Benjamin T. Smith

Anticlericalism, Politics, and Freemasonry in Mexico, 1920–1940

On 16 April 1938, the school teacher of the Mixtec village of San Andrés Dinicuiti reported that the Easter week procession had taken place, despite government regulations prohibiting public displays of worship. During the event, the faithful had marched through the streets shouting “Long live religion, death to bad government, death to the state governor, death to the president of the republic.” When they arrived at the local school, they yelled “Death to the masons, long live religion” before denigrating the teachers parentage. During the 1920s and 1930s, devout Catholic peasants throughout Mexico repeatedly denounced the presumed link between government, school teachers, anticlericalism, and the masons. The popular condemnation obviously emanated in part from the ecclesiastical hierarchys frequent anti-masonic pronouncements. The Apostolic Delegates charge that masons were “the cause of our persecution and almost all our national misfortunes” was reiterated in countless bulletins, manifestos, and pastoral letters throughout the country. In 1934, the Bishop of Huajuapam de León, which controlled the parish of San Andrés Dinicuiti, reminded local priests that they were to refuse to accept masons and members of the government party as godparents for baptisms, confirmations, or marriages. A year later, Mexican Catholic Action argued that government policies of socialist education and agrarismo were the “impious work of anti-Christian masons.” However, despite this popular cross-class conviction, there is little historical work on the actual role of the masons in modern Mexico. By examining the archives of the Grand Lodge of Oaxaca, this article posits that Masonic lodges were key to the process of post-revolutionary state formation. As the state sought to assert control over a divided country, freemasonrys anticlericalism not only offered a model for cultural practice, masons also formed a vanguard of willing political emissaries. However, the institutions influence should not be overstressed. It was often curtailed by internecine disputes, political infighting, and an essentially conservative leadership.

Sons of the Mexican Revolution: Miguel Alemán and His Generation. By Ryan M. Alexander. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016. Pp. 256. Illustrations.

The period from 1946 to 1952 was a turning point in Mexican politics. Elites put aside the socially redistributive programs of land reform, worker support, and socialist education, which had shaped the first two decades of the post-revolutionary period. Instead, they embraced the twin policies of industrial growth and political stability. Infrastructure investment, favorable tax breaks, and protectionist trade policies benefited the financial entrepreneurs, factory owners, and large-scale merchants. Bans on radical parties, increasingly restrictive voting controls, and electoral fraud minimized disruption and kept the system in place. At the center of these changes was postrevolutionary Mexico’s first civilian president, Miguel Alemán Valdés, and his coterie of high school and university friends—the so-called “amigos.”

95.00 cloth.

Este articulo examina las respuestas religiosas a una decada de violencia producto de la Revolucion Mexicana que estallo en 1910, en dos comunidades del estado de Oaxaca —San Pablo y San Pedro Tequixtepec, en la Mixteca Baja, y en Magdalena Tequisistlan, en el Istmo de Tehuantepec—. En Tequixtepec el dialogo entre el clerigo y el sector laico propicio una innovacion ortodoxa, aceptada por las autoridades eclesiasticas. En Tequisistlan, la falta de negociacion religiosa causo un renacimiento religioso menos aceptable: la crucifixion de un viajero italiano

29.95 paper.

can elites. Second, he is too quick to dismiss the extent of American trade with Indians along the Santa Fe Trail. After initially arguing that American traders engaged in “incidental commerce” with Indians that “rarely became more than distraction along the trail,” he later more accurately acknowledges that James Kirker “probably sold more guns and ammunition to Apaches during the 1830s than anyone else” (pp. 101, 160). Third, and most significantly, given the book’s focus on the power of independent Indians in the Southwest, it is misleading to argue that “the United States wrested away more than one-half of Mexico’s territory in the 1840s” (p. xx). Although that is true according to Mexico’s territorial claims on a map, as DeLay convincingly demonstrates elsewhere and as Article 11 attested, the reality was that Kiowas, Comanches, Apaches, and Navajos controlled most of this land. In spite of these weaknesses, however, this is a truly outstanding work of transnational history. It should be required reading for graduate students in American Indian, Latin American, U.S., and global and comparative history. In addition, the vivid narrative and well-conceived maps of the War of a Thousand Deserts should prove useful to those lecturers looking to complicate traditional expansionist narratives in undergraduate courses in American Indian, Western, and Southwestern history. matthew babcock Stephen F. Austin State University

El Señor del Perdón y los matacristos de Oaxaca: la Revolución Mexicana desde el punto de vista de los católicos

This article examines the churchs embrace of scientific methodologies in the late nineteenth century. It is argued that in general, the shift worked to repel liberal ridicule and control popular devotions. However, in Mexico the effects were mixed. During the Mexican Revolution, a desperate church was forced to apply these new scientific methodologies to increasingly unauthorized cults.