Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion Michoacán, 1927-29

by Butler, Matthew

• ISBN13: 9780197262986
• ISBN10: 0197262988
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-08-26
• Publisher: British Academy

Summary

Dr Butler provides a new interpretation of the cristero war (1926-29) which divided Mexico's peasantry into rival camps loyal to the Catholic Church (cristero) or the Revolution (agrarista). This book puts religion at the heart of our understanding of the revolt by showing how peasantallegiances often resulted from genuinely popular cultural and religious antagonisms. It challenges the assumption that Mexican peasants in the 1920s shared religious outlooks and that their behaviour was mainly driven by political and material factors. Focusing on the state of Michoacan inwestern-central Mexico, the volume seeks to integrate both cultural and structural lines of inquiry. First charting the uneven character of Michoacan's historical formation in the late colonial period and the nineteenth century, Dr Butler shows how the emergence of distinct agrarian regimes and political cultures was later associated with varying popular responses to post-revolutionary stateformation in the areas of educational and agrarian reform. At the same time, it is argued that these structural trends were accompanied by increasingly clear divergences in popular religious cultures, including lay attitudes to the clergy, patterns of religious devotion and deviancy, levels ofsacramental participation, and commitment to militant 'social' Catholicism. As peasants in different communities developed distinct parish identities, so the institutional conflict between Church and state acquired diverse meanings and provoked violently contradictory popular responses. Thus thefires of revolt burned all the more fiercely because they inflamed a countryside which - then as now - was deeply divided in matters of faith as well as politics.Based on oral testimonies and careful searches of dozens of ecclesiastical and state archives, this study makes an important contribution to the religious history of the Mexican Revolution.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	v
Illustrations	vii
Introduction: Religion in the Cristero Revolt	1	(14)
1. East Michoacán from the Conquest to the Revolution	15	(35)
2. Sowing New Seeds, Ploughing Old Furrows: Agrarismo, 1915-29	50	(30)
3. Meeting the Missionaries: Rural Education, 1920-9	80	(25)
4. Peter, Mary, and Jack: Parish Life, 1920-5	105	(41)
5. Into the Catacombs: Crisis and Persecution, 1926-9	146	(33)
6. The Cristero Rebellion, 1926-9	179	(34)
Conclusion	213	(9)
Appendix: Agrarismo in East Michoacán, 1915-29	222	(7)
Bibliography	229	(18)
Index	247