Daniel Newcomer, Reconciling Modernity: Urban State Formation in 1940s León, Mexico, Lincoln & London, University of Nebraska Press, 2004, 288 pp.

Abstract

Reconciling Modernity is an important contribution to the scholarship on post-revolutionary nation-building and 1940s cultural politics in Mexico. Newcomer takes aim at the standard interpretation of 1940s Mexican politics that argues that the Cardenista revolutionary program had already accomplished its goals by the time that new president Manuel Avila Camacho (1940–1946) signalled the end of the church-state conflict by publicly expressing his belief in God in 1940. In some ways, this was a masterful stroke by Avila Camacho, mirroring the creation of the revolutionary iconography that often depicted Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Alvaro Obregón, and Venustiano Carranza as having always been on the same side of the revolutionary struggle. By publicly defusing the church-state conflict, Avila Camacho was able to further strengthen the anti-clerical elements of Article 3 of the Mexican Constitution in addition to further centralising his power base by reining in both the labor and agrarian interests in the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano or PRM. Newcomer argues that in León, Guanajuato the church-state conflict reached its apex in a ‘massacre’ in 1946 when federal troops killed several dozen Sinarquista protestors—who had formed a Catholic opposition movement—during a political demonstration. It was only then that the elites of the PRM and the Sinarquistas agreed to accommodate each other by mutually pursuing modernisation.