Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The Agraristas and Cristeros of Michoacan by Jennie Purnell (review)

36?BOOK REVIEWS But success was incomplete and temporary. Even the CIO's tent was too small to shelter blacks. Many of Pittsburgh's ethnic groups, and the churches that mirrored their composition,were far more interested in the fate of their native lands than in the prospects for industrial unionism and political harmony in their new country. When the New Deal coaUtion began to falter in 1938,American individuaUsm and industrialists' procUvity for keeping the workforce divided and powerless began to reassert themselves. Phil Murray, an avowed critic of governmental coercion, found himself relying more and more on the big stick of federal regulation. The anti-Semite Father Charles Coughlin and the anti-CIO Monsignor Fulton Sheen surpassed the labor priests in attracting pubUc attention to their versions of CathoUc social doctrine. Seeming unity came in the teeth of World War II and with the exception of Catholic pacifists like Dorothy Day and her CathoUc Workers. After the war, when Japanese labor and management achieved a common purpose that had eluded the Americans, their steel began underselling Pittsburgh's, and the stage was set for industrial collapse in the Monongahela VaUey Heineman brings to his work a Uvely respect for the labor priests and the encycUcals which inspired them and a corresponding disrespect toward their opponents . Communists, for example, are held responsible not only for their objectively documented behaviors, but sometimes for innuendo spread by their critics. Intended to "bridge the gap between academia and the general reading public," this generally welcome addition to our understanding should find ready acceptance in both audiences. Patrick J. McGeever Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis Mexican Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The Agraristas and Cristeros ofMichoacan. ByJennie PurneU. (Durham: Duke University Press. 1999. Pp. x, 271 . ($4995 clothbound; $ 17.95 paperback.) The Cristero RebeUion— a popular uprising of urban middle-class militants and peasant Catholics against a virulently anticlerical revolutionary state—was one of the great (and one of the last) upheavals in Mexican history. From 1926 to 1929 more than 25,000 Cristero rebels fought the Mexican government to a standstill. Peace came after a negotiated agreement was signed between the Church and the government. Peasants enthusiasticaUy fought for both sides. Jennie PurneU wants to know why. This superb study,however, is not a history of the Cristero Rebellion, the Cristiada as it is called in Mexico. It is, rather, a regional history of the Mexican Revolution which views the rebellion as part of a broader set of struggles. PurneU argues that the problem of peasant partisanship is related to "revolutionary state formation," that is, the re-estabUshment of national government authority BOOK REVIEWS361 throughout Mexico in the 1920's and 1930's following ten years of civU war and revolution. Revolutionary state formation provided opportunities for land, power, and revenge to some peasant communities in Michoacán whUe it represented threats to and an assault on the land-holding system, local power arrangements, and religious practices and institutions of other communities. What made the difference were divergent agrarian histories and not differences in class, ethnicity, or religiosity. "Popular receptions of anti-clericaUsm, as with agrarianism," PurneU writes, "were rooted in previous histories of agrarian and poUtical conflict at the local level" (p. 14). PurneU found that communities which survived the liberal assault on communal landholding in the nineteenth century and entered the new century with their landed bases and traditional institutions intact became Cristeros. Their identity was threatened by the state's anticlerical and land reform policies and they fought back. Those communities, on the other hand, that had lost their lands to capitaUst landowners—hacendados —became anticlerical Agraristas. The state offered them land and the opportunity to upend local elites aUied with local leaders and institutions of the Church. They willingly fought the "counterrevolutionaries," the enemies of their ally and patron, the government. In Mexico appearances can be deceiving. A church-state conflict is not strictly a struggle about religion or even the Church, particularly at the grassroots level. Scientists love elegant theories and mathematical proofs. History is often too messy to allow historians to craft elegant explanations. Histories frequently offer either dense analyses cluttered with...