The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750-1962

4: “The spirit of God . . . in the hearts of everybody”: Liberalism Modified and Catholicism Resurgent, 1867–1910

159 Chapter 4 “The spirit of God . . . in the hearts of everybody” Liberalism Modified and Catholicism Resurgent, 1867–1910 v On February 28, 1879, the priest of Zahuatlán, Feliciano Ramírez, visited the village of Amatitlán to hold Mass in honor of the local image of Our Lord of Health. After the service, Ramírez noticed the Christ had started to sweat. He mopped the statue, but by the time he had called his fiscal to inspect the occurrence, the body was covered in globules of water again. Over the next few hours the priest called together the entire village population, who looked on the “miracle . . . in silence.” According to Ramírez, they interpreted the droplets falling from the statue as “eloquent signs of the most tender affections of Christ’s heart.” Despite the sweating Christ of Amatitlán’s humble beginnings, the diocesan authorities, convinced by the priest and the municipal authorities’ impassioned witness statements, allowed the cult to continue. Over the next decade villagers from around the region made regular pilgrimages to the site during the feast day on the first Friday of Lent.1 Although the empire’s defeat concluded the political heyday of Mexican conservatism, local relations between merchants and peasants and ecclesiastical authorities and lay worshippers shaped regional responses to the new liberal state. In the Mixteca Baja, the authorization of the sweating statue reveals the ongoing accord between priests and parishioners . Priests understood the true foci of popular devotion and did not Chapter 4 160 , . attempt to supplant these images with too many new foreign cults. At the same time, parishioners comprehended the limits of ecclesiastical patience and celebrated a distinctly orthodox and clerical miracle rather than a lay visionary or an indigenous healer. The story of these negotiations and how they affected the region’s political, social, and economic development is the focus of this chapter. Between 1867 and 1910 the victorious liberals held power in Mexico, first under the civil leaders Benito Juárez (1867–1872) and Sebastián Lerdo de Tejeda (1872–1876), and then under the military dictator Porfirio Díaz (1876–1880, 1884–1911). During the period, they attempted to impose a functional version of the liberal ideology, for which they had fought over a decade of civil war, on Mexico’s expanding urban centers and recalcitrant rural hinterlands . On the one hand, in order to maintain social stability they retreated from their wartime support for radical liberalism, increasing central state power, curbing regional autonomy, and reducing municipal self-rule.2 For the same reason, they also drew back from implementing the more controversial aspects of anticlerical legislation, forging pacts with conciliatory ecclesiastical leaders and ignoring all but the most egregious infringements of laws concerning public worship, church property, and Catholic education .3 On the other hand, they also pursued an increasingly disruptive policy of agricultural modernization, building on Reform-era laws to divvy up communal village lands and cofradía properties. Although the move was originally designed to promote a vibrant land market and create a class of individual property holders, by the 1890s the laws were increasingly used to alienate peasant lands and augment large haciendas.4 By 1910 the effects of what Charles Hale rather confusingly dubbed this “conservative liberalism” were felt. The disjunction between liberal political ideology on the one hand and centralizing practice and the “land grab” of village-owned properties on the other combined to precipitate an alliance of middle-class political reformers and land-hungry peasants and the outbreak of the first revolution of the twentieth century.5 This traditional narrative of the Restored Republic and the Porfiriato, most cogently restated by Alan Knight, is still extremely persuasive.6 After four decades of uninterrupted rule, the top-down system of political appointment had become dogmatic and inflexible, its regional point men old, unresponsive , and authoritarian.7 At the same time, the construction of roads, railways, and ports had opened up Mexico’s agricultural base to foreign markets , stimulating the growth of commercial crops, raising land prices, and “The spirit of God . . . in the hearts of everybody” 161 , . escalating both legal and illegal assumptions of village lands in insurrectionist foci like Morelos and many other smaller towns and villages.8 For good reason the most oft-spoke battle cries of the Revolution were “Free election, no boss rule!” and “Land and liberty!” Yet as numerous scholars have argued, such...