Victory on Earth or in Heaven

Between 1873 and 1877, numerous peasant communities of central-western Mexico rebelled against the anticlerical policies of President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, who, in notorious contrast with his predecessor, Benito Juárez, had started his tenure by suppressing public religious acts and reinstating the mandatory oath of fidelity to the liberal Constitution of 1857. Although the so-called Religionero rebellion was a top concern for authorities in Michoacán, Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Mexico State, most historians of the Restored Republic barely mention it, underestimate its relevance, and fail to explain why the Reforma's religious conflict returned to the Mexican countryside when it did. This is why Brian Stauffer's outstanding monograph on this insurrection is so welcome. This book not only reconstructs the rebellion in painstaking detail and largely rewrites this period's history but also offers the best available study of local religious cultures in nineteenth-century Mexico. No previous historian had delved so deeply into the patterns and peculiarities of the popular responses to the liberal revolution or had adequately explored these local phenomena's links with global Catholicism's larger transformations during the troubled pontificate of Pope Pius IX.Given that Michoacán was the rebellion's epicenter, the book reads largely as a regional history informed by myriad voices reporting from the ground. It is mostly based on local newspaper accounts; correspondence between the federal, military, and state authorities charged with suppressing the revolt; parish records and correspondence from the dioceses of Morelia and Zamora; and reports from district prefects to Michoacán's governor. Stauffer is aware that contemporary observers themselves were confused about this rebellion's actual characteristics (who its leaders were, what goals and resources they had, and to what extent they fought in a coordinated manner). He also endorses Benjamin Smith's argument that in Mexico “there were probably as many religious cultures as there were distinct parishes” (p. 14). Nevertheless, Stauffer argues that the rebellion must be read in light of the profound tensions between two different ways of practicing Catholicism in the Mexican countryside: the “baroque” religiosity distinguished by “its collective and performative nature and preference for lavish external worship,” and the “Ultramontane” one that looked to Europe for inspiration and “privileged individual and interiorized piety over communal public worship” (pp. 14–15). For Stauffer, the Religionero rebellion erupted in response to both Lerdo's anticlericalism and the ecclesiastical reforms fostered by the cohort of Ultramontane clerics who rose to the hierarchy's higher echelons during the Reforma years. In the end, both wanted to “modernize” Mexican Catholicism even at the cost of endangering local tradition.To develop this argument, Stauffer explores and contrasts three different settings of the rebellion. The first is northwestern Michoacán, the core of Ultramontane reformism, where the introduction of new lay associations and Marian devotions had already upset the life of rural parishes. Here the Religionero rebellion enjoyed strong popular support and targeted both local liberal authorities and the Ultramontane vecinos who dared to compromise with the state government. The second is central Michoacán, where Purépecha Catholics mostly declined to join the revolt because they had already achieved some important concessions from the church; unlike their peers in the recently created diocese of Zamora, Morelia's archdiocesan authorities had proved a bit more tolerant of local religious practices and preferred to negotiate pragmatic solutions to anticlerical challenges. The third is the southwestern coastal sierra, specifically the district of Coalcomán, where the rebellion was deeply intertwined with local resistance against incoming mestizo settlers. For such local caciques as the Guzmán family, Ultramontane clericalism came hand in hand with the liberal laws that facilitated capitalist extraction through communal land sales. Since local Nahua Religioneros wanted to preserve their traditional control over their territory and religious practices, they violently resisted both the religious and the liberal reformers.Stauffer strengthens his argument about the rebellion's local concerns by analyzing the successful negotiations between Porfirio Díaz and Michoacán's Catholic rebels. Although the young general upheld the Reforma laws, the Religionero rebellion taught him that a radically secularized Mexico could never exist and that a pragmatic tolerance of local religiosity was a necessary condition for consolidating a lasting political order. After showing the early Porfirian regime's co-optation and later displacement of Religionero leaders, Stauffer forcefully concludes that this religious uprising should be interpreted not in simple terms of church-state conflict but as a “cumulative protest of locally oriented rebels who displayed wide inconsistencies in military practice, self-identification, religious orientation, and ideology” (p. 241). Even if I subscribe to Stauffer's thesis, I ended up missing a deeper assessment of this rebellion's national dimensions and context. Stauffer, for instance, does not give sufficient attention to the 1875 Plan of Nuevo Urecho, which sought to provide a common platform to the different subregional rebellions. Why did this plan call for negotiating a concordat with the Holy See? Was this proposal a random idea of its drafters, or was it introduced with the aim of altering the general legal framework that had facilitated Ultramontane reforms? Furthermore, why was the rebellion so strong in Michoacán and the Bajío and not so much in other regions of the country? I know that it is unfair to ask for more from one of the best monographs on nineteenth-century Mexico published in the last decade. I just hope that Stauffer gives himself the opportunity to revisit this period with a comparative perspective and to broaden the historiographical path that he has opened with this extraordinary book

Ancient history · Archaeology · China · Constitution · Economic history · Heaven · Newspaper · Peasant · Political science · Politics · State (computer science) · Victory · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America