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Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00141801-3633411

1527-5477

Mark Overmyer‐Velázquez,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

In Mexican Exodus Julia G. Young challenges scholarly claims that the Cristero War (1926–29) was a Mexican rebellion contained primarily within the country’s west-central heartland. Instead, following Mexican emigrants and religious refugees across the border to communities in the United States, Young demonstrates that the Crisitiada had an enduring and formative relationship with its diaspora both during and after the conflict. By reframing the context and legacy of the Cristero War, Young’s work contributes to Mexican historiographies of religion, migration, and transnational state formation. Using a unique set of primary sources in both Mexico and the United States, Young mines an impressive collection of traditional archival records, institutional and church holdings, and private collections in addition to a series of oral history interviews of Cristeros themselves.In chapter 1 Young examines the historical origins of the bloody civil conflict, situating it within the ever-present struggle between church and state in Mexico. Although in many ways the Cristiada was a familiar moment in that enduring struggle, its coincidence with the first Great Migration of Mexicans to the United States created a unique environment for thousands of emigrants. Although out-migration had begun in the nineteenth century, by the 1920s population pressure, new transportation networks, violent conflicts in Mexico, and economic pull factors in the United States motivated hundreds of thousands of migrants to leave for El Norte.Young employs the appropriate term Cristero diaspora to refer to Mexicans in the United States with strong commitments to the church and its efforts to resist anticlerical government laws and actions. This group included middle-class lay political activists, over two thousand exiled priests and nuns, and tens of thousands of labor emigrants. Young argues that the Cristero diaspora was an influential subset of the 1.5 million ethnic Mexicans residing in the United States during the same period. Supporting conational Catholics in Mexico, the Cristero diaspora also carved out distinct spaces and identities among Mexican American communities in the United States.Chapters 2 and 3 of this significant book focus on the wide range of activities diasporic Cristeros undertook to fight anticlerical efforts by President Calles and his followers during and after the Cristero War. Priests and everyday congregants expressed their support and discontent in speeches, radio programs, movies, community events, and newspaper articles in ethnic Mexican migrant communities throughout the United States. Formalized in several transnational advocacy organizations, such as the Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa and the Knights of Columbus, the politicization of emigrant Mexican Catholics reached its most intense point with the smuggling of arms and active military engagement.Chapters 4 and 5 explore Mexican and US cooperative binational government efforts to thwart the Cristeros. Church-state negotiations, a hardening of the US border security apparatus, divisions in the ranks of Catholic militants, and a lack of funding all helped end the Cristero War in 1929. Young goes beyond those final days to explain how the Cristeros strengthened Mexican Catholic nationalism at home and abroad. The final chapters of Mexican Exodus turn to the “memories, myths, and martyrs” (21) of the Cristero War and their role in solidifying distinct ethnic religious identities among Mexicans in the diaspora.Mexican Exodus lays the groundwork for future studies that examine the intersection of religious practice, migration, and transnational state and identity formations. Building on Young’s scholarship, new research might examine the use of Roman Catholicism as an antidote to perceived and real ideological threats to the nation by communism and its variants, the tension between the Cristero diaspora and the growing Protestant and evangelical Mexican migrant community, and the Catholic Church’s historical relationship with Mexican migrants regardless of their level of religious observance and faith.Mexican Exodus is a fine work that has broad application and relevance well beyond its Mexican-US context to scholars of studies of religion, religious diasporas, migration, and ideological formation around the world as well as of borderlands and transnational history.