Cristero War Research Articles

Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War

Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War

Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War

Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War

Sobre Julia G. Young, Mexican Exodus. Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of The Cristero War

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Mexican exodus: emigrants, exiles, and refugees of the Cristero War

Mexican exodus: emigrants, exiles, and refugees of the Cristero War

Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War by Julia G. Young

Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War by Julia G. Young

For God and Revolution: Priest, Peasant, and Agrarian Socialism in the Mexican Huasteca

For God and Revolution: Priest, Peasant, and Agrarian Socialism in the Mexican Huasteca

2013 Siglo de Oro Drama Festival, Chamizal

2013 Siglo de Oro Drama Festival, Chamizal Anna-Lisa Halling, Coordinated and Laura L. Vidler Each year the Chamizal National Memorial, located in El Paso, Texas, hosts the well-attended Siglo de Oro Spanish Drama Festival. 2013’s installment, which ran from March 6 to March 10, featured professional theater groups from Mexico (Puebla) and Spain (Murcia, Segovia, and San Clemente). The works produced included the more traditional comedia fare (El caballero de Olmedo and La vengadora de las mujeres), a theatrical re-creation of a liturgical ceremony (Misterio del Cristo de los Gascones), an adaptation of a narrative work (El coloquio de los perros), and a compilation of crowd-pleasing entremeses (De burladores y burlados). The following reviews, each written by a different reviewer, offer a critical look at these theatrical productions. The reviews and the reviewers are as diverse as the plays themselves and are meant to offer varying viewpoints and insights into a unique compendium of dramatic endeavors. El caballero de Olmedo by Lope de Vega On March 6, The Shake and Falstaff Company (Puebla, Mexico) opened the 2013 International Siglo de Oro Drama Festival at the Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso, TX, with a performance of Lope’s tragicomedy El caballero de Olmedo. Director Abril Mayett’s production takes several liberties with the setting and casting of the play with mixed results. Mayett frames the work within the context of Mexico’s Cristero War (1926–1929), during which Catholics and the Catholic Church rebelled against the harsh lines drawn between church and state by Mexico’s post-Revolution constitution. The setting is emphasized with varying effect through added and modified dialogue, costume, music, and two extra characters: a bishop and a town mayor. These incidental characters provide the bulk of the additional dialogue through a series of clandestine negotiations that, together, highlight the corruption, hypocrisy, and complicity of the milieu. Appearances of the obispo and the alcalde frame the work throughout, as does the accompaniment of a group of itinerant mariachis, in [End Page 167] huaraches and sombreros, of comically dubious skill. The minimalist set and strings of lights crisscrossed overhead are reminiscent of a summer evening feria. The unusual multiple castings crafted by Mayett, while extremely enterprising and cost effective, leave several issues unresolved without truly enhancing the production. The dizzying casting begins with Mayett herself, who plays both Inés and the gracioso Tello. Fernando Villa Proal plays not only the antagonist, Rodrigo, but also Inés’s father, Don Pedro, and the alcalde. Mario Eduardo D’León plays both Alonso and Leonor. Mónica Bejarano, amazingly, plays Fabia, Ana (the maid), the obispo, Rodrigo’s friend Fernando, and also the Sombra. The cast is certainly to be commended for tackling such a difficult acting (and costuming) challenge. Mayett’s performance, in particular, was a tour de force. Her characterization of each role was so distinctive that, at the curtain call, the audience was baffled by the “absence” of Inés; they had not realized that Mayett had simply taken her bow dressed as Tello (a tip of the hat and a letting-down of hair might have helped here). Obviously, these double and even quintuple castings require some practical adjustments to the dramatic text. For example, because Inés and Tello can never appear onstage together, Fabia becomes the Latin teacher in the second act, and Tello’s lines are redistributed to Don Pedro. The very tall D’León, cross-dressed as Leonor, is forced to play up the height difference between him and Bejarano as Fernando. The resulting slapstick has them unable to keep their hands (and faces) off each other. This sexual comedy spills over to D’León’s portrayal of Alonso when he gets caught by Don Pedro in the house. Inés attempts to hide her physical pleasure as Alonso “hides” under her skirts. When all is said and done, Mayett’s multiple castings and the resulting extradramatic consequences detract from the layers of meaning appended to the production by the Cristero War setting. The limited number of players minimizes opportunities to expose alliances or juxtapose oppositions. For example, since Rodrigo and Don Pedro can...

Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico

In the last decade, a number of studies have explored state building in Mexico during the crucial period of the 1930s, giving us a much better idea of the fragility of the central government and the continuing significance of regional and local leaders as well as diverse forces in opposition to revolutionary projects. By exploring several regional cases of the relationship between the reinstitutionalizing Mexican state and the embattled Roman Catholic Church in the 1930s, Ben Fallaw shows us how tenuous the reach of the central government into the countryside actually was, how central state projects were greeted and resisted in different ways in different places, and how weak, ultimately, was the state’s centralized power. He presents us with a sophisticated and nuanced view of the ways in which revolutionary goals such as agrarian reform, government schools, and the Psychological Revolution against the Roman Catholic Church were negotiated and often thwarted. Geographically, he ranges from heavily Catholic areas to those that were not, in his terms, “levitical,” from both coasts to the interior of the country.Within a single state, some areas were more strongly religious than others or were more defiant of the central government’s project of land reform; the alliances and forms that resistance took differed significantly from place to place. Basically, however, Fallaw finds that in 1940, at the end of the period that he considers, the central state “was much feebler, and its social support was much shallower, than the current scholarly consensus represents” (p. 223). According to him, the Mexican central government, in the decades after the revolution, had established not hegemony but rather what Antonio Gramsci had called “dominance without hegemony” (p. 223), which is certainly a reasonable corrective to the existing historiography. Revolutionary goals, in particular land reform and the elimination of the Roman Catholic Church’s cultural and institutional power, were repeatedly thwarted by some natural but also some quite unexpected alliances between church supporters and others in a given community or region.Fallaw focuses on socialist education and agrarian reform, with the teachers and regional supervisors from the Secretaría de Educación Pública acting as the principal representatives of the central government. He documents the sometimes subtle but not infrequently violent action against these agents to prevent either one or both of these goals. Though the institutional church was usually not actively—or at least not visibly— engaged in resisting the postrevolutionary government, a “radial strategy” of defiance linked Catholic women and men, local and regional officials, business leaders, groups of students, and sometimes even ostensibly revolutionary parties to some clergy and more formal lay leaders (p. 6). A second Cristero War of guerilla attacks continued in many locations throughout the country, making the jobs of schoolteachers not only difficult but also dangerous. President Lázaro Cárdenas, in order to save his presidency and calm the continuing violence in the late 1930s, was forced by this opposition to slow down efforts against Catholic practice and institutions.Still, a larger religiopolitical uprising in 1938 led by Saturnino Cedillo failed, according to Fallaw, not because of any Catholic acquiescence to postrevolutionary projects but because of exhaustion with civil strife. He thinks that Cárdenas, rather than reconciling the Mexican countryside to the central state, calmed the waters sufficiently to pass the presidency on to an avowed Catholic from his own party. This hold on power, Fallaw asserts, was possible not because the countryside had been seriously changed but because new political elites tacitly admitted “defeat on the religious question” and even on land distribution, shifting their commitments to “urbanization and industrialization” (p. 225). Perhaps these conclusions are too strong; a great deal of land had been distributed and the parameters of religious power had changed. Yet whether or not one agrees with Fallaw that these were major revolutionary failures, his careful marshaling of evidence and his sound analysis make clear why agrarian reform and changing religious practice and devotion were extremely difficult to achieve.

Toribio Romo, el Padre Pollero

This essay focuses on the folklore surrounding Toribio Romo, a young priest from Jalostotitlán, Mexico, who was killed during the Cristero War in 1928 and canonized in 2000. Recognized as the patron saint of migrants and popularly known as el Padre Pollero, or the Holy Coyote, Santo Toribio has evolved into a popular or folk saint who appears mysteriously in the desert and helps immigrants cross the border safely into the United States. The folklore surrounding el Padre Pollero is consistent with that associated with various Mexican virgins and saints but is unique in that el Padre Toribio is a transnational figure who appears at the international border rather than in a particular locale in Mexico. Transcending conventional borders and nation-states, he embodies the “practical spirituality” or cultural spiritual economy that migrants have constructed to help them deal not only with suffering and adversity during their migration but with the inequities they face in the United States.

The Calles Government and Catholic Dissidents: Mexico's Transnational Projects of Repression, 1926-1929

During the late 1920s, the Mexican government under President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1928) confronted multiple challenges to state consolidation. These included plots by political rivals, foreign relations crises, and several popular revolts. The longest-lasting and most destabilizing of these was the Cristero War, which persisted from 1926 until 1929, with sporadic uprisings into the early 1930s. Despite these challenges, Calles and his handpicked successors not only remained in power at the beginning of the 1930s, but also launched the single-party political system that would endure in Mexico until the end of the twentieth century.

The Calles Government and Catholic Dissidents: Mexico's Transnational Projects of Repression, 1926-1929

During the late 1920s, the Mexican government under President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1928) confronted multiple challenges to state consolidation. These included plots by political rivals, foreign relations crises, and several popular revolts. The longest-lasting and most destabilizing of these was the Cristero War, which persisted from 1926 until 1929, with sporadic uprisings into the early 1930s. Despite these challenges, Calles and his handpicked successors not only remained in power at the beginning of the 1930s, but also launched the single-party political system that would endure in Mexico until the end of the twentieth century.

La literatura de la Cristiada: una visión apocalíptica de la historia de México

The collapse of social and political order provoked by the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the Cristero war (1926-1934) are two historical moments that saw the breakdown of the religious world’s certainty. Apart from the institutional conflict between Catholic church and Mexican State, the people experienced the threat of a hecatomb, the deprivation of religious protection, known and alive since the period of the Spanish conquest and colonization. This lack of a space for the community and the impossibility of expressing religious rites fed an apocalyptic vision of the world. Not being allowed to access places of worship under the government of Plutarco Elias Calles unleashed the violent reaction of a profoundly religious people, which took arms to defend what it considered fundamental: its own ancestral tradition and a sacred space which it had been denied. In the midst of the silences which official historiography maintained during the years following this unpleasant chapter of Mexican history, Cristero literature has constructed its own vision, an apocalyptic vision which breaks down the temporal and social boundaries within which it has been studied. The present work concentrates on the analysis of the Cristero novel which represents the Cristiada from different perspectives, one of which underlines the redeeming nature of the battle favoring the use of the apocalyptic metaphor of martyrdom.

Una estampa apocalíptica de los tiempos de la guerra cristera: El triunfo de Cristo Rey de Gonzalo Carrasco Espinosa SJ

Una pintura inédita de Gonzalo Carrasco, realizada en los últimos años de su vida, ofrece interesante material de reflexión sobre la iconografía de este pintor relacionada con el tema de la guerra cristera. En este boceto incorporó, a manera de citas, tanto imágenes representadas en otras obras suyas, como obras reconocidas y elementos del fotoperiodismo contemporáneo, poniendo todo ello al servicio de una “meditación al modo ignaciano”, a manera de homilía pintada. Su forma de componer sus pinturas, refractaria a la incorporación de elementos plásticos de vanguardia, se vio fuertemente influenciada, en las últimas décadas de su vida, por elementos compositivos propios de la prensa ilustrada de su época, así como por una paleta más colorida y libre que la utilizada en sus tiempos de estudiante.

Cristero Diaspora: Mexican Immigrants, The U.S. Catholic Church, and Mexico's Cristero War, 1926-29

The author examines the connections between Mexico's Cristero War, a bloody church-state conflict that raged across west-central Mexico from 1926 to 1929, and the great wave of Mexican emigration to the United States that occurred during the same period. Although historians have generally treated the Cristero War and Mexican emigration as two distinct and unrelated subjects, a rich array of archival evidence from both sides of the border demonstrates that thousands of Mexican immigrants during the late 1920s supported the Cristero cause from the United States. By elucidating the geographical and political interconnections between the Cristero War and Mexican emigration and exploring the instrumental role played by the U.S. Catholic Church in placing religious exiles from Mexico within immigrant communities, the author demonstrates the development of a diaspora of Mexican Cristero supporters across cities and regions in the United States.

Los Del Olvido

Los Del Olvido David Dorado Romo (bio) Take a good look at what becomes of the Mexican who goes north. He ends up a man without religion, without a country or home… a coward, an afeminado who is incapable of feeling shame for having abandoned his responsibilities to his family. Despite this, the roads are packed with Mexicans headed toward the United States in search of bitter bread. Everywhere you hear the rallying cry—"¡Vámonos al norte!" —St. Toribio Romo, ¡Vámonos al Norte! Every Mexican, to paraphrase the chilango performance artist Guillermo-Gómez Peña, is a potential Pocho. Take my tío Toribio Romo for instance. My father's second cousin was a priest and a writer from Jalisco, Mexico, who didn't like Mexicans-turned-Pochos too much during his lifetime but became, after his death, a transcultural hybrid of sorts. Santo Toribio, who was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000, is known as the patron saint of migrants. Some call him the "Holy Smuggler." But I like to think of my tío as the first officially certified Pocho Saint. The funny thing is that while he was still alive, Uncle Toribio had some pretty harsh words for Mexicans who crossed over to the US. He called them "traitors to the motherland" and all sorts of other unflattering names. But as divine providence would have it, decades after Toribio was assassinated by Mexican federal soldiers during the Cristero War in 1928 for practicing the priesthood illegally, he seems to have ended up crossing to this side of the border himself—today people in California and Arizona say they sometimes see him walking around or driving a red pickup truck through the deserts rescuing stranded immigrants. Recently, I traveled to Guadalajara where I uncovered a huge batch of St. Romo's writings in the Catholic Church's historical archives. That's where I met the Promoter of the Faith, popularly known as the Devil's Advocate—the archivist appointed by the Vatican to gather documents and dig up dirt on candidates for sainthood. The Devil's Advocate allowed me to take digital photographs of hundreds of pages written by Toribio Romo, none of which have ever been published. Most of them were plays, sermons, homilies, letters to his family, and journal entries he wrote hurriedly on scraps of paper inside caves and abandoned adobe shacks while on the run from government troops. The most fascinating literary piece I came across was a one-act comedy Toribio Romo wrote titled ¡Vámonos al Norte! Believing humor could be an effective weapon in the Catholic Church's "holy crusade" against emigration to the US, Romo staged this slapstick morality play in the Los Altos de Jalisco region in the early 1920s to convince his parishioners to stay home. ¡Vámonos al Norte! depicts a cultural clash between Rogiciano, an Americanized Mexican migrant who returns to his village in central Mexico with foolish airs of superiority, and Sancho, a rough but sharp-witted campesino who never left. In the opening scenes, Rogiciano impresses the locals by flaunting his newly acquired English and proclaiming himself a lover of "progress and civilization." But towards the latter part of the play, Sancho literally beats the acculturated Mexican into submission by slapping him over the head with a cane and forcing him to stand before the audience like a mannequin—Brechtian style—to expose the evils of emigration. Rogiciano is the ultimate Spanglish-speaking cultural half-breed. With his slicked-back hair, sweet-smelling cologne, silk shirt, and high-water pants, he is the very embodiment of the corrosive influences that returning emigrants bring back from the other side—irresponsibility, the loss of family values, materialism, and sexual ambiguity. If you betray your country and go north, Toribio Romo's play warns, you might come back as a "rooster hen that neither crows nor lays eggs" or, even worse, a Protestant. At the end of the theatre piece, Rogiciano is forced to strip down to his underwear, like the mythical Pachuco character of Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit (1978). In the past few years, I've come across quite a...

Economía poética de Pedro Páramo: de la Revolución a la Cristiada

All the work of Juan Rulfo is a model of brevity. The narrative discourse of Pedro Paramo illustrates the efficiency, not only brevity, but poetic economy, understanding this as the art of projecting meaning by means of limitation in the employment of resources for meaning. All of the seventy fragments which make up said discourse are examples of this type of economy, but among them there is one which stands out: fragment 67 which recounts, in fourteen replicas (like a sonnet), the fourteen years running from the consolidation of Carranzism in 1915 until the cristero war ended in 1929. In light of its economy, the alluded to fragment is examined.

Los distintos tipos de subversión femenina presentados en Recuerdos del porvenir

The novel Recuerdos del Porvenir (1963) by Mexican author Elena Garro depicts in an innovative way the military occupation of Ixtepec, that happened after the Mexican Revolution and the subsequent Cristero War of 1920s. Through a collective narrator, the writer gives voice to subaltern groups of population who are forgotten or misrepresented in Revolutionary novels written by Garro’s masculine counterparts. Most importantly, her narrative is replete with examples of feminine subversion toward the status quo and the locus of enunciation. At the same time, Garro breaks with the canon by changing the focus to the female protagonists and by introducing in her novel the Magical Realism to illustrate the female interiority and sensitivity, as well as her personal vision and interpretation of the world. In her maximum expression of rebellion, Garro shows a variety of groups of Mexican women who tried very hard to reach an authentic identity, but the patriarchal society thwarted their plans. As a result, the woman stumbles and fails to contribute to the cause, sometimes becoming a mere traitor and then also a simple witness of the injustice. Many times, she represents main transmitting and defending agent of the same chauvinistic culture that has subjugated her.