Cristero Diaspora: Mexican Immigrants, The U.S. Catholic Church, and Mexico's Cristero War, 1926-29

The author examines the connections between Mexico's Cristero War, a bloody church-state conflict that raged across west-central Mexico from 1926 to 1929, and the great wave of Mexican emigration to the United States that occurred during the same period. Although historians have generally treated the Cristero War and Mexican emigration as two distinct and unrelated subjects, a rich array of archival evidence from both sides of the border demonstrates that thousands of Mexican immigrants during the late 1920s supported the Cristero cause from the United States. By elucidating the geographical and political interconnections between the Cristero War and Mexican emigration and exploring the instrumental role played by the U.S. Catholic Church in placing religious exiles from Mexico within immigrant communities, the author demonstrates the development of a diaspora of Mexican Cristero supporters across cities and regions in the United States.