the lens of identity politics, be it Canadian Franco-Nationalism or Mexican Catholicism. The concept of stakeholder is insufficiently parsed and problemetized. However, it serves Demers as a primary organizing concept to explain the faces of modern citizenship across two nations, languages, and cultures. It also pro-vides a way of explaining the affinities between these groups as they built bridges of friendship and informal channels of diplomacy across the continent during the Second World War...