Postrevolutionary Mexico Research Articles

Pious Delinquents: Anticlericalism and Crime in Postrevolutionary Mexico

As Agent 15 of the Mexico City judicial police made his way home for lunch on a day early in December 1926, he saw a balloon floating in the breeze. He rushed to the rooftopobservatorioof his apartment building, where he spotted a girl around 14 years old, wearing a lilac-colored dress, standing on a nearby roof and holding a string. Certain that the balloon had been released from this location, he ran down the stairs, and, while crossing the street, looked up to see yet another balloon. Balloons had been drifting through the sky since early morning, so many and from so many directions that police struggled to find where they were coming from. When the balloons popped, flyers came tumbling down, urging Catholics to engage in peaceful protest against government anticlericalism by adorning their houses with yellow and white stripes in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe on her upcoming feast day, December 12. Accompanied by a beat policeman, Agent 15 approached two men in the building where he had seen the girl with the string, surmising that they had aided the launch. Although a search yielded nothing more incriminating than a stick with four strings, he arrested the men. He and other balloon-chasing police officers were obeying specific orders in hunting down the perpetrators that day, but in a broader sense they had become enforcers of laws introduced in the 1917 constitution that sharply restricted the scope of religious expression and observation in public.

Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Book Review| January 01 2016 Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico. By Fallaw, Ben. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. xx + 329 pp., glossary, notes, introduction, bibliography, index. $25.95 paper.) Julia G. Young Julia G. Young Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2016) 63 (1): 199–200. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-3135594 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Julia G. Young; Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico. Ethnohistory 1 January 2016; 63 (1): 199–200. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-3135594 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEthnohistory Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2016 by American Society for Ethnohistory2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Forging Female Subjectivity on the Commercial Stage in the 1920s and ’30s: Three Plays by María Luisa Ocampo, Concepción Sada, and Alfonsina Storni

This study analyses little-studied plays by Mexican playwrights Maria Luisa Ocampo and Concepcion Sada alongside a work by the better-known Argentine Alfonsina Storni. Written and performed in commercial theatres in the 1920s and ‘30s, all three plays portray female protagonists struggling with accepted social and cultural norms regarding marriage and motherhood. By calling attention to the use of the commercial stage as the locus for representing social issues, particularly the performativity of gender roles, this work aims to show that shifts in gender ideology, and in the theatre milieu itself, are representative of the conflicting ideas on and about women during the transitional period of post-revolutionary Mexico. Moreover, the difficulties involved in the formulation of female subjectivity, as expressed through views on marriage and maternity, are presented as crises not only in Mexico but also within the wider scope of Latin American modernity.

Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica ed. by Araceli Tinajero (review)

Reviewed by: Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica ed. by Araceli Tinajero Roberto Rey Agudo Tinajero, Araceli, ed. Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica. Madrid: Verbum, 2013. Pp. 227. ISBN 978-8-47962-850-5. Hispanicists will find in Araceli Tinajero’s Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica a useful addition to the study of exile in Latin American Studies. One of the book’s strengths is drawing on disciplines like sociology, art history, film studies, and literature. Its ten essays offer a heterogeneous sampling of exile studies across Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, and Venezuela. Another important contribution is focusing on seldom explored representations of exile and diaspora (e.g., Cuba as a refugee destination or the Venezuelan exile under Chávez), and choosing less familiar texts and films to discuss better-known episodes in contemporary Spanish and Latin American history. The most insightful moments come in close readings and analyses of particular texts, films, and paintings. However, the quality of the chapters is somewhat uneven. Given that concepts like exile and diaspora are of great interest in contemporary theory and criticism, it would have been interesting to find more of the authors of [End Page 836] these chapters in dialogue with the critical literature on exile beyond the scope of each chapter. As a result, there is very little overlap in the bibliography on exile between chapters. Other than Said’s Reflections on Exile, cited in three chapters, few critical studies on exile are cited. Notable absences in the bibliography include Chinua Achebe, Terry Eagleton, Nico Israel, Michael Seidel or Kobena Mercer, and, surprisingly, Claudio Guillén. With the exception of the introduction, and the first and ninth chapters, which have only footnotes, all chapters include a bibliography at the end. With that being stated, Araceli Tinajero’s introduction makes a convincing case that most of the contemporary Latin American canon has been written in exile or deals with exile in one way or another. This section would have been a good place to frame the subsequent chapters in the wider critical examination of exile. Martínez-Assad’s thesis in the first chapter, supported by demographic data and his detailed, street-by-street account of how successive waves of foreigners settled in Mexico City, is that foreign contributions to Mexican culture are qualitatively high considering how many fewer foreigners Mexico attracted compared to the United States, Brazil, or Argentina. In the following chapter, Lemus argues that Martín Luis Guzmán’s ideas about the role of the intellectual in the construction of national identity in post-Revolutionary Mexico took shape during his exile in New York (1916–19), as seen in his personal letters and the collection A orillas del Hudson. Chapter 3 summarizes four unpublished testimonies of exiles in Monterrey. The chapter includes some inaccuracies (the term “niños de la guerra” was definitely in use before 2005) and would have benefited from a more analytical perspective. The source texts seem underutilized either as memory texts or as literary artifacts. Chapter 4 traces the lineage of the imagery of Jewish diaspora in four Latin American artists: the transatlantic crossing in Víctor Manuel’s Olvidados, the iconography of Jewish persecution by the Inquisition in Frida Kahlo’s Sin esperanza and Diego Rivera’s Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central, and José Gurvich’s use of Jewish themes after moving from Uruguay to Israel and finally to New York. Remba’s comparative analysis of the imagery of Alfred Stieglitz’s iconic photo The Steerage (1907) and Víctor Manuel’s Olvidados (depicting the diplomatic crisis of the SS. St Louis, whose Jewish refugees were denied asylum by Cuba in 1939) is one of the highlights in the book. Chapter 5 explores the double sense of alienation felt by exiles in their countries of origin and destination through a close reading of Francisco Ayala’s “El regreso.” Suárez-Galbán Guerra argues that the many layers of meaning in the story—biblical allusions to Cain and Abel, suppressed homoerotic desire, incest, revenge—insinuate the violence...

Suelo, ejido y ciudad mexicana. Algunos apuntes para comprender su relación

In post-Revolutionary Mexico, two issues became pervasive: municipality and agrarianism. While municipality was the basis for the territorial and administrative division of the country, the thirties of the past century saw the beginning of the agricultural distribution based on the common land (ejido) formula. However, the particularities of its legal framework led to the confrontation between both institutions, enabling the founding of parallel governments and authorities. Although contradictions were present from the outset, it was the establishment of urban planning for the country in the sixties which exacerbated the fight for the control and administration of the land. After almost four decades of coexistence and despite the reforms and amends in their legal frameworks, both instances continue to be incompatible, in competition and, not seldom, in collusion. From a historical hermeneutic position, this work seeks to reflect upon their implications and intends to offer further insights into their discussion and current shape.

Dictablanda: Politics, Work and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968

Dictablanda is a volume of essays examining three main forms of power in post-revolutionary Mexico: political, cultural, and material power. That is, the scope of powers that rose-up and matured between 1938 and 1968. The study is located at mid-twentieth century when the revolutionary effervescence fizzled out and conservative-reactionary politics matured. These thirty years are considered the heyday of the authoritarian rule of the one party regime led by the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI). In the following review, I only cover some of the chapters of the compilation. An all-inclusive assessment would have been too extensive and would have left little for the reader to enjoy and value.

Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968

Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968

Ben Fallaw, Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. xx + 329, £67.00, £16.99 pb.

Ben Fallaw, Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. xx + 329, £67.00, £16.99 pb.

Viscous Porosity: Interactions between Human and Environment in Juan Rulfo’s El llano en llamas

Critics have often noted the prominent role accorded to the natural world in Juan Rulfo’s work, interpreting the fusion of human and environment as a metaphor for the characters’ fate or for their desired but unrealizable state. However, the interactions between the human and more-than-human world that proliferate in Rulfo’s writing are not only metaphorical, but also material. Approaching El llano en llamas (1953) from an ecocritical perspective allows the reader to delve into the complex interactions between the geographical, geological and meteorological conditions of south-eastern Jalisco in which the stories are located and the social, historical and economic context of post-revolutionary Mexico, from religion and class to gender and sexuality. This article focuses first on the socio-economic factors surrounding the flood—a so-called ‘natural disaster’—in ‘Es que somos muy pobres’, before turning to the relationship between violence, machismo, weather and land/earth in ‘¡Diles que no me maten!’.

Myths of Demilitarization in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920-1960 - by Rath, Thomas

Myths of Demilitarization in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920-1960 - by Rath, Thomas

Enacting Agrarian Law: The Effects of Legal Failure in Post-revolutionary Mexico

AbstractThe agrarian body of law created by government legislators and jurists in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), sought to restore pueblos’ juridical standing by allowing communities to hold land collectively in the form of ejidos. Yet, state efforts to restructure property relations in the countryside often articulated with local alternative territorial projects that challenged the implementation of these redistributive legal measures. During the course of 50 years, cattle ranchers from the community of El Huanal in Nautla, Veracruz, defended private property, resisted land expropriation, and prevented the establishment of an ejido in the community. How did rancheros achieve this? How did they respond to the pressures of ‘peasant’ mobilisation? How did post-revolutionary legal discourse come to frame this struggle over land? What changes did this failed attempt to implement land reform trigger in the region? Looking closely at the conflicts, interactions, negotiations, and everyday practices that unfolded among a variety of actors around the interpretation and the applicability of ‘the law’, this article demonstrates how the agrarian reform, despite never having been implemented, altered both the material landscape and the social configuration of this community of coastal Veracruz.

The Ocho poetas mexicanos and the marginalisation of Catholic authors in post-revolutionary Mexico

The group known as the Ocho poetas mexicanos were marginalised in post-revolutionary literary circles and remain largely forgotten by literary history because they were dismissed as Catholic authors by a literary establishment which favoured nation-building literature at a time when Catholicism was excluded from official constructions of nationhood. This article draws attention to the significant contribution made by group members to contemporary cultural life and re-evaluates the work they published in the 1955 anthology which announced their arrival onto the literary scene. An analysis of this collection demonstrates that there was scant justification within their poetry for labelling all group members as Catholic poets and suggests that as a collective they are best understood with reference to the “universal” strand of Mexican literature and as heirs to groups such as the Contemporáneos. The treatment of the Ocho poetas provides important evidence of the way in which Catholic authors were marginalised in mid-twentieth-century Mexico, even if they did not express religious beliefs in their work, and draws attention to the non-literary criteria which can come into play when evaluating texts.

Carlos Chávez’s Polysemic Style:

The critical discourse on Carlos Chávez’s music is full of contradictions regarding the presence within it of signifiers of the Mexican, the pre-Columbian, and the indigenous. Between 1918 and 1928 Chávez in fact developed, from stylistic preferences that appeared early in his compositions, a polysemic language that he could use equally well to address the very modern or the primitive, the pre-Columbian or the contemporary mestizo, in and only in those works in which he chose to do so. Chávez’s referents emerged in dialogue with the cultural and political contexts in which he worked, those of post-revolutionary Mexico and modern New York. But he was attracted above all to modernism and modernity, and was impacted by cosmopolitan forces at home and abroad. By the end of the decade he had earned a position within the modern musical field’s network of social relations, and had drawn the attention of agents of recognition such as Edgard Varèse, Paul Rosenfeld, Aaron Copland, and Henry Cowell. These composers and critics added Chávez’s constructed difference to their much-sought collective difference as Americans within a European art. Chávez’s own use of explicit Mexican referents in some of his works shaped the early reception of his music as quintessentially American/Mexican, eventually influencing the way we understand it today.

Minor Transnational Inter-Subjectivity in the People’s Art of Kitagawa Tamiji

The Japanese painter Kitagawa Tamiji’s (1894–1989) unique transnational idea of people’s art originated in New York, where he was a migrant worker and a student at the Art Students League (1916–20), developed gradually over the decades of his career in the midst of the well-known muralist art movement in post-revolutionary Mexico (1921–36), and matured during the remainder of Kitagawa’s long life in Seto, Japan. Kitagawa’s concept of people’s art represents the expression of the people’s subjective power and is grounded in local grass-roots activities. In his later years, in the 1970s, Kitagawa expressed his adherence to people’s art as the “philosophy of a grasshopper” (batta no tetsugaku), a phrase that he repeated as a sort of personal motto. For Kitagawa, the grasshopper or locust (batta) served as an alter ego. In pre-Columbian Mexico, the grasshopper (chapulin in Nahuatl) was associated with a mythical tribal totem, which explains the name of the prominent site Chapultepec Hill (Hill of Grasshopper) in Mexico City, historically an important locus of political power. Although individual grasshoppers are small, Kitazawa explained, they migrate, and “swarms of grasshoppers damage crops in the fields, and can cause famine.” He likened art to a grasshopper because art is not only pleasurable and beautiful, but also contains the hidden power to become a formidable enemy. Kitagawa’s idea of people’s art appears throughout his numerous essays and is further articulated in the recollections of his avid supporter, the art critic, collector, and collaborator for children’s art education, Kubo Sadajirō (1909-96). This article investigates how Kitagawa’s cross-cultural experiences enriched his idea of people’s art and added complexity to his artistic expression after he returned to Japan in 1936. Focusing primarily on Kitagawa’s work following his departure from Mexico, I wish to highlight connections to Kitagawa’s time in Mexico in order to provide a post-colonial perspective on transnational art by borrowing the concept “minor transnationalism” from the comparative literature scholars Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, as introduced in their Minor Transnationalism (2005). This concept of a “minor transnationalism” proposes a transnational perspective through horizontal studies of relationships among minor-peripheral cultures rather than the normative vertical studies of relations between a major-center and minor-cultures on its periphery. Lionnet and Shih argue that their approach allows one to look at cultures being “produced and performed without any necessary mediation with the center,” giving insight into “less scripted and more scattered” phenomena that occur across “different and multiple spatialities and temporalities.” Thus, dialogues between multiple minor spaces allow the periphery to develop self-awareness, and self-critique. Lionnet and Shih note a level of commensurability and effectiveness in revolutionary philosopher Franz Fanon’s attempt to carry his argument well beyond the center’s self-critique. Fanon reworked the Hegelian or Sartrean critique of alienation into a context for the minor culture’s struggle for national and cultural autonomy and worldwide racial equality. The term “minor’” is not used in a pejorative sense here, but positively to provide scholars the freedom to look at the fluid production of art beyond the normative study frame of Western art verses non-Western art. This essay treats Mexico and Japan as “minor” and non-Western, in terms of the art they produce, as nations that searched for modernity and an identity under the overwhelming power of Western art. Kitagawa’s art provides an interesting case of a minor transnationalism operating between Mexico and Japan. By focusing on Kitagawa’s minor transnational connections, this essay also questions the way we look at modernities of non-Western art, which are normally studied as phenomena of reception and appropriation of Western art within a fixed framework of center-periphery cultural relations.

‘Patria, Honor y Fuerza’: A Study of a Right-Wing Youth Movement in Mexico during the 1930s–1960s

AbstractThis article focuses on the intricate and developing nature of official politics and grassroots activism in post-revolutionary Mexico. It does so by tracing the trajectory of the Pentathlón Deportivo Militar Universitario, a right-wing youth movement that emerged in Mexico in 1938. By locating the group within both the international and domestic emergence of youth movements in the early twentieth century, the article shows how the study of Pentathlón's formation, objectives and later evolution can significantly enrich our understanding of an important phase in Mexico's post-revolutionary history. Within the context of right wing oppositional politics, analysis of the movement provides a fascinating insight into both the emerging Mexican state's ability to appropriate the radical impulses of the younger generation and the Pentathlón's willingness to accommodate such strategies in order to ensure its own survival.

Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico, by Ben Fallaw

"Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico, by Ben Fallaw." Canadian Journal of History, 49(2), pp. 323–324

‘Patria, Honor y Fuerza’: A Study of a Right-Wing Youth Movement in Mexico during the 1930s–1960s

AbstractThis article focuses on the intricate and developing nature of official politics and grassroots activism in post-revolutionary Mexico. It does so by tracing the trajectory of the Pentathlón Deportivo Militar Universitario, a right-wing youth movement that emerged in Mexico in 1938. By locating the group within both the international and domestic emergence of youth movements in the early twentieth century, the article shows how the study of Pentathlón's formation, objectives and later evolution can significantly enrich our understanding of an important phase in Mexico's post-revolutionary history. Within the context of right wing oppositional politics, analysis of the movement provides a fascinating insight into both the emerging Mexican state's ability to appropriate the radical impulses of the younger generation and the Pentathlón's willingness to accommodate such strategies in order to ensure its own survival.

Regresar al claustro: las Capuchinas de Zamora en el México posrevolucionario (1934-1948)

Este artículo reconstruye el proceso por el cual se restableció la vida común en el convento Capuchino del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús de Zamora, Michoacán, entre 1934 y 1948. A través de este caso, el trabajo tiene como objetivo ilustrar la forma en que la opción de vida contemplativa femenina pudo renovarse y practicarse en El Bajío y en México después de la Revolución Mexicana y su embate anticlerical. Subraya la capacidad de las religiosas para aprovechar los espacios de conciliación y tolerancia que abrieron los compromisos informales entre Iglesia y Estado en la década de 1930, y muestra que a través de su vocación tuvieron un activo papel como creyentes que, a partir de su propia opción personal y de su capacidad para llegar a tomar acuerdos entre sí, contribuyeron a la renovación de la práctica religiosa en el México posrevolucionario a través de la restauración de la clausura.

Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico. By Ben Fallaw. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Pp. xx, 329. Abbreviations. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $25.95 cloth.

Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico. By Ben Fallaw. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Pp. xx, 329. Abbreviations. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $25.95 cloth. - Volume 71 Issue 1