Most of the historiography which focuses on forms of Catholic resistance in Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century has viewed them as part of a long process linked to the complex high level relations between state and Church. The same approach has generally been adopted towards analysis of the Cristiada, regarding both traditional ‘partisan’ studiesFootnote 1 and academic analyses published since the 1960s.Footnote 2 These have explained the Cristiada (1926–29) as the outcome of Church-state conflicts, viewing the causes of the revolt as linked to one side or the other. Most authors attribute rural participation in the cristero movement to the degree of religious commitment held by the population, even though they disagree about the extent of religiosity of the different actors involved: Robert Quirk views it as low, David Charles Bailey and Alicia Olivera saw it as moderate and Jean Meyer judged it to be high.Footnote 3
Meyer's classic volume La Cristiada (1973) was particularly celebrated by historians and Catholic readers. However, over time doubts emerged about Meyer's sources and methodology, as well as his overall interpretation which overly dichotomized elite and popular forms of religion, and traditional and modern. Meyer tended to overplay the ideological motives of the cristeros and simplify relations between campesinos, Church and state.Footnote 4 Nonetheless, his work inspired many studies, especially the post-revisionist generation or ‘new cultural historians’, to include religiosity as a central factor in their historical analyses.Footnote 5
The growth of regional histories between 1970 and 1990 came to signal the importance of the religious dimension for understanding post-revolutionary Mexican society. The conflict between Church and state was no longer a matter solely of ‘high politics’, but rather implied a cultural conflict with deep roots in society. From the 1990s onwards, post-revisionist studies made the religious element a central focus of study, attempting to understand the ways in which a popular religious culture emerged in the areas where the Cristiada was most intense. Michoacán has attracted considerable attention from scholars: for example, Matthew Butler examined the multiple identities of popular religious culture in the region, Christopher Boyer analysed emergent forms of consciousness and discourse which underpin campesino identity, and Marjorie Becker considered the link between gender and religion in the rural population's sentiments of piety.Footnote 6 All these authors, with the exception of Becker, focus their attention on the religious conflict of the 1920s and particularly on the Cristiada. They do not consider the vicissitudes of the conflict in the 1930s – the eruption of the Second Cristiada (1932–34). Nor do they consider the struggles within the Catholic camp between the ecclesiastical hierarchy, those in favour of passive resistance (including Acción Católica Mexicana, Legiones, Base, and the Unión Nacional Sinarquista) and the ‘active’ resistance (Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa, LNDLR).
Jennie Purnell's work is somewhat at odds with the new post-revisionist historiography; although her main focus is on the 1920s, she finds that the main reasons underpinning factional alignments in the Cristiada – whether in support of Church or the state – had to do with the articulation of forms of land-holding and authority.Footnote 7 Such a line of explanation of the Cristiada was earlier advanced by Jrade at the start of the 1980s.Footnote 8 Jrade and Purnell, respectively, found that cristero communities were characterised by the centrality of the parish, as well as by the strong leadership of the priest in matters of community life, a leadership that was exercised either through a monopolistic faction or cooperation with other brokers close to Catholicism. In contrast, revolutionary communities tended to confine the authority of the priest to the parish alone and local brokers challenged any attempt to extend his influence beyond the religious sphere.Footnote 9 In this sense, rather than different degrees of popular religiosity, the key factor was the different correlation of forces amongst local factions. This article adopts such an approach. Its main objective is to clarify the forms of resistance used by Catholics in the electoral district of ZitácuaroFootnote 10 to confront both the state's anti-clerical lawsFootnote 11 and local enemies of Catholicism between 1920 and 1940.
The central argument of this article is that the differences in forms of Catholic resistance in Michoacán in the 1920s and 1930s were an expression not only of different degrees of religiosity, but also of specific power dynamicsFootnote 12 between rival factions in the different communities and regions of the state. It was precisely the local correlations of forces – understood as dealings of power and resistance, not limited to the political sphere alone – that forced Catholics to adopt diverse strategic positions in each region. In this way, as a number of studies have shown, Catholicism was forced into clandestinity to a far greater extent where its enemies were more powerful (for example, in Zamora and Zitácuaro), whilst it was more defiant and difficult to control and legally restricted where the factions allied with the state were weaker (as was the case in Ciudad Hidalgo and Coalcomán).Footnote 13
Church-state conflicts cut across the individuals in state and church-allied blocks,Footnote 14 placing them in a contradictory situation in which their different identity markers, or repertories of values, and their norms of behaviour had to assume priority. The theoretical premise advanced here is that individuals operated according to an intuitive idea of the concept of ‘vital opportunities’:Footnote 15 they aimed to maximize their life chances, with their values providing a guide to action, but this never cancelled out their freedom to choose between contradictory symbolic universes.Footnote 16
The emergence of an anti-clerical consciousness
The east of Michoacán experienced rapid economic growth during the Porfiriato following the arrival of the railway.Footnote 17 In the north of the region, the districts of Maravatío and Zinapécuaro, forestry and agricultural production expanded; a textile factory was also established in Taximaroa (today known as Ciudad Hidalgo), which in turn stimulated the production of linen by local haciendas and ranches. In the south, which comprised the district of Zitácuaro, where the majority of the indigenous population of the region was concentrated, the railway stimulated the growth of commercial agriculture (fruits and grains), and the production of meat, tobacco and cotton. This provoked attacks on the communal property of Mazahua and Otomí Indians in the district, pushing them onto ever smaller plots, a dynamic which fed the agrarismo of the 1920s and 1930s. Banks were also opened which provided credits for the construction of infrastructure, such as irrigation, reservoirs and wells. All this increased the prosperity of local ranchers, hacendados and traders. Mining had existed in the area since the colonial period, but it was during the República Restaurada (1867–75) and the Porfiriato (1876–1911) that greater foreign capital investment allowed for the expansion of infrastructure at the mining centres of Tlalpujahua and Angangueo. The installations of the French-owned firm Dos Estrellas, at El Oro and Tlalpujahua, allowed it to become one of the main producers of gold and silver in the country. The American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), owned by US capital, dominated the municipality of Angangueo. These two mining centres were the most successful in the region.Footnote 18
The majority of haciendas and ranches in eastern Michoacán were of medium size. In 1889 agrarian properties in the region comprised three or four medium size haciendas (of approximately 5,000 hectares each), between ten and 20 small or medium sized haciendas of some 2,000 to 3,000 hectares each, and a large number of ranches of less than 1,000 hectares. The owners and tenants of these properties introduced intensive methods and techniques of cultivation. The better-off hacendados also introduced modern agricultural machinery. This allowed them to meet the demands of the mining and urban centres in the region and even to export their surpluses. In this manner, the collapse of communal agriculture was replaced by the growth of small-scale farming.Footnote 19
Until 1876 local political affiliations were defined by the civil war; these divisions had themselves originated in the Independence period: Zinapécuaro and Maravatío became strongly pro-clerical, while Zitácuaro was liberal.Footnote 20 When Porfirio Díaz took power, there were 96 Catholic churches in the whole of eastern Michoacán. The district of Zitácuaro had 20 churches, but only half of these were in use, in Zinapécuaro there were 39 and in Maravatío 37. In Zinapécuaro and Maravatío 15 churches were only used occasionally, but 61 stayed open at the weekends for the celebration of mass. In contrast, in Zitácuaro only seven churches were used regularly and thirteen remained closed. The ratio of churches to population in the north (Maravatío and Zinapécuaro) was one for every thousand inhabitants, while in the south (Zitácuaro) it was one for every 2,893 inhabitants, indicating clear differences in the degree of penetration of the Church in both areas. After 1876, these differences became even more accentuated with the arrival of a large number of Protestants in Zitácuaro. The liberal elite welcomed the new immigrants, who came mainly from North America, but also included non-Christians from Armenia, Lebanon and Turkey, the majority of whom were traders. The North American Protestants quickly built churches and successfully spread their influence amongst different sectors of the population. Examining the case of the Presbyterians, Bastian claims that hundreds of citizens of the district cabecera and of another eleven communities ‘organised Presbyterian religious societies which, by 1882, comprised 16 congregations with approximately 2,664 adult members among their affiliates, equivalent to ten per cent of the adult population of the district’. Jean-Pierre Bastian, the principal scholar of nineteenth century Protestant societies, refers to this as a ‘process of mass conversion’, whose main centres were ‘the municipalities of Zitácuaro, Jungapeo and Tuxpan’.Footnote 21 The district's belligerent liberal tradition, which provoked the burning and destruction of the cabecera three times during the nineteenth century,Footnote 22 appears to explain the rapid conversion of diverse sectors of zitacuarense society to Protestantism. The weakness of the Catholic Church in the region, as well as the support of masonic lodges, liberal clubs and some local landowners, was critical to the success of the Protestant missions.Footnote 23
Bastian considers that although the conversions were undoubtedly religious in nature, they were above all else a ‘political phenomenon, which was confirmed by the active protection extended by the liberal jefe politico to dissidents. …[…] Far from being promoted by US missionaries, [religious] dissidence was spread by certain Mexican liberal leaders’. Protestantism, he adds, was ‘a religion of jornaleros and ranchers,’ rejected by large landowners who remained faithful to Catholicism.Footnote 24
Rather than promoting democracy, the fusion of Protestantism and liberalism served to reinforce an anti-clerical consciousness in the region, which was spread through various means. One of its principle vehicles was the Junta Patriótica Liberal Benito Juárez (JPLBJ), founded in 1895;Footnote 25 in addition, religious education of the population was strengthened and by 1910 there were eight Presbyterian schools in Zitácuaro – far above the national average. Jean-Pierre Bastian and Matthew Butler believe there were genuine cases of religious conversion amongst the elite, but note that it is more difficult to evaluate the degree to which Protestantism took hold amongst ordinary people. Many ranchers shared the vision of the elite, as did some indigenous people, who fled from the onerous demands of Catholic festivals. They maintain that Protestant attitudes certainly filtered down to the people after 1910, articulated via new agrarian leaders and Protestant preachers.Footnote 26
State Allies: Liberals and Agraristas
Between 1910 and 1940 numerous political factions appeared in the district of Zitácuaro, but only three of these took root more permanently: the liberal faction, whose principal exponent was the Junta Liberal, the agraristas and the Catholics.Footnote 27
The first president of the Junta Liberal was Enedino Colín, one of the main hacendados of Zitácuaro, who did not favour of the ‘liberal conservatism’ of Porfirio Díaz, who sought reconciliation with the Catholic Church. Enedino Colín managed to bring a group of liberals together in the Junta including hacendados, timber merchants, bureaucrats and local traders, who together monopolised power for most of the Porfiriato. According to Butler, the Junta's hegemony had at least three consequences for local politics: it eroded the influence of the clergy in the region; sharpened tensions with rancheros and indigenous communities, which led to the later strengthening of agrarismo; and promoted the existence of an anticlerical tradition which filtered down to ordinary people and gave agrarismo a markedly anticlerical tone.Footnote 28
When the 1910 revolution erupted, the Junta – now led by Saúl V. Gallegos – embraced the maderista cause. During the federal elections of 1911, the Junta selected its founder, Enedino Colin (who had fled after the barracks coup of Victoriano Huerta) as its federal deputy. Gallegos and his group fought the huertistas in the region. When the revolutionary troops divided, their members also adopted different paths, some adhering to the Convention of Aguascalientes and others aligning with the carrancista troops. When the government of Pascual Ortiz Rubio was installed in Michoacán (1917–20), the majority of the Junta's members became ortizrubistas, led by Enrique Colín – representative of the district's hacendados, León Rodríguez and Estanislao Martínez. Others separated from the Junta and developed a more radical social liberalism, which even came to develop links with magonismo. After 1915 this new group began to challenge the hegemony of the Junta, arguing that it had lost its way and was failing to meet the demands for social justice of campesinos and workers, new actors that had emerged on the political scene with the revolution. This new group was composed of rural teachers, soldiers and former revolutionary officers, artisans and religious ministers. During the armed struggle a number of them had established links with national figures, which proved a great asset in promoting their movement throughout the region. Amongst these were Saúl V. Gallegos (a rural teacher who embraced the villista cause and fled to the USA after its defeat), Neftalí N. Cejudo (a Presbyterian minister, rural teacher and colonel in the maderista and zapatista armies, and a constitutionalist after 1915, where he reached the rank of general), and Moisés Alvarado, maderista and carrancista, whose trajectory was similar to Cejudo's.Footnote 29
When Francisco J. Múgica ran for the governorship of Michoacán in 1917, the majority of this liberal wing endorsed mugiquismo, which found expression through the Partido Socialista de Michoacán and promoted the first agrarian demands in the region. The Junta immediately responded by blocking demands for land, using violence and intimidation against the petitioners. When Múgica won the governorship in 1920, demands for allocation of ejidos multiplied. Despite maintaining an alliance with Múgica, the Junta did not halt the violence in the region. In October 1922, however, it momentarily lost power following the denunciation of the assassination of various agraristas. Footnote 30
In contrast to other regions in Michoacán where hacendados and priests presented a united front against agrarismo, the zitacuarense elite could not count on the support of the Catholic Church, given their anticlerical ideology. The Junta resorted to a two-pronged strategy: on the one hand, they co-opted some agrarian leaders in an attempt to divide their movement, something which was successfully attempted via Jesús Aguilar in Chichimecuillas and Ramón Alcántara in Laguna Verde; on the other hand, they promoted networks of anti-agrarian political elites.Footnote 31
In this way, after Múgica's fall in March 1922, the Junta managed to maintain close links with the interim governor Sidronio Sánchez Pineda (1922–24). During the delahuertista rebellion (1923–24), the Junta faltered in its support for Plutarco Elías Calles. In contrast, the agrarista movement took advantage of the correlation of forces to strengthen its alliance with him. The Junta recovered its position in 1923–24. In 1926 two of its prominent members, Generals Arturo Bernal and Uriel Avilés, established strong links with callista politicians, such as Carlos Riva Palacio and Melchor Ortega,Footnote 32 both of whom became federal deputies in the same year. During the governorship of Lázaro Cárdenas (1928–32), the Junta suffered a setback, but under the subsequent governorship of Benigno Serrato (1932–34), it recovered a large part of the ground it had previously lost, including municipal presidencies and congressional deputies. By contrast, the cardenista sexenio was a time of gain for agrarismo.
With the support of Lázaro Cárdenas, Cejudo promoted himself as the undisputed agrarista leader between 1923 and 1933. In 1934 he was displaced by another distinguished cardenista, Aquiles de la Peña, who began to develop a profile in the municipality of Ciudad Hidalgo in the second half of the 1920s and later established a long-running cacicazgo which extended throughout the entire district of Zitácuaro until his death in 1959. Apart from thriving in politics, De la Peña also built a timber emporium in the region. It seems that Cejudo's political fortunes declined after he was involved in two large-scale massacres: confrontations between liberals and agraristas which occurred in June 1933 and March 1934.Footnote 33 De la Peña took advantage of this situation in order to cement his influence in the district of Zitácuaro. It was within this context of constant clashes between the liberal and the agrarista faction (the two allies of the post-revolutionary state) that Catholic resistance to anticlerical policies of the 1920s and 1930s should be situated.
Catholics and the Post-Revolutionary State
A church survey in 1926 indicates that there were seven priests in Zitácuaro, of whom four were Catholics and three Protestants. In Zinapécuaro, Ciudad Hidalgo and Maravatío there were 15 Catholic priests and one Protestant minister. All were natives of Eastern Michoacán. As Butler argues, this indicated that the churches recruited clergy locally and viewed ‘local knowledge’ as essential to the success of their mission.Footnote 34 This knowledge made it almost inevitable that priests would participate in dynamics between the different political factions in each local community. As classical studies of political clientelism have shown, face-to-face relations – family networks, friendships and neighbours – are central in the constitution of factionalism.Footnote 35
Butler found an ‘absence of priestly labour’ in Zitácuaro as acute as that encountered in Ciudad Hidalgo. This allowed indigenous communities to develop their own autonomous, non-sacramental forms of Catholicism: rituals where they used pulque, flowers, corn and images that linked ancestral cults to souls in purgatory, as well as marianist cults to the Virgin de los Remedios. In this sense, he adds, the encounter with Protestantism (and with agrarismo) was more associated with religious mobility and party affiliations than to genuine acts of conversion. Indigenous people saw no contradiction in continuing with their religious practices, customs and weak links with Catholicism. At the same time as they took part in Protestant juntas, they continued with their Catholic cults. They were able to unite all these practices within popular culture. Similar processes also occurred within mestizo communities.Footnote 36
Butler maintains that Protestantism was accompanied by a rejection of Catholic culture and a flowering of new forms of social, economic, political and religious organisation in the 1920s, such as ‘revolutionary’ ejidos, official rural schools and Protestant churches. Although some communities became accustomed to ‘peaceful religious pluralism’, in all the villages of the district of Zitácuaro attempts were made to eradicate Catholicism and impose a Protestant hegemony. These tendencies towards de-Catholicisation ‘were more pronounced in mestizo communities where the church had never been a key social and religious institution’. Revolutionary leaders tried to fill the cultural vacuum by creating a culture of ‘revolutionary agrarismo and civic nationalism’.Footnote 37
According to Butler, the Catholic Church in Zitácuaro was attacked by both Protestantism and agrarismo. Religious observation declined far below regional standards. The wave of anticlericalism across the whole district generated the impression that the power of the church had been seriously eroded. The widespread support of campesinos for the Calles government, as well as the ‘individualist’ attitude adopted towards religious matters by the local population, did not provide the cristeros with the same support they received in other areas. For these reasons the Cristiada only found support amongst weak armed groups in Zitácuaro.Footnote 38 Butler views Zitácuaro as a sanctuary of liberalism, Protestantism and agrarismo; Catholicism appeared to be in retreat and reduced to an ‘individualism’ which limited its capacity for collective action.Footnote 39 However, as has been argued here, the play of power and resistance in Zitácuaro are somewhat more complex than Butler suggests.
During the Porfiriato, Catholic groups in Zitácuaro maintained a long struggle for local power with their enemies, a struggle which was not interrupted by the revolution. The very founding of the town of Zitácuaro by the Franciscan order in 1526 was linked to the cult to the Virgin de los Remedios. Liberals and Protestants undermined Catholicism, but it did not disappear. In 1896 there were three religious associations, or cofradías, within the parish which continued to function regularly, despite the criticism of liberal elites.Footnote 40
On 9 January 1906 neighbours of Jungapeo appealed to the Archbishop of Morelia, Atenógenes Silva, to ‘not remove’ the town's teacher, Virginia Arriaga, as this would ‘greatly prejudice the young people she is responsible for’ and ‘a change of teacher would lead to the loss of the great advances of our children’.Footnote 41 The same villagers sent another missive on 5 February 1914, but this time to the new Archbishop Leopoldo Ruiz y Flores, in which they asked for a priest to be sent as they had been without a sacerdotal visit for some time and they required this in order to ‘meet out spiritual needs’.Footnote 42
Both missives indicate some of the tasks that the Church performed in the region, providing educational, moral and spiritual guidance. Liberalism and Protestantism leveled their attacks at all of these fields. However, evidence suggests that Catholicism resisted this offensive, as it did the onslaught of agrarismo which erupted with the 1910 revolution. During the maderista regime, Catholics from eastern Michoacán not only actively participated in the Partido Católico Nacional (1911), creating local branches, but also established Círculos de Obreros Católicos, sponsored by the Church hierarchy, which were consolidated in the municipalities of Zitácuaro, Angangueo, Taximaroa and Zinapécuaro.Footnote 43 Following the defeat of Victoriano Huerta, Catholic political parties were banned by the constitucionalistas. However, Catholics took advantage of the vagaries of the electoral laws which only banned parties with religious names or slogans, or those that united a particular belief and/or race.Footnote 44 During the governorship of Pascual Ortiz Rubio (1917–20), a political struggle for control of the municipality in Zitácuaro occurred between liberals and Catholics, which included the use of violence. For example, on the night of 3 February 1918, a gang of bandits linked to Catholic circles kidnapped and assassinated the municipal president of Jungapeo, the constitucionalista Herón Gallegos.Footnote 45 In Zitácuaro, the Liberal Junta was momentarily displaced from power by Catholic groups between 1917 and 1918. It was not until the elections of December 1918 that the Junta recovered its control over the municipal council.Footnote 46 In the 1920s and 1930s, Catholic presence in the electoral arena diminished, and although it did not disappear it was not until the 1940s that it recovered its force. Disputes in the electoral terrain took place primarily within the revolutionary block, between Liberals and agraristas. Catholics were more concerned with confronting the anticlerical laws of the state.
The arrival of Múgica to power shook Catholicism. In contrast to Ortiz Rubio, who showed signs of religious tolerance, Múgica advanced policies which sought to combat the church on all fronts, especially in the social and educational fields. Múgica's brief governorship was marked by numerous conflicts with Catholics and the ecclesiastical hierarchy: expropriation of property, profanation of churches,Footnote 47 and confrontations between mugiquistas and Catholics.Footnote 48
The President of the Republic, Álvaro Obregón, did not approve of the radical turn taken by the Múgica government and forced Múgica to request a temporary leave of absence from the local congress.Footnote 49 Sidronio Sánchez Pineda assumed the post of interim governor (1922–24) and was more moderate towards hacendados and the Church. However, in eastern Michoacán Liberals, agraristas continued to be immersed in disputes with Catholics. Timber companies and the municipal president of Angangueo – of Catholic affiliation – tried to block the work of rural teachers in the municipality, threatening parents who sent their children to official schools with the loss of their employment.Footnote 50
However, something which proved an even greater insult to the Catholic population was the decree issued by Governor Enrique Ramírez on 8 March 1926 which strengthened controls on the clergy of Michoacán, better known as Law number 62. This law regulated religious practices, obliged priests to register with the municipal councils and limited the overall number of priests in the region. Priests were given thirty days to comply with the new law, after which time they would be subject to fines and imprisonment.Footnote 51 Throughout Michoacán protests were made calling for the law to be repealed. In order to bring pressure on the authorities, on 17 April the Archbishop of Morelia, Leopoldo Ruiz y Flores, decreed the suspension of services in his archdiocese for a month.Footnote 52 In this context, the wave of protests turned violent in some places. The worst case was that of Zitácuaro. On 26 April the branch of Acción Católica de la Juventud Mexicana (ACJM)Footnote 53 in the district, supported by the priest Luis G. Cerda, sent a commission of Catholic women to ask the members of the municipal council to petition the governor to repeal Law 62. In the face of the reiterated insistence of the commission that the council provide a speedy response, the municipal president replied that the council (comprised of a Liberal Junta majority and a minority of agraristas) would deal with the matter at eleven the following morning. Before the council meeting took place, the council building was invaded by a large group of Catholics who brought a second petition. The council resolved not to adopt the Catholic proposal, but agreed to send the record of its meeting to the state executive.Footnote 54 At first the Catholic faithful applauded the resolution, but then one of their leaders explained that it had not gone in their favour. The demonstrators then attacked an army captain who was trying to persuade them to disperse, managing to disarm and kill him. Seeing their commanding officer killed, the troops reacted by opening fire on the crowd, leaving three dead and various people injured.
The municipal president claimed that a ‘demonstration of sympathies’ on the part of an agrarista regidor had given rise to the ‘mutiny’. He named José Aguilar, Luis G. Martínez, Ezequiel Correa, Ángel Silva, Luis and Roberto Alanís, Luis Villaseñor, Josefina T. Vda. De Rubio, Aurora Martínez and Josefina Valdés as the principal instigators of the Catholic abuses. The memorials handed over to the council were signed by more than 300 people. The priest Luis G. Cerda was detained, together with the Catholic leaders Cesáreo Robledo, Doctor Ezequiel Correa and Epigmenio Nieto. They were all freed on 4 May by presidential order.
The priest admitted before the authorities that he had called on his congregation to assemble in a building known as the ‘Salón Obrero’, here they discussed how to approach the council and demand the repeal of Law number 62. From this meeting the idea arose to hold a demonstration and send petitions to the state government through the municipal council.Footnote 55
The Secretaría de Gobernación asked the government of Michoacán to shut down the Catholic Church in San Juan Zitácuaro and all others which refused to obey the laws of the day, as well as to order an investigation into the events. The Secretaría de Guerra commissioned Colonel Arturo Bernal to implement these measures.Footnote 56 In this way, Calles backed the Junta Liberal and appeared not to sanction the agraristas’ position. Bernal became a federal deputy in June 1926 and won the municipal elections of that year.
The Catholic Dilemma: ‘active or passive action’
For some Catholics the April repression signaled that violence was the only way to combat the government's anticlerical onslaught. This was the view of Dr Ezequiel Correa, who became one of the cristero leaders in the region. However others, perhaps the majority, believed the government could not be overthrown by force, but neither could it weaken their religious beliefs. They advocated alternative means of resisting the anticlerical policies. This, for example, was the feeling of a group of Catholics from Tlalpujahua when they told Calles: ‘We Roman Catholics make up the majority of the great Mexican family’.Footnote 57 Our religious beliefs ‘with their ceremonies, practices, devotions, do not deprive us of the right to be Mexican citizens. It is impossible to convert us into atheists. […] We neither desire nor want revolutions, we detest them [… what we want] are laws of peace and harmony which guarantee our social order’.Footnote 58 By April 1926 two strands of resistance to the post-revolutionary state existed in the district of Zitácuaro: one which Catholics themselves called ‘active action’ (acción activa), which implied the use of violence, and another referred to as ‘passive action’ (acción pasiva), which advocated the use of peaceful means.
In military terms, the cristero guerrillas in the district of Zitácuaro were fairly ineffectual. They engaged in few battles and generally stayed in the sierra, indisposed to come down to the valleys.Footnote 59 The majority of the region's Catholics were skeptical about the prospect of armed struggle. There were also intermittent uprisings in the Second Cristiada (1932–38), but these were even less than those of 1927–29 and they tended to be confused with raids by bandits who roamed the surrounding mountains.
During the 1930s, the Catholic hierarchy, determined to consolidate a modus vivendi with the state, managed to convince many ardent former Cristeros that the armed struggle was not the appropriate route. They directed their energies towards other forms of struggle through a number of diverse organisations. The conflicts that agrarismo had generated between ranchers and campesinos were addressed to the Unión Nacional Sinarquista (UNS, 1937).Footnote 60 The agrarista faction, which dominated the majority of municipal councils in the district throughout this period, confronted the sinarquista vendetta.Footnote 61
The case of Queréndaro – a municipality belonging to the district of Zinápecuaro – provides a good example of the way in which ‘peaceful’ Catholics tried to continue to impose their idea of social order and evade the legal mechanisms which aimed to stop them from doing so. On 27 June 1929, Ambrosio Macias – who requested that his name be kept secret – informed Calles that Catholics in Queréndaro ‘continued to [celebrate mass] clandestinely’. Only when a military detachment was sent in May did ‘silence reign’, but as soon as it left ‘they continued and continue to celebrate mass with greater frequency in the house of Juan Vedota, doing this with more enthusiasm than ever before’. The sacristan, Marcos Aguilar, ‘uses the bells to assemble the people and in this way they come from all over to the house of Juan Vedota where the priest lives; commissions of the faithful collect alms to maintain the priest. Not only is [mass celebrated] in this clandestine manner, but so too are all kinds of acts, such as marriages and baptisms.’ He added that the same thing was occurring in the municipalities of Zinápecuaro and Indapareo.Footnote 62
Agraristas and liberals in the district of Zitácuaro denounced similar acts, complaining that the municipal authorities frequently ‘searched the houses of the main Catholic leaders’, looking for evidence that they were breaking the law.Footnote 63 Butler claims that while in Ciudad Hidalgo Catholicism became more public and defiant of the law during the cristero period, in Zitácuaro it was more private and clandestine. It can be argued that this was the case because in Ciudad Hidalgo no faction allied to the state took root that was strong enough to force Catholics into greater clandestinity (during his governorship, Lázaro Cárdenas lent all his support to agrarista Aquiles de la Peña, who emerged as the most important cacique of eastern Michoacán during the 1930s), while in Zitácuaro the radicalism and strength of the agraristas and liberals obliged Catholics to turn towards more clandestine and peaceful forms of resistance.
The relative weakness of the Cristiada (both the first and the second) in Zitácuaro is attributable to three factors. First, the existence of two powerful anticlerical factions which limited Catholics’ capacity for bellicose action, although they proved unable to eliminate passive resistance. Second, divisions within the Catholic camp which prevented a unified position in favour of armed struggle. Third, the fact that the organisers sent by the LNDLR were not particularly efficient, in contrast to Manuel Chaparro in Ciudad Hidalgo.Footnote 64
On the other hand the main church in Zitácuaro, San Juan, remained closed from the conflict of April 1926, eight months before the start of the Cristiada, until its end in June 1929. Priests and their congregations were immediately obliged to resort to secret practice of their religious rites. Butler's findings suggest that this allowed the families of the Catholic elite to acquire great influence over the sacred sphere, including the administration of the sacraments, religious education and the protection of local priests. An elitist Catholicism thus flourished, which marginalised the poorest groups and ethnic communities from access to the sacred sphere. This excessive protection of the priest – who was always accompanied by an escort of 30 people – became a bone of contention for the priest himself, according to Butler, because it restricted his freedom of movement and impeded him from reaching a greater number of Catholics. He adds that rumours about the presence of the priest obliged him to sleep in a different house every night and dissuaded other Catholics from seeking him out.Footnote 65
In this way, the more public religious ceremonies – such as took place in Queréndaro or Ciudad Hidalgo – were impossible in Zitácuaro between 1926 and 1929. However, contrary what Butler affirms, the evidence suggests that this did not prevent the faithful from meeting their religious needs, nor stop priests from ministering to them, although they had to do it ‘under cover of darkness’. When the main priest of Zitácuaro, Wenceslao Ruiz, was arrested by the municipal authorities at the start of 1929 for officiating mass without permission in private houses, the faithful asked that he be judged by ‘the competent authorities’, lacking trust in local officials, who they believed would accuse him of a ‘false crime’.Footnote 66
At the end of the Cristiada anticlerical laws became even tougher.Footnote 67 Priests and Catholics resumed their clandestine practices. The priest Wenceslao Ruiz, who was 61 years old and who had lived in Zitácuaro for 35 years, travelled around the sierra by mule to minister to the faithful. On 8 September 1932 agraristas from La Florida, in the municipality of Jungapeo, managed to capture him and his entourage in a spot near the main highway. The priest had with him ‘all the things necessary to officiate [mass] (wavers, a chalice, a crystal plate, the book of mass, a lectern, a reliquary, scapulars and so forth), without having a license for them’. The authorities declared before the district judge that one of the detainees, Pedro Pérez, had ‘brought people to the priest (Wenceslao Ruiz) in order to celebrate religious acts’. Ruiz denied the accusations, stating that he had only officiated in private services in Timbineo, ‘a town which is not within the jurisdiction of Zitácuaro district’ – where the case was tried. Ruiz added that he was intending to sell the articles in his luggage and that since Law number 100 had come into force he had ‘never performed a religious act’, but that despite this the municipal president of Jungapeo had ordered him to be ‘imprisoned in a highly unsanitary cell’ where he was ‘detained for more than 24 hours’. In contrast, the Catholics detained along with the priest admitted that he had officiated mass clandestinely and confirmed that ‘he was on his way to celebrate mass in La Florida’.Footnote 68
Catholics did attempt to find ways to escape the elitist mould that the zitacuarense elite tried to impose, managing to evade the authorities and celebrate religious rites.Footnote 69 Evidence also suggests that serious divisions existed within the revolutionary block which was infiltrated by Catholics. This occurred, again in La Florida, where various members of the sindicato agrarista were arrested after they took part in a Catholic meeting in which Wenceslao Ruiz was due to attend.Footnote 70 The same detainee, Pedro Pérez, declared to the district judge of Zitácuaro that Luis Reyes Brisco (the leader of the Junta Liberal in Jungapeo) had invited him to ‘join the Junta Política of which he is president’. He also called on him to invite other members of the ‘sindicato [agrarista] to join, saying that they would receive guarantees, and that to prove this he would send them the priest from time to time to celebrate mass. Then I started to invite people to join’. The other detained agraristas confirmed Pedro Pérez's statement. The judge freed them because the act was not consummated and it was not a crime to ‘affiliate to political parties’. Nonetheless, the case illustrates that the Junta Liberal was willing to offer religious promises in order to undermine the agrarista faction. The fact that such promises were made suggests the extent to which the Junta was aware of the deep-rootedness of Catholicism in the region.Footnote 71
Catholic groups continued to celebrate religious services ‘under cover of darkness’ until the anticlerical climate abated towards the end of the 1930s.Footnote 72 This clandestine culture was also a response to the reforms of Article Three of the 1934 Constitution, which aimed to introduce ‘socialist education’. The Church and its faithful fought to boycott the official schools: on the one hand they exhorted Catholics not to send their children there, threatening to excommunicate heads of household who failed to obey this injunction; on the other hand, they ran private schools, which sought to evade the laws of the time.
Within this context, in 1935 the priest of Queréndaro began a campaign to ‘exhort the population to remove their children from the school’. In the end ‘of more than 100 pupils, only 33 attended’. In some municipalities the opposition to the official schools even extended to the murder of rural teachers, as happened in Contepec, where a teacher was lynched by the population.Footnote 73 On 13 May 1935 agraristas in the municipality of Ocampo asked the president of the republic to send them a military detachment, because they feared ‘reprisals against the teachers, such as occurred in Contepec a few days ago’.Footnote 74
The archbishop of Morelia, by now also the apostolic delegate, criticised state institutions and protested against the laws ‘dealing with religious practice and external discipline’ through the Mexican Episcopate. He called on Catholics to ‘ignore’ them and recommended that they unify in peaceful resistance ‘to defend themselves against government procedures’.Footnote 75 During the 1930s the church supported various measures to resist the government's anticlerical policies, as well as to counter those Catholics who supported violence, something which would again become manifest in the Second Cristiada. These included the para-religious organisations, the Legiones (1934) and the UNS (1937), although its most trusted agent was Acción Católica Mexicana (ACM, 1929). Through the ACM the Church fought the ground it was not prepared to cede to the state: ‘the struggle for souls and consciences’. Acción Católica Mexicana was the only of these large organisations solely controlled by the clergy. It was headed by the priest in each parish and aimed to provide moral and spiritual guidance for his flock. Following the de facto (as opposed to de jure) modus vivendi reached between Church and state in 1938, ACM proved to be the most dynamic of the para-religious organisations.
The main obstacles to ACM in the district of Zitácuaro during the 1930s were the strength of the rival factions (agraristas and liberals) and the apathy of Catholics themselves, who seemed to have tired of the political and religious passions which had come to the fore since the 1910 revolution. On 26 May 1933, just two months after ACM was established in Jungapeo, the president of the diocesan junta was informed that the ACM had ‘four centres established in rural hamlets’ where meetings were held every fifteen days’. It seems that the groups which made up the organisation (UFCM, UCM, ACJM and JCFM)Footnote 76 ‘were guided by this Junta’ and that ‘the activity of the first days [was] still alive’. However, it was added, the greatest impediments to the organisation's growth lay in the fact that ‘the Catholic element was very ignorant and negligent in religious matters’, it was ‘very disorganised’, whereas by contrast the ‘non-religious element’ (agraristas and liberals) ‘is very numerous, or at least seems to be and is […] very radical’. On 23 May of the same year, the ACM branch in Ciudad Hidalgo reported that ‘its work to meet local needs is advancing well’.Footnote 77 Its counterpart in Tlalpujahua reported that it did not have many catechists because ‘nearly all the members are mine workers and it is very difficult for them to devote themselves to these activities during their few days of rest’. Despite this, ‘religious instruction of children is well attended to’ by some of the members who dedicated themselves to catechist instruction.Footnote 78 The ACM's aim was to concentrate the organisation's activities on religious instruction and ensuring good Catholic conduct in the face of the growing temptations of modernity, such as cinema, theatre, music, dance and new ways of dress. In this fashion, adapting itself to the conditions of each region and parish, the ACM gradually prospered by seeking to re-educate the faithful.Footnote 79 The resistance that Catholics had tried to present to the revolutionary state in the 1920s, which covered all areas of social activity, retreated to a bedrock of educational, moral and spiritual activities. However, a sector of Catholics also tried to conduct the battle in the politico-electoral camp through two political parties not controlled by the Church: the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) and the Partido Fuerza Popular (of sinarquista origin).Footnote 80 They knew that this was a struggle that they could not win in the short term, but considered that over time they might be able to prepare themselves to take power.
As factional conflicts declined in the second half of the 1930s, Catholics became interested in renovating their churches and they called on the government to return certain confiscated properties.Footnote 81 The reconstruction of the tower of the San Juan church, which had been damaged during the war of intervention in the nineteenth century, was completed in mid 1944. Luis María Cerda, priest and coadjutant of the priest Wenceslao Ruiz, by then deceased, blessed the tower in a celebration by the faithful. In the 1940s Cerda promoted the creation of new parishes in Zitácuaro in order to minister to what he considered an ‘extensive Catholic territory’. This spirit of reconstruction was rewarded by the coronation of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios on 21 November 1945, an act authorised by Pope Pío XII and attended by the Archbishop of Morelia, Luis María Altamirano y Bulnes, Luis María Martínez y Rodríguez, the Archbishop primate of Mexico and many priests. With this act, the Pope also declared the parish a religious shrine.Footnote 82 The optimism of the diocese's chronicler, Juan B. Buitrón, may not have been a coincidence when, in 1944, he affirmed that Catholicism was recovering from the spread of Protestantism in the region.Footnote 83
Conclusions
The case of the district of Zitácuaro analysed here confirms that the pursuit of various religious, educational and agrarian policies – that aimed to remodel the nation after the 1910 revolution – involved the state in support for local factions, which were divided in their disputes over control of ejidos, municipal councils, state deputies and political networks. Agraristas and liberals competed to try and gain advantage from the state's anticlerical assault. However, once factional passions began to cool towards the end of the 1930s, it seems that rather than declining, Catholicism in the district was in fact re-invigorated and flourished within the houses, families and communities where attempts had been made to stamp it out. How was this possible? Were conversions not genuine? Had the spread of Protestantism not been widespread? It has been argued here that individuals move in a pendular fashion between the various layers which make up their identity, which themselves appear as a kind of repertory from which they can select different elements according to the context and the opportunities for action presented. These elements are chosen on a pragmatic basis, individuals never lose their freedom of choice. The manner in which this process of selection occurs depends on the level of importance that each layer of identity has for the maximisation of their vital opportunities. In this manner, the revolution opened up opportunities for the acquisition of new resources – including land, water, schools, credit and political networks – which implied ideological conversions on the part of the actors, some genuine and others fake. Once the revolutionary torment had passed and resources were secured, many actors returned to their old belief structures, of which Catholicism was one very important dimension.
On the other hand, Catholic resistance to the anticlerical laws oscillated between ‘active action’ and passive action’. The latter eventually prevailed, sponsored from above by a church hierarchy determined to achieve a modus vivendi with the state. However, this was also the result of experiences from below of wide sectors of Catholic civil society, who were convinced of the impossibility of defeating the state and its allies via armed struggle. It was within this context that a peaceful and ‘clandestine’ Catholic culture flowered, whose principle aim was to avoid the laws of the state and to advance its idea of moral and religious order – areas where the church hierarchy had decided to entrench itself with the faithful.
As this article has tried to show, it was not only divergent religious practices (sacramental versus popular) that obliged Catholicism to assume different forms of resistance in each region, but also the correlations of forces in each specific place. However, we still lack research documenting the way in which both experiences were articulated and lived by the actors. In the case of Zitácuaro, anticlerical groups were more powerful than in any other part of eastern Michoacán, and for this reason Catholicism here was forced to practice forms of pacific resistance above all else. Zitácuaro is unique only in that it was possibly the most radical liberal district of Michoacán – followed by UruapanFootnote 84 – and it had a marked Protestant influence. However, it was not unique with respect to the flowering of passive Catholic resistance. Indeed, apart from the cases of Coalcomán and Ciudad Hidalgo,Footnote 85 where active resistance was stronger, in the rest of the districts of Michoacán passive resistance tended to predominate.
In other words, the claim here is not that religion was not an important factor in the conformation of Catholic resistance; rather it is argued that religion tended to follow a logic informed by local power dynamics and was itself conditioned by those same dynamics. For this reason, Catholicism was able to reemerge at the end of the 1930s within the ranks of agrarismo, just at the time when radical agrarianism was eclipsed. The explanation for this lies in the pragmatic behaviour of the actors: they pursued their interests without renouncing their beliefs, even though for a time they might have had to embrace their ideological rivals. This reflected a belief system where space existed for contradictory values: a ‘state layer’ and a ‘church layer’. Both formed part of their vital opportunities. However, political vicissitudes led them to prioritise one layer over another at different times. At the end of the day, the tendency was towards a kind of modus vivendi not only in the political but also in the cultural sphere. The ways in which this occurred is a subject which has yet to be investigated.
