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Anticlericalism and Public Space in Revolutionary Jalisco*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Robert Curley
Robert Curley*
Affiliation:
Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico
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Extract

The anticlerical attacks of radical nineteenth-century liberals provoked the Church and aided the rise of confessional politics from continental Europe to revolutionary Mexico. In the European case, Stathis Kalyvas has recently proposed that such anticlerical liberalism was often moved by two distinctive motives, one narrow and political, the other broad and institutional. These motives can be associated with the concepts of tactic and strategy as laid out by Michel de Certeau. Working from both conceptual pairings, we can characterize anticlericalism sometimes as a political tactic, responding to conjunctural circumstances, and other times as an institutional strategy, plotting out a terrain and a path on which to forge present and future power relationships. This sort of conceptualization, I believe, is also well-suited to analyses of revolutionary Mexico. Nonetheless, for the distinction between “political-tactical” and “institutional-strategic” to be helpful, historians also need to place anticlericalism within the confusing logic of destruction and reconstruction inherent to Mexico's revolutionary process.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , April 2009 , pp. 511 - 533
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2009

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Footnotes

*

The author thanks Matthew Butler for important suggestions and timely editing, all of which greatly improved this article.

References

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31 Carta pastoral del episcopado mexicano sobre la Constitución de 1917 (Acordada, Texas, 1917). Cf. Balderrama, Luis C. El clero y el gobierno de México: apuntes para la historia de la crisis en 1926 (2 vols. Mexico City: Cuauhtémoc, 1927), vol. 2, pp. 19–32.Google Scholar

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37 Union of Mexican Catholic Ladies.

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47 El Informador, 2 Sep. 1918.

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57 Members of the Regional Confederation of Mexican Labor (CROM), a client labor central.

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61 Vizcaíno, Camberos Un hombre y una época, pp. 306–307;Google Scholar Navarrete, Heriberto Por Dios y por la patria (Mexico City: Jus, 1973), pp. 32–35.Google Scholar

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63 Ibid., 25 Jun. 1921.

64 El Informador, 27 Mar. 1922.

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73 Ibid.

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75 Ibid., 28, 29, and 30 Jul. 1925.

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77 Early propaganda referred to the movement as the Liga Nacional de Defensa Religiosa (LNDR); in 1926, the acronym LNDLR (Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa) was adopted. It was commonly referred to simply as the Liga.

78 As Meyer reminds us, the press was quite free in the first two years of callismo, as seen in the near-universal condemnation of the schism. After this, censorship became routine. Meyer, Jean Historia de la revolución mexicana, 1924–1928: estado y sociedad con Calles (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1977), pp. 105–106.Google Scholar

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81 Even government spies reported that the movement was not organized by clergy but by prominent Catholics; see AGN-DGIPS, v. 228/exp. 33/f. 1, agente especial #7 to departamento confidencial, Mexico City, 20 Jan. 1927.

82 AGN-DGIPS, v. 228/exp. 33/f. 5, agente #18 to departamento confidencial, Mexico City, 7 Apr. 1925; v. 228/exp. 33/f. 2, oficial primero to Gobernación, Mexico City, n/d.

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87 AGN-DGIPS, v. 244/exp. 4/f. 2, oficial mayor to state governor, Mexico City, 8 Mar. 1927.