This article examines pedagogical materials and Catholic youth magazines to uncover how, between 1926 and 1939, the Juventud Católica Femenina Mexicana (JCFM) pursued peasant moralization campaigns driven by young women’s shared distrust of Indigenous and mixed-race campesinas. It unearths the authoritarian dimensions of the group’s educational initiatives and exposes these efforts as fundamentally racial, gendered, and class-conscious political and religious projects. Moreover, this article traces how the JCFM, as an influential upper-class laywomen’s group, tried—and failed—to establish a nationwide educational curriculum grounded in Church doctrine to counter the influence of Protestant missions and Mexico’s nascent Secretariat of Public Education. It attributes these shortcomings to laywomen’s adherence to social hierarchy and their reluctance to offer meaningful solutions to peasant women’s economic hardships.

Authors from a transnational research group analyze Catholic women’s political mobilizations, acknowledging Catholic women’s heritage of organization to maintain their religious practice in their communities from the colonial era onward. These activities afforded women opportunities for civic experience and leadership roles that continued through Mexico’s nineteenth-century political and social debates. This special issue focuses on how twentieth-century women developed new approaches to address revolutionary policies and projects, radical mobilizations, technological changes, and transformations within the Church following the Second Vatican Council. The authors argue that Catholic women have continued to envision themselves as political actors within the framework of their religion, expanding goals to transform religious and civic practices.

Building on recent research, this paper recounts the emergence of Catholic women’s activism in favor of the right to abortion in late twentieth-century Mexico. The article argues that contests over legitimacy—specifically, disputes among Catholics about which beliefs are legitimately Catholic—are central to this history. In this case, the article follows Catholic women’s attempts to legitimize their position in favor of the right to abortion and Catholic authorities’ attempts to delegitimize the same idea. The paper concludes with a 1992 episode in Guanajuato that has not received much scholarly attention, when secular and Catholic feminists collaborated. Because these Catholic activists faced opposition from angry protestors, they set up a press conference to dispel any misconceptions and legitimize their own Catholic position in favor of the right to abortion to the Mexican public. The resistance Elvia Neri, a retired Catholic woman and mayordoma for her church, faced led her to share her testimonio, a rare archival source that publicly reconciled a commitment to both the Catholic faith and reproductive rights. Scholarship on feminist mobilization has at least included the work of Catholic activists who advocated the right to abortion. However, these contests over legitimacy have led scholarship on Catholic women’s activism to neglect Catholic perspectives that favor the right to abortion.

El presente artículo concibe los orígenes del activismo católico femenino en la fundación de la Unión de Damas Católicas Mexicanas (1912). Se busca analizar la forma en que esta organización recurrió al papel tradicional de la mujer como madre y esposa para construir un activismo político y social. Su lucha se centró en defender la fe católica del Estado posrevolucionario que buscaba limitar los privilegios de la Iglesia al máximo. Se hace énfasis en que lograron establecer y consolidar una red de solidaridad que les permitió promover sus actividades y sostenerlas, sobre todo, durante la Guerra Cristera (1926–29). Desde la perspectiva de género, se estudian las tensiones políticas y sociales que se desarrollaron en torno a la participación de la mujer en la esfera pública.

This article examines José Servando Teresa de Mier’s “Carta de despedida a los mexicanos.” In the letter written in 1821, Mier argues that the name México must be spelled with an x to preserve the name’s originary connotations. Analyzing the poetic strategies and messianic discourses implicit in how Mier composes the idea signified by the name México, I argue that Mier supplies a plausible argument for its time about the sources of Mexican identity and nationhood. Given the context of uncertainty around the future of Novohispanic independence in early 1821, the “Carta” is a timely intervention about the nation at a critical juncture.

En este artículo presentamos por primera vez series anuales completas de la población mexicana por estados en el periodo 1820–70, utilizando para ello los conteos de contemporáneos existentes y las estimaciones realizadas más recientemente, además de fórmulas construidas con el propósito de llenar los huecos existentes. Además, calculamos la variación porcentual y la tasa de variación derivadas de estas cifras en fechas significativas, así como otros indicadores que nos permiten concluir que el crecimiento demográfico mexicano fue lento. Finalmente, exploramos los factores más significativos que originaron este comportamiento, a saber, las guerras, invasiones e inestabilidad política, las epidemias y el desempeño económico.

Three visions of anthropology collided in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas in the 1950s. Infrastructural improvements, indigenista politics, and increased US social science funding intensified research on Indigenous Chiapas. The scene drew together imperial travelers, modernist ethnographers, and Mexican development administrators. Among them was Danish explorer-archaeologist Frans Blom, who struggled to establish his estate as a reputationally redeeming fieldwork institute. This article parses how some modernist anthropologists distanced themselves from Blom’s imperial legacy, while others pressed his ideas of cultural continuity into implicit, controversial claims for their centrality to ancient and modern Maya studies writ large.

Wind bands were an integral component of the turbulent political currents that dominated the late Porfiriato (the dictatorship of President Porfirio Díaz, 1876–1911) and Mexican Revolution (1910–20). Three case studies set along the US-Mexico border demonstrate how musical excellence was maintained while political allegiances and methods of financial patronage were shifting radically under successive governments during a time of violence and instability. Close examination of the use of wind-band music in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua—at the Díaz-Taft presidential meeting in 1909, the Battle of Juárez in 1911, and Alfredo Pacheco’s El Paso performances in 1916—reveals how band music was used by political and military factions as a form of “soft power.” It was also used as entertainment and artistic edification, as well as to heighten the rituals of daily life at public and private events, such as concerts, serenades, political rallies, bullfights, battles, and executions.