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  • Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico by Ben Fallaw
  • Marjorie Becker
Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico. By Ben Fallaw. (Durham: Duke University Press. 2013. Pp. xx, 330. $94.95 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-8223-5322-5; $25.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0-8223-5337-9.)

For those whose careers have been informed by efforts to understand the worlds of the Latin American poor, the “everyday forms of state formation” approach has proved useful. Indeed, for scholars whose multiarchival, physically dangerous work led to previously unknown worlds populated by communities inhabited by women, indigenous people, and the poor—populations that previously had gone unseen in much of the scholarly literature—this approach proved crucial. It enabled “ordinary” people and their complex material cultural perspectives, rather than simply those of Mexican elites, to emerge historiographically. Clearly, it has been an approach based on the scholarly recognition of the material natures of perspectives, of the intimate connections between ideas and the resulting political and economic activities, the sort of comprehensive approach long employed by thoughtful scholars elsewhere. In fact, in his new monograph, Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico, Ben Fallaw both builds on his understanding of that approach and contests it.

In his assessment of numerous Catholic responses to the governmental efforts of Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to transform Mexican society for the better, Fallaw maintains that he will not attempt to assess the metaphysical belief systems informing Catholic behavior. Instead, he focuses on multiple Catholic legal and illegal acts that in many ways threatened the postrevolutionary governmental efforts to transform rural Mexico. Although the monograph lacks maps, Fallaw compares and contrasts Catholic responses to the postrevolutionary government in the diverse states of Campeche, Hidalgo, Guerrero, and Guanajuato, where he discovered multiple antigovernmental Catholic-based acts. These acts ranged from legal use of the Mexican government’s electoral structure and boycotts of governmental schools to refusals to participate in (and efforts to undermine or transform) the land reform and the murder of teachers. Although previous scholarship has demonstrated similar antigovernmental resistance prompted by relationships between the Catholic hierarchy and ordinary Catholics, Fallaw’s focus on what he calls a “radial strategy” (p. 6) as well as his emphasis on Catholic associations, the press, and business is original and useful. One of the results is that earlier assessments of the fashions in which postrevolutionary governments were unable to live up to their promises are confirmed here. [End Page 394]

Fallaw demonstrates crucial intellectual sensitivity to the material cultural conditions confronted by many of the Cardenista teachers. For instance, he reminds us, as other scholars previously pointed out, that many of the revolutionary teachers were poorly educated, were quite poorly paid, and did not have the sorts of physical protection that they (especially the female teachers) required in such misogynistic and hostile environments. Moreover, as previous scholarship demonstrated, many of the teachers were almost entirely ignorant of the material cultural worlds of their students, an ignorance that in some cases prompted internal civil wars and in others proved fatal.

Fallaw’s monograph does not attempt to research or assess the historical metaphysical and/or religious underpinnings of the Catholic belief systems informing his historical actors’ behavior. Readers, then, are left to wonder what compelled or persuaded many Catholics to turn against key elements of the postrevolutionary governmental programs. Because of Mexico’s deep diversity, there may well have been numerous rationales behind Catholic antigovernmental activities. Without such a material cultural inquiry, readers are left to ponder, for instance, how seductive power itself may have appeared within the Mexican postrevolutionary contest devoid of governmental or clerical institutional commitment to ensure human well-being.

Nonetheless, Fallaw’s study proves utterly striking, as his study details in multiple ways clerical and governmental failures to serve the basic needs of an impoverished and poorly educated public. His study reveals some of the ways that widespread cultural ignorance of the complex material cultural needs of the Mexican population persisted during the postrevolutionary period.

Marjorie Becker
University of Southern California
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