People, Religion, and Nation in Mexico from Independence through the Revolution

The Birth of Modern Mexico, 1780–1824. Edited by Christon I. Archer. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 2003. Pp. 257. $65.00 cloth.)

Clerical Ideology in a Revolutionary Age: The Guadalajara Church and the Idea of the Mexican Nation (1788–1853). By Brian F. Connaughton. Translated by Mark Alan Healy. (Calgary, Alberta and Boulder: University of Calgary Press and University Press of Colorado, 2003. Pp. 426. $65.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.)

Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876–1910. By Claudia Agostoni. (Calgary, Alberta and Boulder: University of Calgary Press and University of Colorado Press, 2003. Pp. 228. $45.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.)

Church and State Education in Revolutionary Mexico City. By Patience A. Schell. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003. Pp. 253. $50.00 cloth.)

Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacan, 1920–1935. By Christopher R. Boyer. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Pp. 320. $60.00 cloth, $25.95 paper.)

Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion: MichoacáN, 1927–29. By Matthew Butler. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 272. $99.95 cloth.)

Militarism, Ethnicity, and Politics in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, 1917–1930. By Keith Brewster. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003. Pp. 215. $47.00 cloth.)

Upon his return from a tour of Oaxacan indigenous communities, liberal governor Félix Díaz (1869) underscored the importance of public education in his annual address to the state legislature. "The instruction of all classes of society," the governor declared, "is the only way to regenerate the spirit of the people, purging them of their vices and passions through sound doctrines." Education, he continued, "will weaken their customs, bring order to their unruly habits, and inspire in them a pure love of occupation and work, a profound respect for law and justice, a rational and dignified obedience of authority, and a pronounced affection for honor and virtue, the very qualities without which the edifice of a democratic republic cannot be sustained."

As a republican military commander in the War of the French Intervention (1862–67), Félix Díaz had spent a good deal of time with indigenous Oaxaqueños; most notably, he led a battalion of Zapotec national guardsmen from the Sierra Juárez to victory over the imperial army in the decisive battle of La Carbonera in 1866, paving the way for the republican reconquest of Oaxaca. But when Díaz contemplated his former soldiers and their like from the perspective of the governor's office, he clearly did not view them as Mexicans in the same way that he considered himself to be Mexican. Rather, Díaz, along with virtually all of his liberal contemporaries, believed that the people who inhabited Mexico would have to be radically transformed in order to become Mexicans, true citizens of a liberal political order and members of a modern and prosperous nation-state. Revolutionary elites would articulate much the same view—and advocate quite similar projects of social transformation—in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s.

Nineteenth-century liberals and twentieth-century revolutionaries believed, above all, that modernization required the secularization of Mexican society and politics. Sharing much the same view as modernist theorists of nationalism (e.g., Anderson 1983, Gellner 1983, Hobsbawm 1990), liberal and revolutionary state builders assumed that citizenship was incompatible with religiosity, except insofar as the latter was treated as a purely private affair, limited to Sundays and a few holy days, and taken neither too literally nor too seriously. Popular religiosity—with its processions, superstitions, pieties, patron saints, and innumerable fiestas—was of particular concern, given that it was widely viewed to be the primary source of the vices, passions, customs, and unruly habits of which Félix Díaz spoke.

Scholars have paid a good deal of attention of late to the transformative projects of liberal and revolutionary...