Spanish Catholicism Research Articles

Early Modern Imperial Philologies: Ahmad al-Hajarî and the Lead Books of Granada

The Morisco polymath Ahmad ibn Qâsim al-Hajarî (c.1569–c.1640) was a diplomat, writer and translator. His engagement with philology, i.e., the edition, annotation and translation of texts, especially the Lead Books of Granada, is an important part of his work. This article examines his philological practices and how he deployed them in order to defend Islam and Islamic powers, and to counter the hegemonic claims of the Spanish Catholic Empire.

Accountability and information disclosure in a Catholic charity (1798–1801)

By examining a Spanish Catholic charity that operated in an unregulated environment in Cádiz between 1798 and 1801, this article analyses the motivations for discharging accountability to stakeholders and the factors that influence information disclosure. Drawing on stakeholder theory and not-for-profit accountability literature, we show how the organisation’s founders, managers and board members translated their feeling of responsibility and the accounting insight prevailing in their socio-economic context to this charity setting. Their efforts to discharge accountability and disclose information focused largely on upward stakeholders, but they also discharged accountability to aid recipients. Nevertheless, they restricted the information they revealed because of the Catholic doctrine about secret almsgiving and concerns about the protection of poor people’s privacy and fear of public shame. These restrictions may have been somewhat counterbalanced by the charity’s observable actions and by social interaction among board members, donors, and beneficiaries enabled through physical proximity and social ties.

Franco’s Spain and Italy’s Christian Democracy: The Anti-Francoism of the Italian Magazine Politica (1955–1968)

This paper sets out to study the transnational relations between progressive sectors of the Italian and Spanish Catholic worlds. The aim is to focus on various groups of Italian Catholics who took action against the Spanish dictatorship between 1955 and 1968. To this end, the paper examines Politica, a magazine of the Christian Democratic left and an important publication that criticised both Spanish and Italian Catholicism for appeasing the Francoist dictatorship. The magazine served as the mouthpiece of one of the most dynamic sectors among the new generations of Christians committed to the renewal of Italian politics. Moreover, this current of Christian Democracy was bolstered by the local government activities of Giorgio La Pira, the emblematic mayor of Florence between 1951 and 1964, who embodied a political praxis of staunch commitment to the underclasses and in favour of peace in the world.

Gendering Catholicism in Late Modern Spanish History (1854–1923): Research Lines and Debates for a European Dialogue

The aim of this paper is to bridge the gap between Spanish and European historiography specializing in gender and Christianity studies, in order to enrich general observations and contribute to ongoing debates beyond Spain. To this end, I will map the most salient problems and interpretations that have emerged from Spanish historiography addressing the relationship between gender and Catholicism between 1854 and 1923, in light of Spain's dynamic gender and revitalized religious studies. I will then approach inner controversies connected to broader debates on the feminization of Spanish Catholicism throughout the late nineteenth century, the changes in the gender discourse of Catholicism and its interactions with liberalism and modernity, the re-masculinization of Catholicism (or the Catholicization of masculinity), the gendered Catholic mobilization and the controversy on Catholic feminism. Throughout this article, this line of research will, in turn, contribute new insights into the phenomena and discourses shaping the contemporary history of Spain, such as secularization, modernization and nation-building processes.

An Interpretive Approach to Religious Ambiguities around Medical Innovations: The Spanish Catholic Church on Organ Donation and Transplantation (1954-2014).

How do institutionalized religions solve moral ambiguities around controversial medical innovations and public health issues? Most religions have moral guidelines about what can and cannot be done to people's bodies, but these guidelines are not always straightforward and, when faced with certain scientific advances, can come into contradiction with other doctrinal principles. I address this theoretical puzzle through the empirical case of the Spanish Catholic Church's discourse on organ donation and transplantation during the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on an interpretive analysis of official statements by the Spanish Catholic Church, and of the media coverage of the religious debate over organ donation and transplantation in Spain from 1954 onwards, I show that the first experiments in organ transplantation faced the Church with a contradiction between its altruistic teachings and its beliefs in the sacredness of human life. Faced with an interpretive dilemma, the Church produced a context-specific version of its official doctrine friendly to organ donation and transplantation. It did so by activating its altruistic elements and suppressing sacralized meanings of the body, thus aligning organ donation with Catholic values of generosity and fraternal love. My study theorizes this moral alignment as a semantic overlap realized through historically situated institutional discourse. Additionally, it incorporates 24 primary and secondary sources on comparative cases to propose three facilitating factors that enabled and encouraged the Spanish Catholic Church to embrace a controversial medical practice.

New Mexico's Spanish Catholic Past

New Mexico's Spanish Catholic Past Ramón A. Gutiérrez La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue, by Fray Angelico Chavez (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1954), 96 pp. In the years following the initial voyage of Christopher Columbus seeking a western route to the riches of the East Indies in 1492, Spain rapidly established a far-flung empire. By the 1560s Spain's sovereignty extended from Madrid to Manila. Its expeditionary forces had captured the wealth of the Aztec and Inca Empires and explored much of what became known as the Spanish Borderlands of North America, that southern third of what became the United States extending from Florida to California. The Kingdom of New Mexico, established in 1598, is the oldest and most enduring of Spain's settlements in the United States, antedating the founding by the English of Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth colony in 1620. The person who chronicled New Mexico's Catholic history most intensively during the twentieth century was Fray Angélico Chávez. In his lifetime he published twenty-three books and more than six hundred articles describing different facets of Catholic experiences here under Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. rule. The focus of this essay is on Chavez's 1954 book, La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue, in which he narrates the history of New Mexico's Christianization through the eyes of a wooden statue of Our Lady of the Rosary, brought by the Franciscan friars in 1625. Fray Angelico performs as a ventriloquist, giving the statue her feminine voice, which in turn she uses to narrate her triumphs and travails as New Mexico's virgin, queen, and mother over a span of more than three centuries. Chavez occasionally wrote with the female pseudonym as "Ann Jellico" assuming the persona of a woman, making his work by today's standards rather queer and campy. Males assuming female personas in [End Page 61] European and American literature is hardly unusual; what is, is that a piece of wood does. Chavez was born in 1910 to Fabian and Nicolasa Roybal in Wagon Mound, New Mexico and baptized as Manuel Ezequiel. When ordained a Franciscan friar in 1937 he chose Angélico as his clerical name to honor Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, the Catholic patroness of Los Angeles, California. Fray Angélico was born into an ancestral line he traced to members of one of the first Spanish colonizing parties to enter New Mexico in 1598. A year after Angélico's birth his family moved to San Diego, California where his father worked as a carpenter building the pavilions for the Panama-California Exhibition inaugurated in 1915 to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. New Mexico's exhibition there, modeled after Acoma Pueblo's Franciscan church, became the pavilion that attracted the fair's largest crowds and subsequently inspired Santa Fe's city fathers to refashion the town's architectural style from Victorian to Spanish colonial in the 1930s. Some scholars opine that young Manuel's exposure to Spanish neocolonial architecture in San Diego and later Santa Fe may have inspired his fascination with the region's Spanish past. As a child Angelico was educated by the Sisters of Loretto who undoubtedly encouraged his pursuit of a clerical career. At the age of fourteen he enrolled at St. Francis Seraphic Seminary High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, moving to the nearby novitiate of the Saint John the Baptist Province of the Order of Friars Minor in 1929, obtaining a bachelor's degree in theology at Duns Scotus College in 1933. On returning to Santa Fe he was ordained a Franciscan priest at St. Francis Cathedral on May 6, 1937. He was the first native-born New Mexican ordained by the Order of Friars Minor begun by St. Francis of Assisi in 1210, having been educated entirely in Catholic schools by priests and nuns. Angelico Chavez became a prolific writer at a young age, first of poetry while he was still in high school, eventually adding essays and tomes on colonial art, history, and imaginative fiction to his literary repertoire anchored in themes derived from New Mexico...

Apostolado cinematográfico y ruptura del aislamiento en la España del primer franquismo

Since the time of the encyclical Vigilanti cura (1936), the hierarchy of the Catholic Church had invited the Catholic world to take action and participate in activities that would promote film training and the involvement of believers in production or broadcasting work. This article analyzes the performance, in this area, of Spanish Catholicism in a historical period defined by the Spanish postwar period and the survival of the Franco regime, during which - and with the experience of the civil war - the Church considered a pastoral reconquest, which encompassed many areas and instruments, including cinema. This project was integrated into a broader one: creating an alternative exterior image of Franco's regime from 1945.

Pandemic and religion. Spanish Catholicism in the context of global transformations

We examine the impact of the pandemic on religiosity and attitudes towards the Catholic Church in Spain. The author analyzes Spanish religious life and defines its specificity in the context of global transformations of the pandemic era, based on the researches of leading sociological centers. It would seem that in the face of a mortal threat, the population will more often turn to God and that religion will strengthen its positions. But the reality is more complicated. At various stages of the pandemic the reaction was different. Prevailing religions also gave their own models of behavior and understanding of the pandemic. Catholicism demonstrated very rational and disciplined approach to the sanitary measures and vaccinations, which corresponds to its attitude towards earthly life and bodily health. In pandemic era the general pattern was linked with the strengthening of faith among strong believers. The nonbelievers, agnostics and atheists became even more entrenched in their unbelief. This also applies to Spain, where the overall religiosity of the public correlates with its political orientations. The polarization of society is going fast, with religion rapidly losing its influence. The proportion of practicing Catholics continues to decline, and the pandemic accelerated this process. Although the Catholic Church in Spain provided significant material and spiritual assistance to the suffering society, it failed to strengthen its position due to the loss of reputation, caused by suppression of problems related to pedophilia and homosexuality of the priesthood. The author comes to a conclusion that the spiritual transformation of modern Spanish society mean that the Christian world is probably approaching radical changes in the forms of its spiritual life and faith.

Religious nationalism, racism, and raza hispánica (“Hispanic race”) in Constantino Bayle’s, S.J. (1882–1953) missiology (A publication history approach)

This article focuses on the career of the Jesuit priest, Constantino Bayle, as a historian of Spanish Catholic missions and promoter of state-sponsored arrangements that institutionalized nationalist religious historiography. He encoded religious nationalism and racist categories in academic discourse and terminology, elevating in this way racist assumptions and renewed imperialist aspirations to the level of official historiography. The article traces Bayle’s early career as an Americanista at the Spanish Catholic periodical, Razón y Fe. Bayle was an ardent supporter of Francisco Franco’s military uprising of 1936. He was an apologist for Falange Española who defended its Catholic character. Alongside other Jesuits, he was responsible for forging a Spanish school of missiology that was predicated upon the tenets of Spanish national Catholicism and that was meant to rival analogous Protestant and Roman Catholic historiographic projects. Central to this culturalist endeavor were the notions of Hispanidad and Raza Hispanica.

Escrituras postseculares: sedimentos de la religión en la narrativa española (1950-2010) by Daniel García-Donoso

Reviewed by: Escrituras postseculares: sedimentos de la religión en la narrativa española (1950-2010) by Daniel García-Donoso José Patiño-Romero Escrituras postseculares: sedimentos de la religión en la narrativa española (1950-2010) Biblioteca Nueva, 2018 By Daniel García-Donoso The religious politics of Early modern counter-reformation, the Civil War and franquismo haunts the novels that are the object of this study. García-Donoso documents how Spanish fiction, in a world that seems to have replaced institutionalized religion with capitalist speculation, re-deploys this legacy with caution. Escrituras postseculares responds to a perceived lack of critical approaches to religion in contemporary Spanish culture (11), outlining the emergence of a non-dogmatic "postsecularism." It analyzes the reconfigurations of Catholic tropes, which he treats as "sediments," a spatial metaphor he borrows from Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of the re-activation of tradition (21). Experimental, historical, crime and (pre) crisis novels perform an (implied or explicit) critique of the Catholic Church. At the same time, they reconfigure spiritual practices like confession, reconciliation and humility, which become narrative devices. The author's exhaustive research maps out these historical re-sedimentations through compelling syntheses of philosophical, historical, and literary criticism, such as Noel Valis' Sacred Realism: Religion and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative (2010). The introduction provides a helpful, extensive survey of twentieth century critics, like Lukacs and Auerbach, correlating the theory of western "secularization" with the development of the modern novel. Each chapter starts with an extensive and relevant survey of the political and social context of how novelists responded to the consequences of state-sponsored Spanish Catholicism. Chapter One, "Laboratorios de lo Sagrado," describes how experimental novels in the 60s and early 70s demanded active participation from their intellectual reader in "revealing" and reimagining their painful reality in the context of weakened Francoist Catholicism. Fragmentos del Apocalipsis by Gonzalo Torrente-Ballester is a parody of genres, especially Apocalyptic literature, which proclaims its status as a self-sufficient discourse. Saul ante Samuel by Juan Benet deploys excessive allusions to the Old Testament to the point of emptying out their referentiality. The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a narrative technique in the late experimental novel Cristo versus Arizona by Camilo José Cela. This constant leitmotif would preserve readers from "sin." Chapter Two, "Heterodoxa historia de Miguel Delibes," representing an aspect of sixteenth-century Spain's social life only documented in inquisitorial records, is the most relevant for early modernists like this reviewer. For García-Donoso, as opposed to the experimental novel and its exclusive intellectual public, the historical fiction that emerged with the Transición responds to the general reading public's need to re-imagine the past to build a better future. In El hereje, Cipriano turns into a successful businessperson and enters Lutheran circles in Valladolid after his clandestine erotic relationship with his maid/maternal figure was discovered and prohibited, resonating with the prohibition of Protestantism. Cipriano compares his new Lutheran community, an intimate fraternal space, to early prosecuted Christian groups. In his Inquisitorial Auto de Fé, after the confession is shown as an incriminatory practice, his cathartic death by burning resembles Christ in the calvary. The point of view of the public witnessing the execution coincides with the readers' point of view, leading them to question the Spanish Catholic identity. [End Page 204] The novels analyzed in Chapter Three, "Éxtasis del Capital en la novela policíaca española" parody how spiritual exercises that seek evidence to explain mysteries are compared with detective work. In Los misterios de Madrid by Antonio Muñoz Molina, Lorencito is an ad hoc detective hired under false pretenses to investigate the robbery of El Cristo de la Greña. The image's lighting turns on with a coin of 25 pesetas, coined in 1990 for the 1992's anniversary of the "encounter of two worlds." Also, the orgasm at a sex shop is described as a religious experience, the environment resonating with the description of a Catholic souvenir shop. In La piel del tambor by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Lorenzo Quart is an attractive priest sent by the Vatican to prevent the sale...

«Todo menos mirar con indiferencia»: la Iglesia católica y la prensa británica ante el turismo y los trajes de baño femeninos en España (1950-1965)

From the beginning of the 1950s, the visits of tourists from abroad to the Spanish coasts became more and more frequent. The massive influx of visitors meant the arrival of remarkable novelties in fashions and customs, especially in places of leisure, where they had contact with the national population. This paper aims, on the one hand, to analyse the discourses from the Spanish Catholic Church, an institution very concerned about the moral control of Spanish women and women’s summer fashion, but whose arguments have not been studied in detail in relation to tourism. On the other hand, it incorporates a new approach by collecting the opinions expressed in the British press, which allows us to observe the impact of this type of discourse in one of the leading countries in the emission of tourists. For that purpose, we have used different bibliographical sources, archival and newspaper documentation related to tourism and the Catholic religion, as well as British newspapers.

The fatherland and religion in Spanish Catholicism: from turn-of-the-century decline to the Rif War (c.1898–1923)

ABSTRACT The present article analyses both the discourse as well as actions and policies through which non-Carlist Catholic movement promoted and socialised the Catholic image of Spain, from the end of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the 1920s. The anticlerical fervour of the first decade of the twentieth century served to mobilise Catholics who called for the re-Catholicisation of Spanish society for the benefit of religion and the fatherland. Recourse to the fatherland and its identity as exclusively Catholic were significantly reinforced during the insecurity unleashed by the crisis of 1917 and the threat of revolution. Finally, the present paper also analyses the repercussions of the Catalan nationalist movement in 1918–1919 and the Rif War, two events that only augmented the centrality of the fatherland for the Catholic discourse of the period.

Catholic politics of the past. Culture war, National Catholicism, and commemorations in Spain, 1881-1908

ABSTRACT This article aims to analyze the politics of the past implemented by Spanish Catholics during the so-called “age of anniversaries.” The promotion of Catholic commemorations in Spain was a reaction to the culture war which was waged around the role of religion in the public sphere during the Spanish Restauration (1874–1923). Historiography has tended to analyze these commemorations in the light of the political tensions that existed between factions of the Spanish right. This focus has obscured, however, the important role that these commemorations played in the development of a Catholic reading of the past, as well as in the formation of a National Catholic political culture. This essay offers a complete study of the catholic commemoration in Spain from the pioneering celebration of Calderón de la Barca in 1881 to the first centenary of the War of Independence in 1908. By doing so, the paper aims to demonstrate the role played by these politics of the past in the construction of a National Catholic political culture in Spain.

The preference for cooperation over the vindication of religious freedom: The response of the Spanish Catholic Church to the COVID-19 crisis

ABSTRACT The coronavirus crisis has caused a profound impact on different sectors of society. The Spanish Catholic Church has taken upon itself to respond to the overwhelming extent of the tragedy of COVID-19. Through a quantitative analysis, this research begins by defining the actions, and classifying them, into various types of activity, and presents the repercussions on the life of communities and Catholic institutions during the first wave of the pandemic. The analysis goes deeper into implications for religious freedom and health restrictions of the decrees of the State of Emergency in Spain. The official position of the Catholic Church reveals that it has tried to serve the whole of society, working in collaboration with the authorities. In order to tackle the COVID-19 crisis, the institution has respected the rules and avoided legal conflicts in relation to the right of religious freedom.

Electric light and the visualization of Catholic power in Spain during the Restoration Era (1874–1931)

This article analyses the contested adoption of electric lights by the Spanish Catholic church during the Bourbon Restoration era (1874–1931). Through a careful reading of primary sources, namely Catholic popular magazines, and official documents, it will show how Catholic authorities and practitioners resisted, negotiated and, ultimately, engaged with electricity in religious spaces. The article argues that electric light contributed to wider exchanges in a non-monolithic Spanish Catholicism on the observance of traditional values or the possibilities of the church’s modernization. However, amid a particularly tense moment regarding the secular–clerical relations, the systematic use of electric lights in churches at the turn of the twentieth century—but also in other public ceremonies—contributed to the making of religious sensations aimed at attracting new believers and reasserting the presence of the institution in a disputed public space.

Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire

Mina García Soormally’s engaging monograph shows that the category of idolatry tells modern-day readers more about the mindset of European colonizers than the Native peoples charged with heresy. Although the biblical prohibition against the veneration of false idols appeared straightforward, Soormally maintains that Spaniards used this polyvalent category to condemn those aspects of Indigenous peoples’ lives deemed improper such as their sexual relationships, forms of agriculture, and concepts of time (19). Soormally examines chronicles of the Indies, evangelization plays, and literature from both sides of the Atlantic to bridge the gap between “European studies and those on the colonies” (xii). Following Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s (1987: 152) concept of the “Atlantic Mediterranean,” Soormally coins the term Catholic Atlantic to refer to the confluence of geography and politics in areas where Catholic values were implanted and to better assess how physical spaces related to the customs and cultures of European societies (xii, 73).Chapter 1 provides the historical background of European theologians’, bishops’, and clerics’ views regarding magic and witchcraft in the Middle Ages, which, eventually, led to the founding of the Spanish Inquisition. Soormally highlights that Protestant reformers such as John Calvin, Martin Luther, and Ulrich Zwingli accused the Church of corruption and idolatry precisely at the same time when Spanish Catholics evangelized and implemented what they considered to be the “purest of orthodoxies” in the Americas (24). Chapter 2 examines the relationship between the colonization of the Americas and Spain’s Reconquest, during which time Spaniards used religious discrimination to build and sustain their transoceanic enterprises. Soormally shows how the forced conversion of Moors and Jews in Iberia created a tense political climate in which Catholic Spaniards grew anxious about apostasy, blasphemy, and backsliding. This ethos, however, gave Spaniards the experience needed to occupy foreign territories and subjugate Indigenous peoples in the Canary Islands, New Spain, and Peru (39).In chapter 3, Soormally examines the theatrical performances of Indigenous actors in evangelization plays such as Ejemplo del juicio final and La conquista de Jerusalén, demonstrating that Spaniards also employed drama as an instrument in their spiritual conquest and that Native groups, such as the Tlaxcalans, used these plays to assert their newfound status as Christians (107). Soormally contends that these newly founded Christian societies needed outcasts and idolaters to differentiate the haves from the have-nots, which led to the creation of a state reliant on marginalized subalterns (118). Chapter 4 reevaluates the iconic tale of the Virgen de Guadalupe and Juan Diego to assess how an exported European symbol, that is, Mary, could become a source of national pride for Indigenous peoples. Soormally argues that Catholic missionaries sought to prevent pagan devotion to the Aztec mother-god Tonantzin. Therefore, sixteenth-century clerics transposed the cult of Tonantzin into that of the Virgin Mary (139). Soormally doubts the historical authenticity of Juan Diego and his encounters with Mary and Fray Juan de Zumárraga, noting that sincere belief in these encounters benefited the Dominican archbishop Alonso de Montúfar, since his assigned role was to convert numerous Indigenous peoples. Soormally casts further doubt on the event itself, noting that Zumárraga never mentioned an encounter with Juan Diego in any of his personal or official writings (162). In sum, Soormally has written an excellent monograph that connects Spain to the Americas, bringing religion to the fore of Spanish conquest. Scholars and students of Latin American history, religious studies, and literature will, no doubt, enjoy Soormally’s cogent argumentation, novel insight, and excellent translations.

Syncretic Santa Muerte: Holy Death and Religious Bricolage

In this article, we trace the syncretic origins and development of the new religious movement centered on the Mexican folk saint of death, Santa Muerte. We explore how she was born of the syncretic association of the Spanish Catholic Grim Reapress and Pre-Columbian Indigenous thanatologies in the colonial era. Through further religious bricolage in the post-colony, we describe how as the new religious movement rapidly expanded it integrated elements of other religious traditions, namely Afro-Cuban Santeria and Palo Mayombe, New Age beliefs and practices, and even Wicca. In contrast to much of the Eurocentric scholarship on Santa Muerte, we posit that both the Skeleton Saint’s origins and contemporary devotional framework cannot be comprehended without considering the significant influence of Indigenous death deities who formed part of holistic ontologies that starkly contrasted with the dualistic absolutism of European Catholicism in which life and death were viewed as stark polarities. We also demonstrate how across time the liminal power of death as a supernatural female figure has proved especially appealing to marginalized socioeconomic groups.

Gentile in Spain: An historiographical mirage

This article studies the influence of Italian educationalist and philosopher Giovani Gentile in Spain. In the first part, the main features of the Gentile’s thought are analysed as well as the key reform that he implemented in Italy as Mussolini’s first Minister of Education. In the second part, the limited influence of his thought in Spain is studied, both in the main pre-war pedagogical tendencies and in the educational policy and thought after the civil war. It is defended that the seeming coincidence of the Spanish secondary school reform of 1938 and the Gentile Reform is purely superficial, since Spanish Catholicism had a program for reform (primarily aimed at securing the interests of Church schools) whose goals were completely independent from Gentile’s. Then, the supposed influence of the Gentile Reform on the Spanish reform of 1938 is no more than a historiographical mirage.

Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz, 1783–1840 by Art Martínez de Vara

Reviewed by: Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz, 1783–1840 by Art Martínez de Vara Gerald Poyo Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz, 1783–1840. By Art Martínez de Vara. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2020. Pp. 269. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Art Martínez de Vara's biography of José Francisco Ruiz is another in a growing list of biographies of Tejano leaders of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Well-written and readable, the book skillfully weaves and contextualizes Ruiz's life into a broader historical story, providing more than the title's promise. Martínez de Vara's fourteen chapters include excellent coverage of the late Spanish period, the Mexican independence era, the Mexican period, Native American affairs, relations with the United States, and Texas independence and politics through 1840. As with other books on Tejano political figures of this era, this text explores Ruiz as what historian Raúl Ramos has called a cultural broker among Mexicans, Anglos Americans, and Native Americans. Also, in keeping with prevailing historiography, the study adheres to the now familiar interpretation of Béxar's Tejano elites as mostly provincially minded and pragmatic historical actors primarily interested in defending their town and region from centralized power in Mexico City while pursuing economic interests with those coming from the east. Martínez de Vara tells us that Ruiz prioritized his economic interests, protected local prerogatives, and threw his lot in with Anglo Americans and Texas independence. Besides exploring these themes, Martínez de Vara explores, albeit briefly, a mostly unexplored aspect of Tejano intellectual history. He draws on Raúl Coronado's award-winning book A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Harvard University Press, 2013), which [End Page 482] treats religious and philosophical currents in northeastern New Spain in the late eighteenth century. Martínez de Vara embraces Coronado's argument that the region's elites shared a worldview framed by Spanish Catholic liberalism and scholasticism. Coronado traced this through the writings of Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, an ardent supporter of insurgent leader Miguel de Hidalgo, who invaded Béxar from Louisiana in 1813 and declared Texas an independent Mexican state. Martínez de Vara confidently argues that Gutiérrez de Lara's ideas also influenced Ruíz and his fellow elite Bexareños as they made revolutionary decisions during the Hidalgo era and later. While Martínez de Vara's view that Ruiz and others in this frontier town shared Bernardo de Lara's revolutionary commitment to liberal Catholic principles in 1813, he does not explicitly explore the theme through the rest of the book. Instead he describes Ruiz as a man with a pragmatic understanding that his economic interests and future lay to the east among Anglo-American Protestant immigrants. The need to pursue pragmatic actions driven by circumstance certainly competed with his Catholic values, but how did his thinking evolve over time? Given the thorough research reflected in this book, apparently Ruiz did not leave much testimony on the subject; Martínez de Vara does not return to the question along the way except to reiterate the point in the conclusion. The extent to which Catholicism and scholasticism influenced the political worldview of Ruiz and other Béxar elites remains an open question, but Martínez de Vara did a favor in raising the issue and alerting Tejano biographers to explore the intellectual history of these important figures. In the process, historians may even explore the extent to which Tejano liberals may have shared similar views with fellow travelers in Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico during this period and later who also pragmatically looked to the United States as a model for their own societies even to the point of outright annexation. Gerald Poyo St. Mary's University Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Entre coronas, cruces y banderas. Monarquía, religión y nacionalismo español en la dictadura de Primo de Rivera

El estudio trata sobre la Corona española y el catolicismo, analizando el peso de la religión dentro del monarquismo y de la propia monarquía en los sectores católicos, tanto a nivel discursivo como práctico o simbólico. Se destaca especialmente el peso del nacionalismo atendiendo a la conjunción nación-catolicismo desarrollado durante estos años, de ahí la relevancia de la cronología escogida. De la misma forma se aplicará una metodología comparada tanto a nivel temporal (Restauración) como espacial (en un contexto europeo).