Pious Delinquents: Anticlericalism and Crime in Postrevolutionary Mexico

As Agent 15 of the Mexico City judicial police made his way home for lunch on a day early in December 1926, he saw a balloon floating in the breeze. He rushed to the rooftop observatorio of his apartment building, where he spotted a girl around 14 years old, wearing a lilac-colored dress, standing on a nearby roof and holding a string. Certain that the balloon had been released from this location, he ran down the stairs, and, while crossing the street, looked up to see yet another balloon.¹ Balloons had been drifting through the sky since early morning, so many and from so many directions that police struggled to find where they were coming from.² When the balloons popped, flyers came tumbling down, urging Catholics to engage in peaceful protest against government anticlericalism by adorning their houses with yellow and white stripes in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe on her upcoming feast day, December 12.³ Accompanied by a beat policeman, Agent 15 approached two men in the building where he had seen the girl with the string, surmising that they had aided the launch. Although a search yielded nothing more incriminating than a stick with four strings, he arrested the men. He and other balloon-chasing police officers were obeying specific orders in hunting down the perpetrators that day, but in a broader sense they had become enforcers of laws introduced in the 1917 constitution that sharply restricted the scope of religious expression and observation in public.⁴

In addition to pursuing thieves and murderers, the job of police now included listening for priests with foreign accents, following gaggles of modestly dressed women who may have been violating the prohibition on participating in religious orders, closing prayer rooms in hospitals, and breaking up prayer sessions in private homes. Moreover, they were now charged with investigating lay organizations suspected of supporting the pro-Church Cristero Rebellion, which had broken out in the countryside only days after the girl in the lilac dress allegedly launched the seditious balloons. These new police activities expanded the meaning of “crime” beyond its conventional associations with deviance and poverty. Cutting across boundaries of class and gender, police now pursued Catholics in polite society, under a new kind of criminal law: violating the ideological vision of modern Mexico that revolutionaries had strived to forge through anticlerical legislation.

Agent 15 assumed his new role with zeal. Not only did he apprehend the alleged balloon launchers on an unsubstantiated suspicion. Taking a red pencil to his incident report, he modified the national motto of “Effective Suffrage, No Reelection” (a celebration of the revolution’s victory over Porfirio Díaz’s long dictatorship) to “Effective Suffrage and Reelection.”⁵ The scribble was a gesture of support for another rule-bending amendment, this one to constitutional Article 83, which prohibited reelection to public office. Weeks earlier, the national congress had voted to change it to permit reelection for nonconsecutive presidential terms. More pointedly, the amendment cleared the way for the reelection of revolutionary leader Álvaro Obregón. After a decade of battle launched under the banner of “No Reelection,” even the amendment’s main proponent, Gonzalo N. Santos, betrayed some sheepishness. He recognized that “anti-reelectionism” was a “revolutionary principle” from a political perspective, but in this case he believed that the “socialist principle that constituted the essence of the Mexican Revolution” should “transcend” the letter of the law.⁶ As he and other Obregonistas insisted, the amendment was necessary to consolidate the achievements of the revolution and prevent the ascension of reactionaries, particularly those within, or influenced by, the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, Agent 15’s scribbled tweak to the national motto, as well as his rooftop investigations, were perfectly in keeping with the new political alignments.

The constitutional amendment was conjoined, ideologically and practically, with revolutionary anticlericalism, a project launched vigorously by President Plutarco Elías Calles in the mid 1920s. A continuation of legal reforms by nineteenth-century liberals, the laws restricted the role of the Church and sought to expand the scope of civil...