Catholic Borderlands: Mapping Catholicism onto American Empire, 1905-1935 by Anne M. Martínez (review)

In Catholic Borderlands, Anne M. Martínez considers U.S. Catholic clerical activity, from missions fundraising to communications with foreign and domestic political leaders, during the early twentieth century. Catholic Borderlands traces the ways this output of religious energy intersected with, and intervened in, U.S. imperial endeavors of the era. Martínez proposes the Catholic borderlands as a model that clarifies the particular transnational and trans-imperial orientation of these Catholics, as they contributed to the discursive underpinnings and political maneuverings of American empire.

The book’s central character is Francis Clement Kelley, the Canadian-born priest who headed the Catholic Church Extension Society from 1905 until 1924. As founder of the Extension Society, Kelley was committed to promoting Catholic missions in rural parts of the United States, including its expanding territories. As part of his work, Kelley published accounts in Extension Magazine that emphasized Catholicism’s antiquity in these territories and spoke to its importance to their American futures. Above all, Kelley took special interest in Mexico, a nation that, while politically independent, fell under the economic, cultural, and – so Martínez demonstrates – religious influence of the United States. As official representative of the Mexican church in the United States, Kelley advocated on behalf of Mexican clergy in exile and confronted American political leaders about the role of the U.S. in resolving the other nation’s “religion question” – the ongoing and, in the case of the Cristero Rebellion (1926-29), deadly dispute about Catholicism’s place in post-revolutionary Mexico. Martínez aptly applies the term “Catholic Monroeism” to describe U.S. interest in Mexican church-state relations during this era, and the eagerness of Mexican clergy and politicians to secure their American counterparts’ assistance. “Catholic Monroeism,” she writes, “shows a broader U.S. Catholic disregard for national boundaries as well as a Mexican Catholic investment in a weakened, permeable border” (100-101).

Martínez applies the term “Catholic borderlands” to most of the territories of the expanding, turn-of-the-century U.S. empire, including Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Catholic borderlands “are spaces that … through geopolitical shifts, layer a Catholic past with a Catholic present, challenging universalist ideas about Catholicism as well as the spatial and temporal boundaries of empires” (25). Martínez invokes this model throughout the book to remind readers that a common, Spanish Catholic imperial history cast U.S. territories as regions of special obligation for American Catholics. Catholic leaders invested in these regions saw this past as an opportunity to look forward, to assert a new imperial vision that remained distinctively Catholic but was also fully American. Kelley himself proposed an expansive narrative of American progress, built upon civilizing groundwork laid by a centuries of Catholic missions. Through his work, he countered Protestant missionary activity in U.S. territories, and also a dominant, Protestant-inflected discourse that cast American empire as a triumphant corrective to its “backward” Spanish predecessor. “Catholic borderlands,” Martínez explains, “disrupted … narratives of a progressive, Protestant future, by creating a space within the empire for an American Catholic future – one that was built on the Spanish Catholic past yet American to its core” (2-3).

Martínez constantly crosses borders in Catholic Borderlands. She explores the post-revolutionary religio-political situation in Mexico and the transnational movements of clergy in exile. She offers interesting discussion of racial theories that informed nationalist (and anti-American) currents within Mexico, even as different forms of racialization played out in the imperialism of U.S. Catholics. The author’s recognition of the United States as a metropole, and her commitment to moving away from the metropole to build a history of “American” Catholicism, are the great contributions of this book. Catholic Borderlands is a valuable addition to an emerging body of scholarship engaged in a project of remapping, of leaving behind the nation-state to consider anew appropriate geographies for studying forms of Catholicism that...