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

The onset of the Mexican Revolution sent shockwaves through the Catholic Church in the United States, particularly as it took a decidedly anticlerical turn. Anne Martínez provides us, in Catholic Borderlands, an intriguing examination of the interplay between titanic forces: the Revolution itself; the political and ecclesial elites of Mexico and the United States; the Vatican; and Bishop Francis Clement Kelley of Oklahoma City and Tulsa, founder of the Catholic Extension Society. In Martínez’s hands, the definition of borderlands is broadened beyond the mere geophysical to include the spiritual.

Martínez very effectively places her work within a broad historiography, and carefully and artfully articulates the significant influence of Catholicism in the context of U.S.-Mexican relations in general and Kelley’s influence on these relations from the 1910s to the 1930s in particular. Kelley’s work, moreover, in Martínez’s hands, takes on a much deeper level of significance in positioning American Catholicism as central to the American identity in the early-twentieth century, including its instrumental role in forging the U.S. response to the Mexican Revolution. Catholic Borderlands, therefore, limns not only the boundaries of both U.S. and Mexican history and identity but also a place (both geographic and ideological) where Kelley could work to redefine what he believed it meant to be “American.” As such, these borderlands proved much more metaphoric than geopolitical, as evidenced by Martínez’s contention that the location of the 1926 International Eucharistic Congress made “Chicago the center of the Catholic borderlands” (p. 27).

Kelley established the Catholic Extension Society as a way to defend the Church against a rising tide of Protestant challenges in the burgeoning West. Among the “frontiers” to which Catholic Extension dedicated its efforts were the U.S.-Mexican border region, the American Southwest, black and creole missions in the Deep South, the islands of the Caribbean, and the Philippines. In effect, anywhere that Kelley considered Catholicism threatened by Protestant proselytizers in schools and communities was targeted for what Martínez calls Kelley’s “religious Monroeism” (p. 124). Kelley’s travel schedule indicates the reach of Catholic Extension’s net: to the Vatican in 1915 to lobby for a new archbishop of Chicago, to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 to lobby on behalf of the Mexican hierarchy, and to London in 1920 to work on securing Catholic missions in the former colonies lost by Germany following World War I. His diplomatic work culminated with the effort to secure peace among the Mexican government, the Catholic Cristero rebels, and the Mexican hierarchy.

The implications of Kelley’s definition of Catholic borderlands are identified in Martínez’s discussion of mestizaje within the context of the 1910s and 1920s eugenics movement. For eugenicists, mixed-race Mexicans in the Southwest were agents of degeneration and degradation. For Kelley, however, the Spaniards were the focus of this story, and Mexicans—the mestizo race that emerged from the noble Spanish effort to Christianize the natives—were the results of that effort and thus were to be honored, although only through their linkage to the conquistadores.

Anne Martínez’s Catholic Borderlands is a skillfully written, meticulously researched, and engagingly diversified examination of what it meant to be a Catholic and an American from the perspective of Kelley. By expanding the concept of borderlands from geography to ideology, Martínez challenges her readers’ understanding of the place of Catholicism in the modern world. As such, it deserves a wide readership in postsecondary classes where students examine the concept of American political, social, cultural, and religious imperialism.