In the early 1940s, a Mexican public relations battle was unfolding in the print media in the United States. On one side were the leaders and supporters of a new, rapidly growing Catholic organization, the Unión Nacional Sinarquista (UNS), a right-wing group with chapters across Mexico and in the United States that actively contested Mexico's revolutionary government. On the other side were the organization's detractors in both countries, who claimed, among other things, that the UNS was nothing less than a fifth column for foreign powers—especially the Spanish Falange and Germany's Nazis—that could destabilize not only Mexico, but the United States as well.
Given the timing, the stakes could hardly have been higher. The Spanish Civil War had begun a year before the UNS's founding in 1937, and the organization's tremendous growth in membership during the early 1940s overlapped chronologically with the Second World War. Thus, the rise of the UNS coincided with growing fears throughout the Western Hemisphere of potential infiltration by Axis and fascist powers, and with authorities’ increasing wariness toward right-wing groups of all kinds. With regard to US-Mexican relations, the scandal over the Zimmerman Telegram during World War I had primed at least some Americans to be aware of the southern border as a permeable space that global enemies of the United States could easily penetrate.Footnote 1 For many in the United States it seemed eminently plausible that a right-wing or fascist movement in Mexico could become a fifth column of Axis support, and therefore a grave threat to US national security.Footnote 2
Between 1937 and 1945, the UNS received widespread press coverage in the United States, and its opponents and supporters—in both Mexico and the United States—sought to sway that coverage. American journalists and writers in the mainstream secular press largely portrayed the UNS as a fifth column for America's enemies and a source of potential danger to both Mexican and US national security. Opponents of the UNS in Mexico often served as both sources and contributors for these portrayals. By contrast, the US Catholic print media described the Sinarquista movement very differently, largely downplaying the possibility of violence and danger, and even arguing that the UNS represented a critical bulwark for religious freedom and anticommunism in both Mexico and the United States.
Throughout the war years, Sinarquista leaders and representatives in the United States attempted to improve the public image of the organization in the American media landscape, primarily by collaborating with influential US Catholics. They did so despite the fact that the UNS was, for most of the early 1940s, openly and vociferously critical of the United States, for they were well aware that negative press coverage could—and did—trigger condemnation from US politicians.Footnote 3 Such condemnation, Sinarquista leaders believed, could lead to political pressure from the “colossus of the North” that could threaten the survival of the UNS.Footnote 4 As a result, a public relations campaign to improve the image of the UNS in the United States could be integral to the survival of the organization.
The Sinarquistas’ fears—and their media strategy—had echoes in recent Mexican history. The United States had repeatedly proven both its ability and willingness to intervene directly in Mexican political movements, and various Mexican political leaders had appealed to the US press to try to improve their fortunes. During and after the Mexican Revolution, for example, competing factions found that the approval or disapproval of the United States could determine the viability of their movements.Footnote 5 As a result, revolutionary leaders sought to influence US policy through public relations campaigns.Footnote 6 Throughout the Cristero War, as I have written elsewhere, Mexican Catholics repeatedly appealed to US politicians through the medium of the US press, both to seek support for the Cristero cause and to obtain official repudiation of the anticlerical Mexican government by the government of the United States. Ultimately, the Cristeros never received the support they sought, which was one of the factors that doomed their movement.Footnote 7
After a brief review of the history of the UNS, this article will examine how Sinarquistas were portrayed in American print media between 1937 and 1945, drawing on the review of numerous articles from mainstream secular newspapers, articles from Catholic newspapers published in cities and towns across the United States, and archival material from both Mexico and the United States. Throughout, I examine the ways that Sinarquistas responded to this press coverage, and attempted to cultivate relationships with prominent US Catholics who could improve public perceptions of their organization in the United States.
The article makes three contributions to our understanding of the UNS. First, it examines the role of the US print media in shaping American public opinion about the Sinarquista movement in the United States, and underscores how stories about the UNS reached a surprisingly wide readership, especially during the 1940-45 period. Second, it elucidates how the UNS operated on both sides of the US-Mexico border, both through its US chapters as well as through its constant attention and responsiveness to US print media, notwithstanding its official anti-Yankee position. Finally, while this article does not propose a definitive answer to the question of the true nature of the UNS—was it actually a fascist fifth column?—it does offer a critical examination of these allegations, putting them into the political context in which they were made. Through these contributions, this article extends and challenges a historiographical literature that has, with only a few exceptions, treated the UNS as an entity confined to a national or even regional sphere in Mexico.Footnote 8 Instead, this article describes the ways in which the organization both extended and was perceived beyond Mexico's borders.
History of the Sinarquista movement
The Unión Nacional Sinarquista was established in May 1937, in a country still reeling from years of violent Church-state conflict—not only the widespread conflagrations of the Cristero War (1926-29), but also the more sporadic violence of the 1930s known as the Segunda Cristiada. In this context and owing to the still-simmering legacy of the mobilization behind the Cristero Rebellion, the UNS aimed to bring about a Christian social order in Mexico by restoring the Catholic Church as the ultimate authority in Mexican society, and opposing the revolutionary government's policies, in particular its anticlericalism, socialist education policies, and agrarian reform.Footnote 9
The UNS emerged as the public branch of a secretive Catholic organization, Las Legiones/La Base, which had sought to organize Mexican Catholics during the mid-1930s. Within only a few years of its founding, the new organization had grown so rapidly that its membership far outnumbered that of its predecessors, particularly in the central states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, Michoacán, and Querétaro, although it had chapters practically nationwide.Footnote 10 In addition to being Mexico's Catholic heartland and the locus of intense fighting during the Cristero War, these states were also the home states of the UNS founders, all of them young, educated Catholic laymen. The city of León, Guanajuato, would serve as the organization's spiritual capital, and was often referred to as “Sinarcópolis” by UNS members. By the early 1940s, the organization had between 300,000 and 500,000 members. During the first half of that decade it would be the country's most visible Catholic popular movement.Footnote 11
Furthermore, the UNS would also become a transnational organization. It held great appeal for some among the hundreds of thousands of Mexican emigrants in the United States, many of whom came from the regions where the UNS was most popular, and—as I have described elsewhere—had supported the Catholic cause during the Cristero War and the Segunda Cristiada.Footnote 12 As the movement grew, the organization established headquarters in El Paso and Los Angeles, as well as numerous chapters in cities throughout Texas and the Southwest.Footnote 13 Each city's committee held its own meetings, and members were charged with the task of growing the organization by recruiting from their own and other migrant communities. Their fundraising would prove particularly important for the organization's leadership back in Mexico, since migrants were comparatively better paid than their counterparts at home.Footnote 14
To its adherents, the UNS presented not only an alternative political and social platform, but also the possibility of recreating an idealized Catholic nation. Indeed, the UNS proposed nothing less than a new social order based on the teachings of the Church. In contrast to revolutionary policies of state-led land redistribution, the UNS envisioned a largely agrarian society, guided by Catholic moral principles, in which families would work cooperatively to farm privately owned land. At the helm of this new, integralist society would be an authoritative Catholic Church, from which all of Mexican society would derive its social norms and rules for living.Footnote 15 The Sinarquistas’ ideal Mexico would be corporatist—with its conception of an organic collectivist society comprised of synergistic and integrated interest groups. In that sense, it offered a Catholic integralist counterpoint to the labor-driven and agrarian corporatist society proposed by the Revolutionary state.Footnote 16
Below (and subordinate to) the Church in the Sinarquista order would be a conservative secular bureaucracy that would exist to uphold individual liberties and private property. Sinarquistas envisioned the traditional family, with the father as head of household, as the basic unit of society. Women also played a significant role in the UNS: female members formed auxiliary women's organizations nationwide, and helped to develop programs of Catholic education for children wherever the UNS had a presence.Footnote 17 The UNS was also explicitly anticommunist, framing itself as a bulwark against the global spread of an atheistic communism that, UNS leaders argued, had already infested Mexico in the form of the leftist Revolution and anticlerical policies—and the religious persecution that it brought about.
UNS growth was most rapid under the leadership of one of its founders, the charismatic Salvador Abascal, who worked largely behind the scenes until taking the helm of the organization in 1940-41, and subsequently spearheading the UNS's colonization efforts in Baja California. Abascal devised the organization's strategy of launching massive Sinarquista demonstrations on the streets of Mexican cities and towns.Footnote 18 Many of these marches would end in the arrests of Abascal and other leaders and sometimes in violent encounters with the police or federal forces. When UNS members were killed in such clashes, the organization celebrated them as martyrs murdered by the brutal revolutionary state—a strategy that in combination with the impressive size of their demonstrations helped draw publicity and attract new adherents.Footnote 19 By 1943, the organization had extended across Mexico, including urban areas and small towns, as well as into the US Southwest and Midwestern states.Footnote 20
Another contributing factor to the organization's early success was its comprehensive symbology and identity: it developed its own flag, salute, hymns, armbands, and uniforms. Sinarquistas also honored their own historical heroes, in particular Mexican independence leader and Church defender Agustín de Iturbide, whose monarchical vision for Mexico appealed to the UNS's glorification of Mexico's Hispanic traditions and colonial past. All of this allowed UNS members to participate proudly in an immersive, spiritual, mystical, nationalistic, and patriotic experience.Footnote 21 Under Abascal's leadership, the organization promoted a defensive distrust of anything seen as foreign to Mexico's Catholic national identity. It was therefore vocally anti-American, decrying the United States as imperialist, Protestant, and a threat to the integrity of Mexican territory.Footnote 22 Jews were similarly portrayed as outsiders to Mexico. Anti-Semitism was a defining characteristic of the UNS, whose publications occasionally deployed common Catholic tropes of Jewish conspiracies.Footnote 23
Abascal and other UNS leaders always insisted that the organization had no foreign connections whatsoever—and historians with deep knowledge of the UNS archives have argued that there is little to no archival support for charges of foreign control.Footnote 24 Still, they openly admired and were certainly influenced by falangismo, as well as by contemporaneous European fascist and authoritarian movements. Juan Ignacio Padilla, one of the founders of the UNS, stated:
We would be insincere if we denied the influence exercised upon Sinarquism by the totalitarian movements. . . . Of course, the admiration and applause was not for the ideas and systems themselves, lacquered with errors and serious violations of human dignity. What was admired and imitated with frequency was the spirit and iron will of those peoples who, under the direction of undeniably colossal men, elevated their countries . . . to an astounding level of material progress and military power.Footnote 25
At the same time, Padilla and other leaders were often critical of these movements. As Padilla put it, they were plagued by “errors,” such as the “deification of the Strongman and the State,” that made them unfit for Catholic countries such as Mexico.Footnote 26
To bring its national vision and social projects to life, the UNS aimed to establish a constellation of rural colonies in Mexico's arid north, which UNS leaders hoped would attract Catholic families from all over Mexico who wished to live according to the organization's cooperative and religious principles. In these settlements, the UNS leadership promised, families could flourish in utopian Catholic communities in which resources would be shared, while the patriarchal order, private property, and Catholic education would be held sacrosanct. The largest and most successful colony was María Auxiliadora, located in the state of Baja California Sur, and led by Salvador Abascal. In it, the UNS built a church and 60 houses of palm and reeds, and attracted some 260 people, almost all from Michoacán, Guanajuato, and Querétaro. Their daily lives revolved around work and prayer.Footnote 27 Another colony, Villa Kino in Sonora, attracted some 85 colonists and was organized similarly; there were also three smaller colonies in Sonora and Tamaulipas. The colonization effort was an enormous undertaking for the UNS, and the organization spent significant time and energy to make the colonies a success during the early 1940s, devoting many pages of its binationally distributed weekly newspaper El Sinarquista to appeals for funding and new colonists.Footnote 28
Throughout the period of its rapid growth and the establishment of the colonies, the UNS lacked official endorsement from the Mexican clergy. Indeed, according to one contemporary observer, the Catholic Church in Mexico was “careful to dissociate itself from the movement in any way which might indicate official approval or . . . disapproval.”Footnote 29 Furthermore, many bishops were dismayed by the rapid expansion of the UNS, since its bellicose rhetoric and massive crowds threatened to alter the carefully negotiated modus vivendi between the Church and the state in Mexico.Footnote 30 While there were certainly some within the clergy who admired the UNS, the officially distant relationship between the organization and the Church stood in contrast to entities like Catholic Action, which received the public endorsement of the hierarchy and since its creation in 1930, had become the Mexican Church's main vehicle for organizing the laity.Footnote 31
The relationship between the UNS and the Mexican government was overtly antagonistic. The phenomenally fast rise of the UNS, its consistent opposition to the revolutionary state, and its startling plans for colonization naturally raised the alarm among officials and supporters of the revolutionary government, particularly after the violence and tensions between Church and state over the previous decade and a half. This long-held suspicion of the Catholic right and other right-wing organizations was intensified by rising authoritarian and fascist movements in Europe, many of which had sympathizers in Mexico (including branches of the Spanish Falange, as well as German and Italian groups).Footnote 32 In 1941, Mexico's congress created the Anti-Sinarquista Committee in Defense of Democracy to investigate the activities of the UNS; the committee president was Alfredo Félix Díaz Escobar, a congressman from Querétaro, part of the Sinarquista heartland.Footnote 33 In the same year, the ruling Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRM; later, the PRI) issued a manifesto condemning Sinarquismo that was endorsed by numerous unions and political associations.Footnote 34
Nevertheless, this antagonism never came close to the outright warfare between the state and Catholic partisans that had occurred in the previous two decades.Footnote 35 Instead, a much more protracted battle over the legitimacy and the nature of Sinarquismo took place in public print media on both sides of the border. Here, I turn to an investigation of how the UNS was covered in US print media, both secular and Catholic, during the 1940s, paying close attention to the ways that Sinarquistas sought to influence, shape, and capitalize on this coverage.
The UNS in the Mainstream US Press
To analyze print media coverage of the UNS during the 1940s, I searched for digitized articles concerning the UNS on a variety of platforms.Footnote 36 Ultimately, I selected and reviewed 150 newspaper articles from mainstream secular daily newspapers in cities and towns across 39 US states, the vast majority of which were published between 1939 and 1945. Some of these, particularly those printed in smaller local papers, were originally released by newswire services such as Associated Press, and therefore appeared in multiple print outlets nationwide; others were written by foreign correspondents for specific national or big-city papers. Another 88 articles, which will be consulted in the subsequent section on the Catholic press, came from Catholic news media. Among these, 32 were released by the National Catholic Welfare Conference News Service, a wire service that produced articles for syndication in the Catholic press.
Early coverage of the UNS in the United States was sparse and fairly neutral. Between 1938 and 1940, a few short Associated Press articles reported on instances of violence or political clashes between UNS members and others. Generally, such articles described the UNS as merely an anticommunist organization.Footnote 37 One article, from El Paso in 1939, for example, described the UNS as a group whose “objects are to fight communism and fascism.”Footnote 38 To UNS leaders, such a description would have been gratifying, for they generally preferred to identify the organization as Catholic, counterrevolutionary, and anticommunist. Yet such articles were few and far between, and their relatively positive portrayals of the UNS would soon be eclipsed by a comparative avalanche of far more negative press.
By the fall of 1941, and consistently until 1945, journalists and other writers from the United States increasingly turned their attention to the Unión Nacional Sinarquista, publishing hundreds of articles about the organization each year in newspapers around the country.Footnote 39 There were likely two reasons for this increased interest: first, the UNS had announced its plans to colonize part of Baja California, thus bringing it geographically closer to the US border; and second, the United States had entered the Second World War, and there was greatly heightened concern about right-wing or fascist organizations in the Western Hemisphere, as well as the potential for “enemy aliens” to infiltrate the United States. During this period, the vastly greater part of newspaper coverage of the UNS was strongly negative, drawing overt comparisons between the UNS and foreign fascist movements, with the majority portraying the Sinarquistas as a fascist, potentially foreign-directed, and highly dangerous organization. Many reporters speculated that the UNS represented a threat to the security of Mexico, the United States, and the entire hemisphere. In doing so, they were often reiterating and echoing the charges levied against the UNS by its opponents in Mexico, some of whom served as sources for American foreign correspondents, or published their own articles in the US press.
The most vocal opponents to the UNS within Mexico largely came from within the left-leaning and pro-government Mexican press, labor leaders, members of congress, and other civic leaders.Footnote 40 Alfredo Félix Díaz Escobar, the aforementioned chair of the Anti-Sinarquista Committee in Defense of Democracy, spoke out frequently about the UNS to members of the American media, declaring to one journalist that the UNS was an “Axis-sponsored fifth column” that “obeys a premeditated plan of espionage prepared by the agents of Hitler and is the enemy of Mexico and the world's democracies.”Footnote 41 He also published at least one English-language editorial in the US press, as did other opponents, such as Alejandro Carrillo, the editor of the leftist newspaper El Popular and labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano.Footnote 42
The stance of leftist critics of Sinarquismo in Mexico is particularly interesting because during the rise of the Soviet Union, those critics were themselves frequently accused—by Sinarquistas, as well as others within the Mexican Right—of comprising a fifth column of Soviet or “Red” influence within Mexico.Footnote 43 Yet, in the context of World War II, which saw fascists and right-leaning dictators becoming main enemies of Mexico and the United States, Sinarquistas seemed to represent a much more potent threat than the pro-agrarian, pro-labor, and at times pro-socialist Mexican Left. This was certainly true in the mainstream US print media, and may be why the charges of UNS opponents such as Díaz Escobar were frequently reprinted in the mainstream press.Footnote 44
While dozens of US journalists would publish stories about the UNS during the war years, two in particular did so at length, and their work was widely read and cited by other journalists. One was Betty Kirk, who was based in Mexico as a foreign correspondent for a variety of US newspapers and published a widely reviewed 1943 book titled Covering the Mexican Front: The Battle of Europe vs. America; the other was Allan Chase, an anti-fascist and a supporter of the Spanish Republican cause who also in 1943 published Falange: The Axis Secret Army in the Americas to “rave reviews.”Footnote 45
Kirk moved to Mexico in 1936 and lived and worked there until 1943, cultivating connections with the Cárdenas government. From 1941 on, she returned frequently to the topic of the Sinarquistas in her writing, casting them in the pages of the Washington Post—in the overtly racialized terms so casually used at the time—as “backward Indian peasants” who were mere puppets of antidemocratic European totalitarian movements.Footnote 46 She reiterated these claims of foreign control for the Christian Science Monitor, stating that the Sinarquistas were linked to “international fascism” and labeling them as mere “tools in the hands of Spanish Falangistas.”Footnote 47 In a section of her 1942 book Covering the Mexican Front, she laid out a purported exposé of the Sinarquistas, claiming that they “are a direct offshoot of the Falange Española” and quoting a Belgian diplomat who asserted that “their real object is to serve Hitler and the Nazis.” She also raised an accusation, which had circulated widely in the Mexican press, that the UNS was actually organized “by a Nazi, Helmuth Schreiter, a language professor of Guanajuato, who used and is using the young Mexican fanatics merely as a front behind which Hitler can operate in Mexico!”Footnote 48 Kirk further claimed that the UNS was linked to a group of the same name in Vichy France, although there is no evidence to support this claim. She even connected them to Japan, exclaiming that the Sinarquistas were “being assisted by the diabolical Japanese Saka de Ly movement!”Footnote 49 To Kirk, the UNS was exactly as its Mexican opponents, who were also her informants, supposed it to be: a pro-fascist reactionary group that was directed by shadowy leaders from outside Mexico.
Like Kirk, Allan Chase focused on the purported manipulation of the UNS by both Falange and Nazi foreigners. Based on his own interviews with anonymous contacts from Spain and Latin America, he asserted that the Spanish Falange had infiltrated over 20 foreign countries and had a million members outside of Spain—mostly in Latin America—by 1936.Footnote 50 In Mexico alone, Chase claimed, there were “50,000 uniformed, dues-paying members” of the Falange.Footnote 51 The Sinarquistas were “a Falange-front organization.”Footnote 52 Furthermore, Chase claimed that the UNS was actively collaborating with Nazi and Italian fascist agents, asserting that Mexico City “has over a thousand Gestapo-trained SIM [Servizio Informazioni Militare] agents working out of no less than eleven offices in the capital alone.”Footnote 53 The Sinarquistas were therefore not only puppets of the Falange but a part of a widespread right-wing network “aided by Falange specialists,” and were conducting drills “with sub-machine guns, rifles, and other arms kindly supplied by the Nazis via Spanish boats.”Footnote 54 Like Kirk, Chase saw Japanese involvement in addition to Nazi connections: he reported that settlers in the UNS colony in Baja California (which, according to Chase, Mexicans “bitterly refer to . . . as the ‘República Sinarquista’”) were smuggling “valuable Mexican mercury” to Germans and Japanese “who come in submarines.”Footnote 55
Numerous other writers in the English-language press likewise cast the UNS as a fascist organization that was either subordinate or directly linked to European fascist movements. There was particular concern over the origins and sources of UNS funding, and many journalists asserted that the organization could only be funded by Axis powers. For example, the New York Times reported in 1943 that the UNS “is looked upon by everyone except its own members as a Fascist spearhead against Mexican democracy that is being financed by some foreign power.”Footnote 56 These charges were reiterated frequently in small and large newspapers across the United States. Despite the frequency of such allegations, no journalist ever provided conclusive documentary evidence about foreign financing of the UNS.Footnote 57 Although it is not impossible that the UNS received foreign funds, and more investigation is certainly needed in this regard, it seems more likely that a significant amount of UNS funding came from its members in both Mexico and the United States, who were regularly prevailed upon in the pages of El Sinarquista to donate money to support the colonization effort.Footnote 58
Beyond the question of funding, journalists also perceived similarities in the UNS political structure and organization that—to them—could only mean that the organization was a fifth column for European powers, particularly Spain, Germany, and Italy.Footnote 59 In a syndicated article by Marshall Hail, Salvador Abascal was described as the organization's “fuehrer,” “who demands and apparently receives blind obedience.”Footnote 60 While direct comparisons to Italy were rarer, they also appeared in several articles, including a piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by special correspondent Jack Starr-Hunt, who observed similarities between the UNS embrace of corporatism and Mussolini's labor policies.Footnote 61
Many writers focused on aspects of UNS visual symbols and actions to draw direct comparisons between the UNS and European totalitarian movements. This argument was advanced in a Philadelphia Inquirer article by Alvadee Hutton, a student journalist visiting Mexico, who finagled both an interview with Abascal and an invitation to a UNS rally. Her article underscored visual similarities between the UNS and Nazism, including “a uniform, and arm-band, and a salute that is similar to the Nazis.”Footnote 62 Indeed, the salute, official slogans and the organization of the movement were highly reminiscent of fascism to many writers.Footnote 63 These observations were repeated frequently in other publications; for example, the Hope Star [Arkansas], published a slightly edited version of the previously mentioned wire article by Marshall Hail that pointed out that the UNS “like most totalitarian movements . . . has its own salute.” The article was accompanied by a photo of the right-handed Sinarquista gesture (see Figure 1).Footnote 64
Figure 1 Sinarquistas giving the UNS salute
Source: Article from the Hope Star, October 10, 1941.
Such observations about aesthetic and organizational similarities were not completely inaccurate. As mentioned, Sinarquista leaders such as Abascal and Padilla did express admiration for fascist movements and leaders, imitating their military and aesthetic style, and Sinarquista society was corporatist in structure, just like the fascist organizations in Europe. Lacking any proof for their assertions, however, US journalists simply equated the similarities between Sinarquismo and fascism with subordination of the UNS to foreign powers, thus negating the possibility that Mexico could have an autonomous right-wing movement that responded to its own historical and political realities.
Over the course of the war years, US journalists—with the help of anti-UNS critics in Mexico—came to perceive the UNS as a fascist organization controlled by outside powers. As a result, they naturally worried that it posed a direct threat to the internal and external security, democracy, and stability of Mexico—and beyond that, to US interests in the region. The sheer size of the UNS, as well as its rapid growth, was a particular area of focus, with numerous journalists frequently remarking on the hundreds of thousands of Sinarquista members as a source of “strength” for the organization.Footnote 65 Given its size and supposed power, journalists expressed fears that the UNS would manage to infiltrate the Mexican government and destabilize its democracy. While the UNS itself claimed that it was not a political party and did not seek political power, its authoritarian, illiberal, and militaristic tendencies certainly did not reassure journalists such as Edgar Ansel Mowrer, who, in an editorial column printed in the Gazette and Daily of York, Pennsylvania, cited Allan Chase and others to conclude that “Mexican sinarquistas are wolves in sheep's clothing . . . [whose purpose is] overthrowing the legitimate Government of Mexico, abolishing all political parties, and establishing a sort of Spanish-type or Portuguese-type dictatorship.”Footnote 66 This focus on the integrity of Mexico's democracy was somewhat paradoxical, however, given that Mexico's ruling party had recently managed to install its president, Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-46), after a highly contested election against right-wing candidate Juan Andreu Almazán, and would continue to hold single-party rule until 2000.
The potential for violence and the actual violent acts of the UNS were also a concern for US writers and their audiences. In a widely syndicated article, journalist Willis Thornton commented that “the announced non-violent principles of [Abascal] have produced plenty of violence.”Footnote 67 While there were certainly multiple small-scale violent clashes between the UNS and the government during the early 1940s, US journalists during this period largely seemed to believe that this violence was instigated and funded by foreign powers. In 1943, the New York Times repeated charges that the Sinarquista organization and other “fascist elements” had “provoked armed uprisings to further the Axis cause in Mexico.”Footnote 68 This view of the UNS as a violent, sinister organization was also reflected in American fiction of the mid 1940s: at least two popular novels featured Sinarquista antagonists.Footnote 69
However, it seems evident that violent episodes that involved the UNS were either clashes between Sinarquista demonstrators and the Mexican government (these were relatively common and helped to produce a cult of martyrdom around the UNS), or isolated violent confrontations between Sinarquistas and government supporters in the Mexican countryside—such as one which resulted in the assassination of Teresita Bustos in Celaya, Guanajuato, in 1939—rather than instances of Axis-instigated violence.Footnote 70
Still, in the eyes of many in the secular US press, the UNS clearly represented a threat not only to Mexico but also to its northern neighbor, and perhaps even to the entire hemisphere. Several journalists noted correctly that UNS leaders were frequent critics of the United States, and that Sinarquista rhetoric was often virulently anti-American, casting the United States as both materialistic and imperialistic.Footnote 71 Naturally, then, for many journalists the Sinarquistas’ colonization movement, and particularly the María Auxiliadora colony in Baja California, represented a grave danger to the United States, given its proximity to the border. Writing for the Washington Post, John White charged that “the whole [colonization] movement is a scheme to establish a Fascist colony on the Pacific Coast in the interest of . . . the totalitarian countries which are interested in the eventual invasion of the American continent.”Footnote 72 Similar charges were widely repeated in the US secular press.
If the colonization movement was a significant threat, an even bigger one was the existence of UNS chapters within Mexican migrant communities in the United States.Footnote 73 A New York Times writer stated that the UNS had 50,000 members in the United States, while a journalist at the Washington Post claimed that the UNS was one of the most “active propagandists” within the country.Footnote 74 In 1945, an editorial in the York Daily Record fumed about “fascists . . . right in our very midst,” alerting readers that the organization would be “a serious threat to our democratic way of life . . . particularly if there were numerous cells of fascism in the United States, part and parcel of a fascist government in Mexico.”Footnote 75
Allan Chase was particularly apocalyptic on this issue, asserting that the UNS “has established itself like a cancer in many centers of Mexican population in the United States.” UNS chapters in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, he claimed, were “producing bloodshed and disorder.” In Los Angeles, the UNS was aided by “members of German and Italian organizations dissolved after Pearl Harbor.” To this, Chase added, “the Los Angeles Sinarquist movement has been held directly responsible for a crime wave which broke out among unemployed Mexican youths in 1942, and figured as a prime factor in at least one California murder case.” Further, Chase asserted that the Sinarquistas in the United States were apparently dissuading Mexicans from enlisting in war activities, purchasing war bonds, or supporting the US war effort.Footnote 76 Finally, he described a frightening UNS plan to build a brand-new capital city—to be called “Sinarcopolis”— “in what are now the plains of Texas.”Footnote 77
Despite such perceptions, there is little to no evidence of widespread Sinarquista crime or violence in the United States, aside from one report of isolated conflict between Sinarquistas and their Mexican opponents.Footnote 78 Indeed, journalists’ assessments of the US-based UNS chapters have more to do with their preconceptions of the organization as a violent front for foreign powers who wished to destabilize Mexico, and therefore the United States, in the context of the fears and concerns of the American public during the Second World War.
Taken together, the coverage of the UNS in the mainstream secular press that I reviewed was overwhelmingly negative, with a focus on the organization's purported ties to fascism and Nazism, its violence (or potential for violence), its seemingly sinister and mysterious leadership (particularly Salvador Abascal, who was profiled by several reporters), and its potential threat to the security of the United States. Certainly, to the extent that the general US reading public developed a general perception of the UNS during the 1940-45 period, it was of the Sinarquistas as a fascist, Nazi-influenced, totalitarian threat.Footnote 79
This negative coverage may have influenced—and been influenced by—the stance of the US government, and US government representatives toward the UNS during the war years. Both the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) surveilled Sinarquistas during the war years. The FBI compiled a 2600-document dossier on the UNS and also censored publications sent to the United States by the UNS headquarters in Mexico. The OSS, meanwhile, gathered intelligence in Mexico from “domestic journalistic accounts, consular officers’ assessments, and Mexican informants.”Footnote 80 Furthermore, influential US politicians spoke out against the organization in public. In 1943, US Secretary of State Harold Ickes, speaking at a meeting of the United Jewish Appeal, declared that the Sinarquista movement was “the most important Nazi-Fascist penetration and the most dangerous to the cause of democracy,” and urged vigilance.Footnote 81 The following year, US Representative John M. Coffee of Washington charged Sinarquistas with being “in contact with Fascists” in Spain, and accused them of stirring up the ‘zoot-suit’ riots in Los Angeles.”Footnote 82
Sinarquista Self-Advocacy in the United States
Sinarquista leaders were well aware of the dominant perceptions about them in both Mexican and US media, as well as in the US government, and they expended significant energy fighting back against their portrayal as a fascist, violent, and foreign-controlled movement. Indeed, they almost certainly believed that these perceptions could threaten their very survival, as demonstrated not only by the FBI and OSS investigations, but also by the constant efforts of opponents within Mexico to shut down the UNS.Footnote 83 The organization, therefore, embarked upon a number of strategies to confront negative press coverage in the United States.
In the pages of its newspaper, El Sinarquista (published in Spanish), as well as in many English-language outlets, UNS writers responded vehemently to charges that the organization was affiliated with Nazism, fascism, or the Falange. While the readership of El Sinarquista would have been primarily members of the UNS, the paper was distributed in the United States as well, and US journalists read and cited it.Footnote 84 Sinarquista editorialists repeatedly insisted that no outside organization influenced the UNS, that it was strictly a national entity, with a vision only for Mexico. Furthermore, they frequently turned around the accusations against them, charging their opponents in the Mexican government and the Left with being a tool of foreign powers.
To the Sinarquistas, the Mexican Left was merely a front for an imminent communist takeover of Mexico.Footnote 85 The contrast between what they saw as their own organic nationalist movement and a foreign-controlled internationalist Left was expressed clearly in an editorial from 1942:
Sinarquismo is Mexican through and through [hasta las cachas]. There they are, proclaiming this truth, the charros of San Luis, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Michoacán. They form the vanguard [descubiertas] in our splendid marches. . . . This is their battle cry: ¡VIVA MÉXICO! This is their flag: that of Iguala. This is their Queen: the Virgin of Guadalupe. In front of them, how pathetic are the “internationals” with their military outfits, their red-black rags, their withered little banners! You, charros sinarquistas, represent Mexico; they, the “internationals,” represent . . . Anti-Mexico!Footnote 86
In El Sinarquista, UNS leaders directly confronted press coverage that they found objectionable. In 1941, the newspaper published an article complaining about Alvadee Hutton, the aforementioned female student journalist who, El Sinarquista charged, had written “mendacious notes” about the UNS after interviewing Salvador Abascal. According to the UNS, Hutton's subsequent report, which had appeared in the Mexican newspaper Excélsior as well as in the Philadelphia Inquirer, was a complete misrepresentation of the Sinarquista movement:
It was obvious that la gringuita . . . already had the idea to portray Sinarquismo as a movement of the Nazi type . . . [she had] the evident intention of presenting this profound Mexican Movement, which expresses the aspirations of the most oppressed and noble part of our country, as a Hitlerian, fifth-columnist, and antidemocratic organization.”
In response to Hutton's article, the UNS also wrote to Excélsior denouncing the article as full of lies and lamenting that the newspaper, as a widely read publication that could influence public opinion in both Mexico and the United States, had not treated the UNS “honorably and with decency.”Footnote 87
UNS writers in El Sinarquista (who often wrote without bylines) also tried to convince their readers that opponents were planting false information about the organization. In response to an “unfounded” editorial in the New York Herald Tribune, which alleged that the UNS was part of the Falange and was following German orders, and that its colonies represented a threat to the security of the borderlands, El Sinarquista writers reminded American journalists that they should “not rely on our enemies, because they will share false information.” The article accused Mexican labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano of being one of the sources for the Herald Tribune editorial, and countered that “[these . . . ] stupidities do not deserve a refutation. They are vulgar charges.”Footnote 88
Only a few months later, the UNS undertook an even more proactive attempt to counter the accusations of its opponents by publishing and distributing an English-language booklet to a variety of American newspapers and magazines that would once and for all “explain the Sinarquista point of view.” For the booklet, the UNS crafted a statement that aimed to address all of the typical preconceptions held by US journalists at once: “Sinarquism condemns Communism, totalitarianism, dictatorships, and tyrannies: we repudiate the division of ‘leftists’ and ‘rightists,’ of ‘revolutionaries’ and ‘reactionaries.’ We repudiate, likewise, the Nazi swastika, the Communistic star, and any other foreign symbol.”
Through this pamphlet, the UNS sought to cast itself as a Catholic-nationalist alternative to both the Left in Mexico and worldwide and to right-wing totalitarian movements across the globe. Furthermore, the booklet underscored that communism was an explicitly foreign phenomenon that had created “class hatred” and a “class struggle” in Mexico.Footnote 89 Here, the UNS again attempted to flip the script on US press coverage, by making the same fifth-column accusation against the Mexican government that had accused the Sinarquistas of being under the sway of foreign influence, and simultaneously appealing to those sectors of US public opinion that were concerned with the apparent threat of communism.
To further counter US perceptions, the UNS also attempted a public relations tour. According to Nathan Ellstrand, in 1943, two groups of young UNS leaders collaborated with US Catholic clergy to organize a tour of universities in South Bend, Indiana; St. Louis; Chicago and Champaign-Urbana in Illinois; New Orleans; New York; and San Antonio. One group included UNS founding members Juan Ignacio Padilla and Alfonso Trueba, along with Efraín Pardo, a Sinarquista from Los Angeles. These emissaries spoke to a variety of audiences and gave newspaper interviews in which they denied any connections to European fascism and stressed the religious underpinnings of the Sinarquista movement. In their efforts, they had the support of various clergy, including Bishop Edwin V. O'Hara, head of the Inter-American Institute in Kansas City, which facilitated international exchanges.Footnote 90
The goodwill tour was only one of the fruits of a deep relationship that Sinarquista leaders had been cultivating for several years with influential Catholics in the United States. In 1938, UNS representatives traveled to Washington, DC, where they met with William Montavon, director of the legal department at the National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC), the preeminent organization of the US Catholic hierarchy. In appealing to these US Catholics, the Sinarquistas were following the tactics of Mexican Cristero supporters during the previous decade, who had secured significant moral support and publicity (although never the funding that they wanted) after appealing to Catholic bishops and organizations, including the NCWC and the Knights of Columbus.Footnote 91 The relationship between the UNS and the NCWC was ultimately not as fruitful, but it did result in an alliance with Montavon, who did what he could to help promote a better image of the UNS in the Catholic press.
After that visit and throughout the early 1940s, Montavon corresponded regularly with Sinarquista chiefs Gonzalo Campos (1938) and Antonio Santacruz (1938-45). These relationships were extremely cordial, and both men frequently sent him press clippings in which they felt the UNS had been misunderstood or maligned.Footnote 92 To Montavon, it seemed clear that the mainstream press—and as a result, US politicians—were misrepresenting the UNS, and that any resemblance between the Sinarquistas and foreign fascists was merely incidental. In his view, representations of the UNS as a foreign-funded fifth column were rooted in leftist bias among journalists. To counter this supposed bias, Montavon and his colleagues would work assiduously to promote a different portrait of the UNS to the US media and influential individuals.
As he wrote to Nelson Rockefeller, then assistant US secretary of State, in 1941, “It is my impression that the Sinarquist movement is being much maligned and that the reason for this opposition is largely to be found in the fact that the Sinarquists are opposed to communism in Mexico.”Footnote 93 To counter these purported misconceptions about the UNS, Montavon kept close track of events in Mexico throughout the 1940s, compiling information about major Sinarquista conventions and press releases, and following reports of the UNS's involvement in debates over labor and land redistribution in Mexico, as well as the acrimonious battle between Sinarquistas and the Mexican government over the future of public education.Footnote 94
Sinarquista Defenders and Critics in the US Catholic Media
Montavon was not the only advocate for the UNS working at the NCWC. Throughout the 1940s (and particularly in 1940-45), NCWC's Catholic News Service (CNS), which had been founded in 1919 to disseminate news of particular interest to US Catholics, published periodic reports about the Sinarquistas and their activities in Mexico. The News Service articles generally relied on quotes from interview subjects, rather than editorializing, to defend the UNS. For example, one press release quoted a priest in Los Angeles who rejected charges of violence by Sinarquistas in the United States as “absurd” and claimed that the UNS in Mexico was “a very respectable and well-recognized movement to counteract the effects of extreme Communism through lawful means.”Footnote 95 Another press release summarized an official Sinarquista statement that asserted that the UNS “rejects communism, rejects also racism; has no affiliation with any political party either in Mexico or in any foreign country; [and] is against revolution.”Footnote 96
Like the articles about the UNS in the secular US press, Catholic news articles offered no definitive proof that could settle the question of whether the Sinarquistas were a violent, fascist, or foreign-funded organization. Nevertheless, they presented a counterpoint to an increasingly numerous Catholic reading public; CNS articles were generally picked up by Catholic newspapers across the country. They also underscored the same main arguments that Sinarquista leaders made: that the UNS was not Nazi or fascist, but rather that it was an organization run by respectable Mexican Catholics in response to the abuses of the revolutionary government, and for the good of the Mexican people.
During the 1940s, US Catholic newspapers sometimes offered descriptions of the UNS that went beyond simple refutations of the allegations in mainstream newspapers. Specifically, some within the Catholic press put forth the argument that the UNS actually offered the possibility of a healthier democracy in Mexico. In the archdiocesan St. Louis Register, for example, the Catholic journalist C. J. McNeill described Sinarquismo as a “Christian democratic movement” that was being “smear[ed] . . . with the stigma of fascism..Footnote 97 Further, it was actually a “disciplined . . . counterrevolutionary movement.”Footnote 98 McNeill also refuted specific charges made in the media, citing an informant to assert that there were no Nazi founders of the UNS, and explaining the church-state conflict that had given rise to the organization.Footnote 99 This kind of portrayal offered a very different analysis from that in the secular press, underscoring the religious origins and motivations of the UNS, investigating and presenting the organization's historical background, and highlighting the organization's alleged potential to improve democracy in Mexico. In the same publication, a different article reiterated this point, arguing that the UNS was comprised of “simply Christians whose idea is to make the nation more Christian by means of the ballot and instruction,” and arguing that it had been unfairly maligned by “the Reds.”Footnote 100
It is important to note here that the relationship between the UNS and Mexican electoral politics was in fact quite contentious. For most of the early years of its existence, UNS leaders had discouraged their followers from voting, including during the campaign of opposition presidential candidate Juan Andreu Almazán in 1940, alleging that the election would only result in fraud.Footnote 101 Only after 1944 did the organization begin to promote electoral politics, eventually supporting the creation of a short-lived political party, Fuerza Popular, in 1946.Footnote 102 Nevertheless, US Catholic proponents of the UNS saw it as an opposition force potentially capable of putting electoral pressure on a non-democratic regime.
The Jesuit magazine America, which had been hailed by the UNS in El Sinarquista, was another space that advanced a more positive portrayal of the organization and emphasized its potential for the strengthening of democracy in Mexico.Footnote 103 James Magner, a renowned Catholic author and priest who visited Mexico frequently during the 1930s and 1940s, wrote in its pages that while “enemies of Catholicism saw the specter of the Church in politics and of the Spanish Inquisition looming in the foreground . . . the truth is that Abascal is a man of high character and clean personal record, sincerely desirous of lending his energies to the betterment of the Mexican people.” As a result, the UNS had the potential to “bring just that much closer the realization of a genuine democracy to a country that has suffered so much.”Footnote 104
Catholic defenders of the UNS also wrote to secular US newspapers to try to correct what they viewed as erroneous reporting about the UNS. In a 1944 letter to the editor of the New York Times, Francis Heltshe, a Catholic priest, refuted rumors of a Sinarquista conspiracy to assassinate President Ávila Camacho, as well as the suspicion that the Sinarquistas were plotting against the government, asserting instead that Sinarquismo was an “open” and “democratic” movement.Footnote 105 In a sign of how closely the UNS leadership was monitoring US press coverage, El Sinarquista published an article responding to Heltsche's letter and noting that “fortunately in our neighbor to the North there are decent people that are well aware of what we are and what we want and in this occasion, as in others, they did not fail to raise their voice . . . to defend the dignity of Sinarquismo and the dignity of our principles.”Footnote 106 Paul Dearing, who was the publicity director for the NCWC, also wrote to the New York Times in response to a critical article about the UNS. “Sinarquista [sic] is a social movement offering a genuine hope of self-government to Mexicans,” he asserted. Going further in defense of the Sinarquistas than many other writers (and possibly attempting to make the UNS seem more like a pro-democratic movement to American readers), he added that the UNS “is as anti-Fascist as our own Republican Party.”Footnote 107
Although the coverage of the Sinarquista movement by Catholic journalists was more favorable than that of mainstream and left-wing journalists, some Catholics were more skeptical about the movement. In the Saint Louis Register, H. L. Moore offered a somewhat qualified critique, claiming that “not enough is known about sinarquismo to give it a completely clean bill of health.” While Moore defended the organization from writers like Allan Chase, he also stated that the “Catholic attitude is one of interest but of watchful waiting. . . . There has been no minimizing among US Catholics of certain dangers . . . in the movement.”Footnote 108
A more direct and impactful critique of the UNS came from Fr. Edward Skillin, who had been a prominent Catholic critic of Franco during the Spanish Civil war and was the editor of the progressive Catholic magazine Commonweal. In a 1944 article, he asserted that the UNS was “authoritarian and highly centralized . . . . it requires blind obedience on the part of its members.” Making a clear rhetorical link between the UNS and Franco's Spain, Skillin argued that the UNS's secrecy meant that it could easily be co-opted by a “jefe or caudillo,” and if it were to gain power, “we should once again have a dictatorial state adorned with Catholic symbols and forcibly repressing all opposition . . . to the terrible detriment of the Church.” In using the phrase “once again,” Skillin was clearly making a comparison—and a direct criticism—of Franco's Spain, where the Catholic Church openly complied with a violent dictatorial regime in return for the total repression of anticlerical elements of Spanish society. He was also rowing against the current of contemporary US Catholic opinion, which largely supported the Franco government.Footnote 109
Skillin's article was approvingly quoted in the secular press.Footnote 110 By contrast, however, most Catholic press coverage of the Sinarquistas was still more positive, and numerous Catholic writers pushed back against Skillin's portrayal of the UNS.Footnote 111 Sinarquistas back in Mexico certainly noted this largely positive coverage and occasionally touted it in the pages of El Sinarquista, with one writer noting that “although there are in the United States newspapers that publish malevolent and false reports, there also exists an honorable press that presents Sinarquismo as it actually is before American public opinion.”Footnote 112 Indeed, to some UNS leaders these efforts to improve perceptions of the UNS in the US media were working, perhaps lending hope that the organization would receive more legitimacy within the wider US public. Ultimately, however, the fragmentation and decline of the organization during and after 1944 would render the question of US approval (or lack thereof) moot.
Conclusion
After 1945, press coverage of the UNS in the United States diminished significantly. This is partly related to the fact that the organization had already begun to decline in size and influence. By 1944, the Sinarquista colonies had collapsed due to lack of funding, farming expertise, and population. During the same year, there was a major fracture within the leadership of the Unión Nacional Sinarquista, with Salvador Abascal ultimately leaving the movement, along with many of his followers. Meanwhile, Mexico's Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) had begun to coalesce as a viable electoral option for Mexicans (and Catholics) on the right, and, finally, President Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946-52) explicitly adopted a platform of anticommunism.Footnote 113
Perhaps equally important for the US press, however, was the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War. This meant that the threat of an Axis fifth column was suddenly not nearly so frightening or attention-grabbing to many Americans; instead, the American public would grow increasingly concerned about potential communist infiltration in government and society. The fate of Allan Chase, the writer who had warned Americans of the threat of the Falange in Latin America and accused the Sinarquistas of being their puppets, attests to this shift. In 1953 he was called to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and grilled about his suspected communist ties.Footnote 114
Yet, at the tail end of the stormy debate over the nature of the UNS, there were at least a few instances of more nuanced press coverage, in which writers paid closer attention to the religious roots of the UNS and echoed some of the distinctions that UNS leaders articulated between themselves and European fascism. This change came at least in part because the organization significantly downplayed its previous anti-American stance. In 1945, for example, one journalist in the New York Times noted that UNS representatives frequently spoke out against communism, Nazi fascism and “pseudo-liberal democracy,” all of which they saw as opposed to the teachings of Christianity.”Footnote 115
The premier example of this more moderate tone was journalist and novelist Margaret Shedd's long investigative article, “Thunder on the Right in Mexico,” published in Harper's Magazine in 1945. In it, she delved into the origins and goals of the UNS, interviewing its leaders and embedding herself in several Sinarquista marches in order to observe its participants and practices. In her assessment, while she clearly perceived fascist, Falange, and Nazi influences (and hinted at, but did not substantiate, allegations of Nazi funding), she also understood and highlighted the UNS's Catholic and Mexican origins and goals. Shedd also exhibited some familiarity with the long history of both Church-state conflict and land tenure in Mexico and connected the Sinarquista movement to both of these issues, directly linking them to the Cristero fighters of the previous decade. Shedd's article offered its readers much of what so much of the mainstream secular media coverage of the UNS during the prior years had lacked: a critical portrayal of the Sinarquistas that took into account the Mexican context in which the organization arose, without ignoring the movement's ideological debt to global fascism.
Yet this more nuanced portrayal was not what the majority of the American reading public encountered during the war years. Despite the best efforts of the UNS, which tried to change the narrative about the Sinarquista movement by building relationships with prominent US Catholics and responding to common charges against it in the print media, a much larger American readership had encountered negative descriptions of the UNS in their daily newspapers, in prominent national magazines, or in nonfiction books such as those by Betty Kirk and Allan Chase. As a result, a majority of the American public read about an organization that was dangerous, subversive, antidemocratic, fascist, suspiciously religious, and most frightening of all, a possible fifth column for the Axis powers that threatened the entire Western Hemisphere.
Even in the Catholic press, the secular media always set the terms of the debate: Catholic coverage of the UNS was largely focused on responding to and refuting the charges of foreign involvement and reassuring leaders that the movement was headed by decent people. In the end, the Sinarquistas never received widespread positive coverage outside of the Catholic media.Footnote 116 To the extent that Sinarquistas are remembered in US popular consciousness, they seem to be linked inextricably with fascism and other sinister forces.Footnote 117
Nevertheless, the story of the Sinarquistas’ game of tug-of-war in the US press helps illuminate two key facts about the Unión Nacional Sinarquista. First, despite its vocally anti-American stance for much of the early 1940s, it closely monitored US public opinion about the organization and took actions to improve public perceptions of the UNS in the United States (such as touring universities and lobbying the NCWC), most likely because UNS leaders believed that support from US Catholics could help counter negative press and perhaps even forestall the condemnation of the US public and potential state intervention. After all, as Margaret Shedd pointed out at the time, “the official attitude of the United States is the question of first importance to anyone who thinks of making a revolution in Mexico”Footnote 118
Second, the story of the US press coverage of the UNS highlights the transnational nature of the Sinarquista organization itself, and the centrality of a transnational public opinion to the project of remaking Mexico's Catholic nation. Not only did the UNS, which claimed to be an explicitly Mexican nationalist organization, have chapters across the United States—a fact that is only recently beginning to draw the full attention of historians—but its leadership also routinely traveled to and throughout the United States to try to influence public opinion, with members of the organization moving comfortably within American Catholic circles and working to influence the US media landscape. Indeed, although it was perhaps contradictory given their nationalist and anti-American ideologies, UNS members understood perfectly well that in order to fulfill their ultimate aim of founding a Catholic nation in Mexico, they needed to push back against negative perceptions of their organization in the United States.
Finally, this history of competing media narratives can also help us to chart new directions for the scholarly study of the Sinarquistas. To some extent, the question that dominated press coverage of the Sinarquistas in the 1940s—were they Nazis, fascists, or something else?—continues to infuse scholarly debates. It is certainly a relevant question. Yet it also can distract from a deeper examination of the organization's connections to Mexican Catholic history, its outgrowth from the Cristero War and other episodes of Church-state conflicts in Mexico, and its possible connections to other contemporaneous global Catholic movements, such as Catholic integralism.
Of course, scholarly understandings of the Sinarquistas are far more nuanced than press coverage ever was, and an ample and growing historiography of the Sinarquistas has expanded far beyond any simplistic question. Recent studies on women and the Sinarquista movement, on the transnational aspects of the UNS, and on the activities of the organization after the 1940s all promise to move the research in new directions.Footnote 119 Yet there is still work to be done on the question of the manifold intellectual and religious origins of the movement. The Sinarquistas saw themselves as the inheritors (and restorers) of a Catholic order that went back to the era of Spanish sovereignty over Mexico. Their critics on both sides of the border saw them as a sinister foreign-influenced movement that existed purely to undermine Mexico's revolutionary government, and possibly that of the United States as well. A fuller investigation of the UNS's own historical narratives of Mexico—their chronology, their legends, and their historical heroes—may help to further historical understandings of the movement's formation, motivations, and expansion during the 1940s and beyond, and to take us even further beyond the one-dimensional debates that dominated media coverage then, and still inform contemporary perceptions of the Sinarquista movement today.
