Insurgency, Counter-Insurgency and Policing in Centre-West Mexico, 1926–1929: Fighting Cristeros 9781350095458, 9781350095489, 9781350095465

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Map
Preface and Acknowledgements
1 Origins, context, historiography
2 Cristero battlefronts
3 Government battlefronts
4 Cristero home fronts
5 Government home fronts
6 Legacy, memory and conclusion
Notes
1 Origins, context, historiography
2 Cristero battlefronts
3 Government battlefronts
4 Cristero home fronts
5 Government home fronts
6 Legacy, memory and conclusion
Sources and Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Insurgency, Counter-Insurgency and Policing in Centre-West Mexico, 1926–1929

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Insurgency, Counter-Insurgency and Policing in Centre-West Mexico, 1926–1929 Fighting Cristeros Mark Lawrence

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Mark Lawrence, 2020 Mark Lawrence has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjaša Krivec Cover image: Mexico Cristero War - civil war 1926–29. In the desert of North Mexico: arrival of a railroad car with drinking water for the government troops (© ullstein bild Dtl. / Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-9545-8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-9546-5 eBook: 978-1-3500-9547-2 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Maps Preface and Acknowledgements

vi vii

1

Origins, context, historiography

2

Cristero battlefronts

35

3

Government battlefronts

59

4

Cristero home fronts

83

5

Government home fronts

107

6

Legacy, memory and conclusion

139

Notes Sources and Bibliography Index

1

149 185 195

Map 1 The geographical focus of this study

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Preface and Acknowledgements This book comes out of several years of happy bonds of intellect, friendship and family. Almost ten years ago, when I accepted a temporary lectureship position at the state university of Zacatecas, I  had little knowledge of the Cristero revolt which shaped the state and wider region which I  have since come to know and love. Travelling through Zacatecas state and the Jalisco highlands, visiting local museums run by enthusiasts, witnessing the commemoration of religious martyrs (even of some priests killed in the Spanish Civil War) and the emblazoning of hillsides with Hollywood-style letters ¡Viva Cristo Rey!, all brought the topic to life for me on a personal level even when my academic research interests still lay elsewhere. Over time I decided to take the plunge. My background researching war and radicalism in modern Spain perhaps gave me more preparation than most historians daring to embark upon a new topic in a new continent. But I could not have developed the momentum to write a regional study without the love and support of family members and the friendship and networks I have been fortunate enough to enjoy over the past few years. My thanks go first of all to my wife and daughter, Susana and Nicole, who have long put up with my interest in the Cristero War. They never complained of my erratic visits to remote regions in the Altiplano and lengthy stays in archives in the region and in Mexico City. My thanks especially go to Miguel Acosta, whose interest in the topic and in history generally was the cause of several interesting conversations and visits. He showed me great generosity, hospitality and support. My thanks also go to my good friend, Nathaniel Morris. His insights into indigenous involvement in the Cristero War and wider Mexican history have been invaluable and inspiring. It was always great fun to welcome him to the comforts of Zacatecas on several occasions after he had spent long periods living frugally among the indigenous communities of the Sierra. My thanks also extend to colleagues. Luis Rubio has been very generous with his time and insights, as has Ben Fallaw. Matthew Butler and Keith

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Preface and Acknowledgements

Brewster read and approved of my proposal to write a regional study with a military angle and have been very welcoming to a scholar whose main work so far has been on Spain rather than Mexico. Mexican archivists have been universally friendly and helpful, especially those working in the smaller state and municipal archives. It has been a pleasure to meet Fernando Villegas, chronicler of the municipality of Guadalupe in Zacatecas. I  hope that our discussions about opening the first-ever state museum dedicated to the Cristero War bear fruit soon. Friends and family in Mexico are almost too numerous to mention, suffice it to say that they are all very dear to me and that they have all helped me in various ways with this project. Canterbury, April 2019

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Origins, context, historiography

The Cristero War (1926–9) was a popular convulsion made in protest against enactment of the Mexican Revolution’s anticlerical constitution of 1917. It was ultimately the most violent and divisive episode in Mexico between the 1910 revolution and the ongoing Narco Wars. The war has generated significant historiographical attention in recent years, especially in relation to the states of Michoacán and Jalisco, and is also increasingly the object of attention outside the academy. The breakthrough of regional studies in the 1970s and the loosening grip of Mexican revolutionary hegemony have improved our understanding of the 1926–9 Cristero revolt against Federal anticlericalism. Far from being a revolt of fanatics in cahoots with landowners, the Cristero rebellion had diverse motives and interests. Yet there are still gaps in our understanding. How, for example, was peaceful opposition to anticlericalism expressed in Mexico’s centre-west? What civil–military tensions existed in governmentheld areas, and how did these compare to those of the insurgent zone? In what ways did local power networks (cacicazgos) shape decisions to support or defy the government, and how were these informed by social, cultural and economic tensions? This new history, the first regional study of the Cristero War to be centred on the state of Zacatecas, answers these questions, adapting models applied in regional studies elsewhere and offering fresh perspectives in equal measure. Instead of studying the Cristeros in isolation, this book explains how the communities on both sides of the Cristero/Federal divide showed similar responses to the demands of militarization and displacement of population, and how the proximity of cruelty and killing produced similar spirals of violence. Fighting Cristeros shows how the war in Zacatecas and the centre-west hinged less on ideology and more on long-standing local tensions,

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Insurgency, Counter-Insurgency and Policing

vertical rather than horizontal lines of allegiance, and on the autonomy of highland (serrano) culture hostile to central control. This book aims to develop leads established by such historians as Lourdes Celina Vázquez Parada and the late Alicia Olivera, who placed regional and oral history firmly on the map of the Mexican historiography, as well as the classic trilogy of the Franco-Mexican historian Jean Meyer. Nonetheless, there are still opportunities for new research in several directions. Matthew Butler’s pioneering 2004 study of diverse and non-violent Cristero activism in Michoacán revised the dualist emphasis on overt militancy offered in Jean Meyer’s classic 1970s study and led to calls by experts, including by Meyer himself, for more studies of non-combatant responses to the Cristero War, including in regions untouched by fighting.

A regional history Fighting Cristeros studies the Cristero War in Mexico’s centre-west, the state of Zacatecas and the adjoining bordering areas of Jalisco, Durango and Aguascalientes, parts of what is sometimes referred to as Mexico’s ‘Rosary Belt’. Zacatecas, a largely underpopulated state, has not been subject to a new military history study of its Cristero conflict. This is remarkable considering that the Federal war minister, humble-born Joaquín Amaro, and one of the leading Cristeros, Aurelio Acevedo, both came from the state. Jean Meyer’s classic trilogy included substantial material on the state, thanks to his privileged access to the papers of General Aurelio Acevedo of Valparaíso (Zacatecas). But this book does not claim to follow Meyer’s nationwide study. Rather, it considers Zacatecas and the adjoining centre-west states as an enclosed theatre of war and the Cristero rebellion waged within it as a kind of asymmetrical warfare. It explains how the geography, Catholic traditionalism and serrano culture of Zacatecas and the centre-west predisposed this region to suffering a very embittered insurgency in the Cristero War. It also explains how the recent revolutionary experience of the Mexican army led to both a brutal counter-insurgency and crises in civil–military relations. The persistence of the Cristero War in the Zacatecas region was determined not just by the clash between a ruralized militant traditionalism and an urban-based political and



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military counter-insurgency, important though these were. Rather, terrain, poor communications, economic dislocation, civil–military crises and defiant local power networks all combined to give the war its prolonged and asymmetrical features in this region. It is hoped that detailed analysis of a broader phenomenon will necessarily lend weight to those calling for a more nuanced approach to Mexico’s national history. The book moves across genres and forms of history to offer a more complete picture of the everyday experiences of religious conflict in rural Mexico, explaining patterns of everyday resistance and negotiation as much as the better understood religious rebellion itself. Two sets of paired chapters explore the structuring and socializing of the insurgency and then of the counter-insurgency. After an introductory, contextualizing Chapter 1, Chapters 2 and 3 show how Cristero groups developed a guerrilla strategy in the centre-west by overriding local networks of power and utilizing them for insurgent ends, and then how the government ‘battlefront’ escalated its war effort. Chapters 4 and 5 switch focus to the experience of war on the ‘home fronts’ of the insurgent and government zones. Chapter 4 shows how Cristero control and collaboration was maintained and underpinned by local practices and policed by Cristero-appointed authorities; in mirror image, Chapter  5 details the militarization of the religious conflict at the hands of the Federal Army and the dislocation of government and administration under the impact of the revolt. This book provides a first regionally specific study of Zacatecas and its borderlands and, in particular, applies a new military history methodology to its analysis. The new military history has not advanced much in the Mexican historiography, in part because historians have too readily accepted the state’s own claims that it demilitarized quickly after the 1910–20 revolution. The Mexican Defence Ministry archives for this period remain effectively off limits for historians, as only scant details on personnel files are forthcoming. This book tries to compensate by mining state and municipal archives (especially those of Zacatecas, Durango and Aguascalientes), along with further sources housed in London and Mexico City. A  mysterious blaze devoured most of the relevant Zacatecas state archive in the 1990s, but this shortcoming is compensated elsewhere. This book also uses memoirs, local histories and selected oral history accounts in order to sustain a regionalized analysis,

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integrated throughout in the context of leading academic sources. My diverging source base offers local colour and detail ranging from cattle rustling to prostitution to the financial draining of local government, and these need to be explained as the consequences of civil–military relations and in the context of sociological and everyday aspects of the rebellion. The advantages of using diverse primary sources are clear. As Lourdes Vázquez has shown, the oral tradition for the Cristiada is of critical importance, largely because of the decades of silence imposed by embarrassed institutions in order to obliterate memory of the conflict and the fact that many (most?) veterans from both sides were illiterate.1 Oral history also retains the distinct advantage of offering a personal version of history which, as a historian of Cristero women has remarked, ‘almost always diverge[s]‌from the official version’.2

Conflict and Mexican history Regional conflict has long characterized Mexican history. The independence struggle against Spain in the early nineteenth century was more regionalized in New Spain/Mexico than in other Spanish possessions. The regions have witnessed secession pressures from without (the Mexican–American War of the 1840s and filibusters) and within (the 1881 attempt to declare an independent Jalisco Republic3). Alongside nineteenth-century caste wars raged more complex revolts, such as the campaign waged by the mestizo Manuel Lozada (1828–1873), which was supported by several Huichol and Cora Indians as well as mestizos, and motivated by demands relgious and political autonomy as well as land reform. The Lozada revolt went down in official history as a ‘barbarous’ Indian revolt, although great savagery was in fact shown by both sides.4 The most dynamic internal conflicts have always fractured on the competing claims to legitimacy of religion and of the state. From the outset of independence neither conservatives nor liberals reconciled their politics with the powerful Catholic hierarchy,5 but liberals proved far more consistent than conservatives in attempts to impose state power over the Church. The first anticlerical attempts occurred under the 1833–4 Gómez Farías presidency (the only enduring feature of which was the abolition of the civil obligation to pay tithes).6 The greatest pre-revolutionary assault on



Origins, Context, Historiography

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Church power came with the religious secularizing articles added to the 1857 Constitution, implemented after the War of Reform. Studies of the nineteenth century have shown how the Reform War politicized society, cementing ‘popular liberalism’ via such institutions as the National Guard and imposing a strongly laic policy against the powerful Catholic Church.7 The 1872–6 radicalization of anti-Catholic measures was not unique to Mexico (cultural struggles also happened in Italy and in the German Empire). But the Catholic armed ‘religiosero’ revolt (a forerunner of the twentieth-century Cristeros) was peculiarly Hispanic, as only Spain witnessed a comparable phenomenon at the same time (the Third Carlist War), albeit for more complex reasons. The doyen of new military history, Jeremy Black, has pleaded that civil wars should attract the sort of scholarly attention normally afforded to wars between states.8 Given Latin America’s absence from both the First and Second World War battlefields, historians of conflict have been more drawn to civil wars, insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. They have also been drawn to the particularly Hispanic phenomenon of armies making and breaking regimes, imposing their praetorianism usually under the pretext of a higher cause. As an expert on Latin American militarism put it, Whenever the armed forces assumed political power, whatever their motivations, they maintained they were doing so only because the government had failed. Ostensibly they were motivated by only the purest of patriotic intentions. In their own eyes, grave national circumstances made intervention imperative. Indeed, ever since independence, the military had developed the firm conviction that it was their duty to step forward in times of internal crisis to save the nation from itself.9

Armies dominating politics either in presidential palaces or behind the scenes often faced domestic resistance to their policies. During the 1920s Mexico’s revolutionary regime steadily consolidated its power, successfully warding off army revolts, but the regime itself had come to power thanks to the army. Ultimately the regime relied on army power, especially when confronted with one of the most infamous challenges to its regime by the Cristeros. These rebels fought the Federal Army to a standstill by 1929, out of a complex array of religious, regional, socio-economic and power-political motives. They were dubbed ‘Cristeros’ by their enemies, but for much of the war official records

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referred to them as ‘revolutionaries’, as did several Cristeros themselves. One of the leading Cristeros, General Aurelio Acevedo, objected to the term ‘revolutionary’, citing how the Cristero movement aimed to restore a social and religious order vanquished by the chaos of real revolution underway in Mexico since 1910.10 But the Cristero rebellion was the last major armed conflagration of the era that opened up in 1910, so the term ‘revolutionary’ seemed uncontroversial to dispassionate contemporaries. For their part civilians caught in the path of contending government and Cristero armies tended to refer to the government side as the ‘Federation’ or as ‘callistas’, after President Calles, whose hard-line anticlericalism provoked the Cristeros to revolt. The Cristero War of 1926–9 led to the deaths of somewhere between 70,000 and 85,000 people, with the government side sustaining casualties around twice or three times those of the Cristeros. The war exacted a toll almost half as great as the total claimed by the ‘armed phase’ of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and devastated large parts of Mexico’s centre-west.11 The localized and intimate nature of killings make it hard for readers more accustomed to ‘regular’ conflict to understand the killers’ motives and states of mind.12 Even regular forces engaged in sectarian violence. The policing and factional traditions of the Federal Army made its culture uniquely prone to harming civilians and its regionalized structure open to regional interests. The ‘private’ killings, sexual assaults and robberies committed by serving officers under the duress of the 1920s evolved by the 1950s into an institutional form as the army went about imprisoning strikers.13 This pattern explains much of the local Federal military response to the Cristero insurgency. The Federal counter-insurgency tended to be conducted by troops alien to regional identities and by officers hostile to the Cristero worldview. Like soldiers in most parts of the world, the Federal Army tended to view counterinsurgency as glorified bandit-hunting, even though the Mexican army was slower than many armies to develop the technology and infrastructure to perform well at anything else. The ‘best’ infantry (in terms of reputation for blind obedience) were indigenous levies recruited from areas where no Cristiada raged and indeed where, at least as late as the 1930s, no national efforts had accumulated to integrate them into the Mexican nation. The Yaquis from the north-western state of Sonora were the shock troops of the



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revolutionary army, akin to the ‘martial races’ that provided the vanguard of other world armies.14 The officers tended to have their own worldview, being in many ways products of the radicalism sweeping the army since the start of the revolution in 1910. The army, which at its height in 1916 had swollen to two hundred thousand men, was disproportionately officer-heavy, like so many other Hispanic armies. Even though many of the excess commissions had been whittled into ‘honorary’ positions (on full pay), remaining officers were forged out of the brutality of the revolution, with little of the professional ethos imparted by the now-destroyed Colegio Militar.15 Anticlericalism characterized most officers, as brass caciques had no time for preachy Catholics, usually women, who by resisting anticlerical campaigns offended the army’s machismo, ideology and function in equal measure. By the 1920s Obregón-era officers generally saw priests as half-men, sexual predators and obstructions to ‘progress’.16 General López, who held a Cristero priest hostage on campaign, liked to taunt him by asking for a blessing with his ‘spider-web dance’ (araño) whenever they came under fire. The army’s Cristero War allies, agraristas (peasants who hoped for land grants in return for loyalty to the State), called churches ‘whorehouses’, as only women went there. At a post-war protest in Zacatecas agraristas proclaimed that they were not a flock to be shepherded by the Church but free men who had earned their right to land.17 Army attitudes mattered because officers continued to shape politics after the end of the armed phase of the revolution in 1917, despite subsequent attempts at demilitarization. General Álvaro Obregón led a triumvirate of rebellion in April 1920 (with fellow Generals Adolfo de la Huerta and Plutarco Elías Calles) which led to Obregón becoming president in December 1920, setting in train the so-called Sonoran dynasty. Obregón’s 1920–4 presidency was characterized by attempts to restrain militarism, generally by the promotion of agrarian and labour mobilization as counterweights to the army and by the drastic demobilization of thirty thousand troops.18 These measures certainly helped curb the militarism which had seen six military coups in nine years between 1911 and 1920.19 But in many ways this decentralization of political force would also embitter the Cristero War even further, as rebels faced not only the Federal Army but also mounted police and the Defensas (progovernment paramilitaries). The Defensas received arms from the government in order to defend their local autonomy and associated communal interests

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(which were often conflated with the economic and political interests of their commanders). Increasingly these were subordinated to Federal Army control over the course of the war. Although the political consequences of participation in war could be radical, even revolutionary, this radicalism stood at odds with the decidedly nineteenth-century nature of the Mexican revolutionary army. The army could usually guarantee the defence of major towns, railways and ports, but it was hard-pressed to defeat rural insurgencies, as the Cristero War would show. The Mexican Revolution showed how the Federal monopoly on artillery kept cities safe for the government (except in Chihuahua) from the agrarian and serrano revolts of 1911–13, and a similar pattern of Federal artillery supremacy would prevail in the Cristiada.20 Porfirian railways eased counter-insurgency efforts, but the vastness of key areas of the underpopulated centre-west meant that decisive force was hard to concentrate against an enemy who used topography and remote civilian support networks to their advantage. The result was that each military zone (whose boundaries largely mirrored those of the states) hosted Federal troops whose role involved more policing than formal military concerns.21 In practice this meant that Federal troops deployed away from railheads became ever more dependent on requisitioning from civilians in proportion to their distance from railway supplies. Martin van Creveld has argued that the First World War marked a revolution in army logistics, as static and expensive mass armies relied upon industrialized logistics instead of the previous norm of living off the land.22 But Mexico’s revolutionary war and the Cristero War only partly obeyed Creveld’s dictum for the side controlling railways, and not at all for the rebels. The Mexican army was thus more of a visceral than a theoretical institution. Even though their legal privileges (the so-called fuero militar) were formally curtailed by mid-nineteenth-century constitutions (such as the Juárez reforms of Mexico), rural rebellions continued to offer officers the pretext to impose martial law and thereby exempt themselves from civilian jurisdiction. One of the main reasons why President Francisco Madero’s liberal programme failed at the outset of the revolution was because of the unrest his promotion of middle-class civilians above military men provoked.23 Officers themselves came disproportionately from rural backgrounds (as was the case with all other Latin American armies apart from Argentina) and thus tended to



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manage local power networks better than urban-based politicians.24 Despite the growth in technical training in the academies, command posts remained more attractive in terms of careers, and the phenomenon of sons following their fathers into the military profession, as well as comradely bonds between commanders, survived well into the professionalization drives of the 1930s.25 When the obese War Minister General Serrano lost four times his annual salary during a night’s gambling in 1923, President Obregón (another general) instructed the Treasury to reimburse him his losses.26 Given the predominance of the politics of kith and kin, little was left for modernizing the order of battle. Cavalry still dominated the Mexican order of battle by the time of the end of the revolution in 1940, and the army still had scant artillery, no real divisional structure (rather battalions and regiments), and no national service requirement was in place before 1939.27 Even so, during the Cristero War the government was out-horsed in all areas of operations apart from Colima (a small state dominated by volcanic terrain and therefore poorly suited to cavalry),28 and commanders had to mobilize large numbers of mounted police and Defensas, often complicating civil–military relations as a result. Even though the Mexican army looked outwardly nineteenth century in appearance by 1926, internally its discipline had been substantially professionalized thanks to the tenure of the Zacatecas-born War Minister Joaquín Amaro. Amaro was made a divisional commander aged 31 in 1920. His loyalty during the 1923–34 delahuertista revolt led to his promotion to the War Ministry. Amaro then professionalized the army, to some degree reforming its Porfirian image, and standing the Federal Army in good stead to face down both rebellions from its own ranks and rebellion from without. Above all Amaro restrained Mexican militarism, something previous revolutionaries failed to accomplish. The Federal Army became the servant of the government, and much less the plaything of regional strongmen and careerist insubordinates.29 Amaro’s ‘Prussianizing’ ethos thus produced a recognizably modern army, which restored and exceeded the partial Prussian reforms of officer training and rationalization which had been derailed during the armed phase of the revolution.30 In terms of relations between officers and men, more entrenched hierarchies persisted that reverberated across careers, class and ethnicity. Most Latin American armies were officer-heavy owing to the politicization of promotions

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and the (practically speaking) non-universal conscription falling mainly on the lowest of orders. Thus a working-class ‘them against us’ radicalism grew in the ranks of mainly brown-skinned soldiers and workers against mainly white-skinned officers.31 Army discipline remained mostly immune to the humanist political reforms of the Mexican Revolution. The 1917 Constitution limited the applicability of capital punishment, and several states restricted it still further or even abolished it altogether. But the army continued to operate its own justice, one formal and the other informal. Formally, officers had the legal power to impose martial law in zones of rebellion, freeing up soldiers and their paramilitary auxiliaries to shoot on sight. Informally, the culture of extrajudicial killings  – the ‘ley fuga’ or shooting prisoners who ‘tried to escape’  – persisted throughout the Cristero era. Officers often preferred to shoot their own soldiers condemned for capital crimes via the extrajudicial method. The formal process of a firing squad could test the loyalty of the condemned man’s comrades, and ‘expendability’ of life for one’s own side had necessarily to be individual in nature, in contrast to the group expendability of captured enemies.32 Whereas epauletted rebels were often treated leniently by their own officer caste, political and ethnic rebels from the lower orders tended to be treated as ‘expendable’, especially in the case of Indians who were deemed ‘savages’. Any discussion of indigenous involvement in the Cristero War must recall the tendency of scholars to ‘apoliticize’ subaltern involvement in state power struggles in Latin America in general. John Lynch’s study of the caudillos of the Independence Wars represented blacks and Indians in the nineteenth century as ‘apolitical’.33 Yet Julia O’Hara’s study of the nineteenth-century wars in northern Mexico between Apaches and Tarahumaras has demonstrated that these Indians collaborated with the Creole/mestizo state all the same. Even while Mexican elites represented ‘the Indian’ as a national enemy, there were certain ‘good Indians’ (‘mansos’) such as the Tarahumaras who collaborated with government forces in exterminating the ‘wild’ (‘bronco’) Apaches.34 For a long time historians considered that the tendency of Indian communities in the centre-west to support the Cristero rebellion was motivated by religious devotion and an ingrained scepticism towards the Mexican state.35 But, as Nathaniel Morris has argued, Indian responses to the Cristiada in the Gran Nayar were a sophisticated expression of local power politics. Certainly,



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post-revolutionary reforms, such as the government-appointed headmen of Tepehuano communities, threatened a meta-apocalypse according to the Tepehuano worldview, as the reforms destroyed the spatial rather than linear perception of time and would result in a catastrophic failure of the rains.36 But Indian communities were not solely metaphysical in their calculations: they also reacted as logically as mestizos to the pendulum swings of arms and the threats and opportunities these posed. Centre-west Mexico was largely representative of the overall ethnic make-up of the republic. The majority mestizo ethnicity was balanced by majority indigenous populations in some parts, especially southern Durango, and majority white populations in others, especially the Altos region of Jalisco. The ethnic dimension to army recruitment displayed some similar patterns since the independence wars. Indians and blacks were likelier to support liberal projects than conservative ones because of the opportunities in terms of career and identity.37 In some ways this ethnic division played out in the Cristero centre-west. Cristeros, especially those operating in the ethnically white highlands of Jalisco, often referred to Federal troops using the racialized term ‘changos’ (‘apes’; a less pejorative term was ‘guacho’).38

Context: Army and revolution The persistence of army supremacy and class and ethnic conflict undermined the early liberal impulses behind the revolution. Over the course of 1912, conservative forces increasingly conspired against Madero, driven above all by Federal Army officers who resented the scrawny and, above all, civilian Madero. Army hostility might have seemed surprising: from 1911 Madero was enacting the very counter-revolution of which the army approved (the army’s grievance was that it should enact the policies itself and win the spoils, thereby giving the army the real political power behind the fig leaf of civilian rule). This new tradition of high-handed militarism towards civilians would endure into various civil–military crises at local levels during the Cristiada. Mexican militarism endured not only because of the demands of the Cristiada but also because throughout the twentieth century the army resisted examination by civilians, placing its archives off limits, and thereby successfully but also

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inaccurately giving off the appearance of being a ‘apolitical’ institution, a form of Mexican ‘exceptionalism’ unlike the civil–military crises in the rest of Latin America.39 Even though conservatives were crying out for a Porfirian ‘man of order’, there was little outright army support for the ex-dictator’s nephew, Félix Díaz, whose seizure of Veracruz and a number of other areas was short-lived because his forces did not seek support in the countryside (as the more intractable Orozquistas and Zapatistas had been doing). Félix’s imprisonment and stay of execution ended Porfirianism as a political force.40 But Madero was not safe. Early in 1913 General Mondragón raised a rebellion in Mexico City of some 700 troops which stormed the Military Prison, liberating the ill-fated Díaz and managing to seize control of Chapultepec Castle. A shoot-out ensued across a capital city which hitherto had been spared revolutionary violence (known as the ‘Decena Trágica’). But Madero loyalists saw their purely military victory snatched away by the conservative classes who supplied the beleaguered rebels and by diplomatic intervention (ultimately led by the Spanish minister) which arranged for Madero’s handover of power to a temporary body led by Díaz and General Victoriano Huerta. The new authorities met in a cabinet under Huerta on 22 February 1913. Madero was supposed to be evacuated to safety, but he was shot and killed by his escort in an ironic escalation of the ley fuga. The palace coup was complete.41 The ‘better elements’ of society, such as clerics and Spaniards, welcomed Huerta’s coup.42 In general, Madero’s liberalism had been too abstract, which meant that his counter-insurgency crackdown seemed even more of a ‘betrayal’ harder for his supporters to bear.43 Madero went down in official historical memory of the revolution as a martyr rather than a disciple, precisely because his liberalism could not be reconciled with the irruption of militarism in politics and demands for land redistribution.44 Also, even though Maderistas promoted land reform, this often proved counterproductive in the sense that homage to the free market tended to empower hacendados and rancheros more than smaller proprietors. Some improvements were welcome, such as alleviation in the tax burden (e.g. some 70 per cent of the state tax base before the revolution was diverted to ‘administrative costs’) and the accelerated demise of debt peonage, but there was no systematic commitment or financial ability to break the estates of the Porfiriato.



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While the Madero regime was discovering the limits of liberalism, the army unleashed its Porfirian strength against regional challenges to state power. General Juvencio Robles mounted a brutal counter-insurgency in Morelos in 1912, and other units performed with great violence, as witnessed in the collective punishments in Oaxaca, the ongoing use of the ‘ley fuga’ against anti-government activists, to say nothing of the continued brutality against the Yaqui Indians. All this excess was ‘legal’ thanks to the 1912 suppression of constitutional liberties in one-third of the Republic’s territory, allowing for military justice against ‘bandits’.45 The incidents of arbitrary military rule during the Cristiada thus came from a fertile tradition. All this brutality ushered in a privatization of violence and to the formation of Defensas (quasi-autonomous militias).46 This habit of paramilitarism would be mobilized by both Cristeros and agraristas during the Cristiada. Such militarization expanded the army far beyond its constrained Porfirian limits, burying the Madero legacy even further. Meanwhile, Coahuila, Durango and Zacatecas formed a triangle of rebellion as this region slipped out of government control.47 After the February 1913 coup, Huerta got the bulk of former rebels and bandits in Zacatecas to serve on the government side.48 Huerta in his determination to impose ‘peace at all costs’ was a counter-revolutionary, and his hard-line rule demonstrated the impossibility of radically changing political culture in a vast country unused to anything other than authoritarian government and which was riven by regional, ethnic and now religious divisions.49

The weakness of liberalism As two historians observed about the paradox of marrying liberty with hierarchy, ‘in a materially unequal society, assertion of formal equality can be violently oppressive’.50 The revolution was fractured: local objectives frequently took precedence over ‘national’ aims; when the victorious party, the PNR (later PRI), tried to forge the ‘revolutionary family’, two of its obstacles were ‘lingering factionalism’ and ‘ethnic antagonisms’.51 The revolutionaries tried to paper over these divisions by innovating in the cultural realm. Monuments dedicated to the revolution were constructed as a mnemonic lesson to the masses, copying the French revolutionary example.52 These efforts reflected a

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1920s corporatist and 1930s ‘guided democracy’ conception of revolutionary politics, both of which divorced the liberalism which had been martyred along with Francisco Madero in the early phase of the revolution. Madero’s liberalism could not embrace a political culture forged by almost forty years of authoritarianism. To be sure, the Porfirian era (1872–1910) had been admired by US and European investors for its positivist developmental model and the ‘scientific’ (científico) technocrats who at the end of the nineteenth century managed to grow the Mexican economy faster than the population. Few foreigners liked to dwell on the brutality the regime inflicted on rebellious Indians, hacienda labourers, or strikers in the growing industrial and mining sectors.53 Compared to what passed before and after, the Porfirian era can be presented as something better than its revolutionary black legend. Paul Garner argues that there were three sources of Díaz’s longevity, based upon his construction of a modus vivendi accommodating:  (1) the liberal tradition of popular sovereignty, constitutionalism, regions and municipalities, (2) the emergent and (after 1867) dominant conservative idea of positivism and (3) the traditional of personal, patriarchal and patronage power at which Díaz excelled. Garner thus argues that Díaz needs to be appreciated in the context of the nineteenth century (in which by no means was he ‘bad’), rather than the hegemonic and demonizing representations following the Mexican Revolution.54 In some ways nineteenth-century authoritarianism returned to shape the upheaval of the 1910–17 ‘armed phase’ of the Mexican Revolution. General Reyes’s presidential campaign, a Catholic hierarchy resentful of being pushed back from the summit of power it had achieved under Porfirio Díaz, hacienda owners sullen at the relentless demands for land redistribution, and the ‘iron hand’ of the Huerta presidency (1913–14), all looked like continuities in Mexican history.55 But the proclamation of a new Constitution in 1917, with its socialist and anticlerical elements, combined with the victory in 1920 of the left-leaning ‘Sonoran’ faction of the Mexican Revolution, changed the country irrevocably. The revolutionary class was very different from the liberals of yore, not least in the degree of its hostility to clericalism, as witnessed during the civil war of 1910–17 and the inclusion of the strongly anticlerical articles 3, 27 and 130 in the Constitution of 1917. This charter reduced the powerful Catholic Church to the status of any other private organization of ‘citizens’. Over the



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course of ten years of upheaval unleashed by 1910, elites fought for power and popular classes for social justice. According to the American sociologist Frank Tannenbaum, the Mexican Revolution was ‘a series of waves having more or less independent beginnings and independent objectives’.56 Even though a great deal did change, the logic of power was not much changed from the Porfiriato. The armed phase of the revolution ended with the Plan of Agua Prieta in 1920. The Sonoran dynasty established its grip on the presidency, imposing a relative political stability characterized by caciques, rigged elections, violence and occasional military revolts. The all-powerful trade union confederation (CROM) led by Luis Morones presided over an increasingly docile industrial workforce which in return got a say in economic policy. Land grants gathered apace with varying impact, radically transforming landholding in the states of San Luis and Morelos, for example. But land reform was sluggish in several parts of the centre-west region, where conservative local power networks usually resisted, even sponsoring Cristero rebels in the process.57

Approaching the Cristiada Marxists, both at the time and since, viewed the Mexican insurgency as little more than counter-revolutionary bandits. One Socialist diplomat saw the Cristeros as the twentieth-century equivalent of the Carlist ‘shotgun priests’ who plagued his native Spain a century earlier.58 Soviet historian Nikolai Larin described the Cristeros as fanatics duped into counter-revolution by the great estates.59 Only the socio-economically radical ideas of the current known as magonismo, and more vaguely Zapatismo, won substantial support from Mexican and foreign communists.60 Similar dismissive interpretations by other Soviet historians and the British Marxist Eric Hobsbawm laid down the gauntlet to more innovative historians with a greater command of Mexican sources. Just as Alan Knight refuted Hobsbawm’s claim that the vast majority of the Mexican peasantry stayed aloof from the 1910–20 revolution, Jean Meyer revised revolutionary interpretations of the Cristiada. Catholicism has been extensively researched in relation to the Cristero War. Mexico’s anticlerical tradition, notorious when compared with the rest of Latin America, was not invented in the 1920s. During the 1832–4 regime

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of President Gómez Farías the Catholic Church was singled out as a tyrant in the pay of aristocrats and the erstwhile Spanish overlords to such an extent that patriotic celebrations of Independence and anticlericalism emerged as the same theme.61 The international burden and appeal of Catholicism continued to reverberate in Mexican politics, as the Maximilian Empire of the 1860s demonstrated. But the role played by Catholicism in the Cristero revolt has been disputed.Whereas Jean Meyer argued that Catholicism was intimately and extensively linked to Cristero militancy, other historians (Bailey) argued that it was mixed, and others still (Robert Quirk) that it was low. Matthew Butler has argued for the multiple identities and forms of resistance linking Catholicism with the Cristiada. Yet Catholic resistance varied between active (above all, the League for the Defence of Religious Liberty [LNDLR], founded in 1925) and passive (Acción Católica Mexicana, Unión Nacional Sinarquista etc.) forms. The LNDLR justified armed resistance with reference to eleventhcentury strictures from Pope Gregory VII:  ‘It is not wrong to kill, but it is wrong to kill without reason and right.’62 The passive forms prevailed owing to the Church hierarchy’s resolve to come to some sort of accommodation with the revolutionary state. Guerra Manzo argued that Cristero resistance cannot be understood just in terms of the divide identified by Butler between sacramental and popular religious practices but also in terms of the correlation of forces in each locality which encouraged varying and overlapping degrees of militancy, and that religion itself became not an instigator, but an expression of local power politics (‘state layer’ and ‘religious layer’).63 Anticlericalism provoked a response in Catholic Jalisco not just from armed insurgents but also from civil society. The ‘respectability’ of Catholicism assailed by the revolution led to the mobilization from May 1911 of a Catholic Party under de la Barra’s leadership, an example of how the revolution opened up possibilities for conservative as well as radical forces.64 In fact the intellectual climate for a Catholic revolt seemed ripe. In 1918 the Jalisco state government repealed much of the anticlerical measures emanating from the 1917 Constitution in the wake of a highly successful year-long economic boycott organized by the ACJM.65 Carlos Blanco Ribera, jalisciense brigadiergeneral of Cristero forces in Los Altos from October 1927, recalled how pre-war Jalisco was gripped by a Catholic revival, as elements in civic and religious organizations rallied against ‘alien’ minorities introduced by the



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revolution – Bolsheviks, Protestants, atheists – and saw armed revolt as a logical response.66 In 1923 the Cerro de Gubilete (Guanajuato), the geographical centre of the Republic and the buckle of Mexico’s ‘Rosary Belt’, was witness to a million-strong gathering of nationwide Catholic political and syndical associations. Neighbouring Aguascalientes witnessed the deaths of several Catholic militants at the hands of gendarmes and troops in March 1925. As the Catholic press from 1923 campaigned for the self-made man, General Ángel Flores, to be a candidate for the 1924–8 presidency of the Republic, regional elites followed suit.67 Political circles in Zacatecas sponsored Flores against the rival candidate Plutarco Calles, while the state governor Aureliano Castañeda dissolved left-wing town halls. Yet Calles won and his presidency signalled a cooling of the Federation’s attitudes towards Zacatecas conservatism. Zone commander General Eulogio Ortiz moved against local Catholic organizations from the start of 1926, and well-connected Catholics raged against the four horsemen of land reform, education, Bolshevism and Protestantism.68 The Valparaíso rancher, Aurelio Acevedo, a learned man who nonetheless saw himself as an apolitical man of faith, busied himself collecting donations for military contingencies and liaising with the National Confederation of Catholic Workers.69 Even as fighting got underway well-connected Catholics in the centre-west continued to pressure the Federal authorities. A 1927 manifesto from the Jalisco Association of Catholic Lawyers protested that ‘a thousand Catholics need more ministers than a thousand Protestants, as we have more religious rituals and obligations than they do’, and ‘if each Protestant church is permitted one minister for every five thousand inhabitants, how many ministers can the Protestants have in Jalisco, and how many can Muslims, Jews and Buddhists? We Catholics number 800,000–900,000 in Jalisco!’.70 There was a widespread view by Cristero sympathizers that Mexico’s Protestant minority was being protected by the Federal government.71 The Catholic press decried Calles’s election to the presidency in 1924:  ‘a group of agraristas bedecked with red-and-black flags, the portent of the destruction of our nation, hailed Calles’s election and called for the destruction of the Knights of Columbus’.72 A  key plank of the extreme laic agenda was the imposition of Federal education via the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), governed by the Protestant Education Minister Moisés Sanz. Secular education was frequently resisted in pro-Cristero areas, or infiltrated by

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priests, or ‘minimalized’ to teaching nothing more than the three Rs. Even in pro-agrarista areas, participation in the SEP was usually linked to popular desires for material gain (especially land) via this closer relationship to the state rather than to the Church.73 In the same manner, agraristas who thwarted a reactionary rising in Jalisco in 1925 then deluged the government with petitions asking for rewards of land.74 These were a logical response to Calles’s public boast in 1924, made five years after Emiliano Zapata’s assassination at the site of the tomb of the prophet of agrarianism, that the ‘land question is mine’.75

The region

Map 1 The geographical focus of this study (shaded) The centre-west in this study encompasses the states of Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, Jalisco and Durango. For all the regional upheaval underway in Mexico since the start of the revolution, there are cultural, socio-economic and geographical reasons why neither the north nor the south of the country



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harboured the Cristero revolt. Both northerners and southerners had shaped the revolution. Northern Orozquismo and Villismo shared many social justice/agrarian anti-Maderista features with southern Zapatismo, but the spatially and socially mobile North emitted less ‘moral economy’ and less fierce parochialism than the village interests driving Zapata’s rebellion. Further south in Guerrero, the Figueroa movement of 1912 represented serrano localism. But unlike Zapatismo and Orozquismo, the Figueroa movement was not officially opposed to Madero’s regime.76 Certainly the centre-west region was not devoid of revolutionary activity. Parts of the Maderista rebellion at the outset of the revolution found support in the sierras of Durango and Zacatecas, feeding off rural banditry which was made worse by the failure of the 1911 harvest in Zacatecas.77 Zacatecas in June 1914 was the scene of the famous battle which toppled the conservative Huerta regime. But the main protagonists – northern Villistas and the Federal Army – came from outside the region. Just as the centre-west was not at the forefront of the revolutionary process, so did it disproportionately mobilize Catholic responses to the liberated political climate. The boisterous freedom of elections benefited not just ‘new’ politics in the cities but also old politics in the countryside and reinvigorated Catholicism in state capitals like Aguascalientes. Here only railwaymen and passing armies showed any degree of revolutionary fervour, in stark contrast to the conservative and Catholic grip of the surrounding haciendas and ranches of Mexico’s second smallest state.78 Zacatecas state is divided into three topographical zones. The southern part, closer to Guadalajara than to Zacatecas city, is known as los Cañones. This region is the warmest part of the state because of its lower altitude and is home to maize, bean, sugarcane and fruit production. It was dominated by small-holding and communal agriculture, especially in respect of indigenous communities. Government attempts at land reform in this area were usually rebuffed, ejidos not appearing here in any numbers until cardenismo in the 1930s, and property conservatism was a major factor in this zone’s widespread support for the Cristeros. The second zone, known as ‘the valleys’ (Los Valles), surrounded Zacatecas city and was the centre of most population, economic and political activity, and the Porfirian railway network which had been built to link the state’s mines with Mexico City. Los Valles contained many more large estates (haciendas) than the south and was accordingly the scene of

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widespread socio-economic conflict as 80 per cent of state petitions for land redistribution came from this zone. Finally, the vast northern zone known as the High Plains (Altiplano) incorporated the vast municipalities of Mazapil, Río Grande and Sombrerete and bordered Durango state, the southeastern and indigenous Mezquital areas of which also form part of this study. Durango, a state which records winter temperatures colder than even those of Zacatecas, was unmistakeably northern in character, despite its authoritarian traditions and forested and mountainous topography. Zacatecas’s Altiplano zone contained a number of mines but very little concentration of population or intensive agriculture. Instead large, underproductive haciendas dominated, which meant that landowners often complied with land reform as a means of getting rid of marginal lands. Thus the socio-economic reasons for support for the Cristeros were mostly absent in the High Plains, and the military history of the war reflected this.79 Zacatecas had an ingrained conservative tradition in local politics, as was demonstrated from the start of the revolution. Governor Guadalupe González demonstrated the limits of ideology. Even though the governor was a genuine Maderista, he remained conservative and changed very little of the state’s Porfirian establishment.80 Further south in Aguascalientes, even less revolutionary fervour had been evident. Aguascalientes had few very large estates, so there was little revolutionary demand for redistribution, the Church remained strong and popular and it was no accident that the Catholic Party (PCN) did conspicuously well here.81 This popular Catholicism provides part of the rationale for including Aguascalientes in this study, a small state whose social geography produced Cristeros who were all labourers.82 Particular focus will be devoted to the bordering areas adjoining these four states, as they were overrepresented in terms of battles, especially in the ‘Three Fingers’ of Jalisco and neighbouring extremities of Zacatecas. The topography and climate dictated military operations in this area. Peaks rose as high as over 3,000 metres, where temperate and tundra conditions predominated, down to canyons only several hundred metres above sea level, where the temperature was routinely hot in the extreme. The dry season, often harsh in the extreme, lasted from October until May, and the wet season over the summer frequently led to localized flooding, impeding agricultural production and military logistics. Marginal agriculture producing beans and maize on less than ideal



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soils predominated in the ‘Three Fingers’ of Jalisco, especially in the vast municipality of Mezquitic, which was larger than the state of Aguascalientes. The wealthy minority of large cattle-owners and urban bourgeoisie were pinpricks in a rural mass of either Huichol communal lands, as in the case of Mezquitic, or mostly illiterate mestizo labourers, smallholders and ranchers, in the other two ‘fingers’ of Jalisco. The inhabitants of the ‘three fingers’ were noted for their culture of horsemanship, vendettas and insurgency. Thus insurgents with intimate knowledge of difficult terrain used this to their advantage. Federal counter-insurgent operations, for their part, were well aware of the challenging terrain, and indeed often exaggerated the challenge as an excuse for their poor military performance, very much in a tradition stretching back to the colonial and liberal eras when failures to integrate remote indigenous communities were usually blamed on terrain.83 Jalisco has long been viewed as the heart of the Cristero insurgency. Its highland region (the tableland known as Los Altos) was not ‘high’ if approached from Zacatecas, but it was high when approached from the centre of the Republic. Los Altos had a tradition stretching back to Independence of religious-inspired reaction to liberal and revolutionary nation-building projects.84 One downside of this insurgent tradition was provincialism. Aurelio Acevedo, Cristero officer from Valparaíso (Zacatecas), noted in 1933 how ‘provincialism (in Jalisco) was the unbreachable barrier preventing internal and external cohesion’.85 But provincialism was lost on costumbrista Cristero writers who romanticized the entry of Cristero irregulars into the friendly ‘promised land’ of Los Altos: ‘white women with blue eyes, like in a Biblical landscape, bring water to their Cristero saints … at last they reached this land drenched in blood, where all is great, and the menfolk bearded, good-natured and manly’.86 A region marked by greater concentration of smallholdings, the agricultural workers of Los Altos had suffered less from Porfirian hacienda abuses than most other places and offered insurgents a well-connected network of large villages, decent roads, prosperous farms and good horsemanship.87 In addition to hacendados, Cristero zones of Jalisco were dominated by middling landowners, or rancheros. The ranchero had a Jekyll and Hyde character, being at once a sturdy, independent, peasant bourgeoisie and also greedy and expansionist in the context of agrarian conflict. But unlike the absentee hacendados, rancheros had a common touch and commanded powerful local

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intelligence networks. Rancheros, who had already turned the 1910 revolution into a ‘farm revolution’, not least in areas where they were not outbid by Indian agrarianism, applied the same rationale to the defence of their interests during the Cristiada.88 From a revolutionary perspective the ranchero seemed a reactionary Mr Hyde. According to Jean Meyer, the Cristero revolt of 1926 was ‘an expression of the ranchero mentality’.89 The traditionalism of Los Altos made the region receptive to the growth of political and militant Catholicism . The rise of the PCN and Social Catholic lay organizations might have shown promise of a two-party liberal versus Catholic democratic system, but any such hopes were dashed by the events of 1913 which had created the hard-line Huerta presidency.90 Between 1913 and 1936 the see of Guadalajara was led by the most impassioned episcopal supporter of the Cristiada, Bishop Francisco Orozco y Jiménez, whose popular touch fanned the flames of a peculiarly vibrant popular devotion including a cult of saints for different industries.91 Even agraristas in Jalisco mobilized religion, including one case where they invoked a local saint to bless their demands for landownership and to make it rain.92 The social and topographical geography of Los Altos also resembled Calvillo in the western part of the neighbouring state of Aguascalientes, where Catholicism and a mixture of haciendas and smallholdings dominated. The rest of Aguascalientes was more heavily dominated by haciendas, with only a few resilient communal landholding pockets surviving in the indigenous areas of Jesús María and San José de la Gracia, themselves pockets of pre-Columbine populations in a state which contained Mexico’s lowest proportion of indigenous population.

The historiography of the Cristiada For a long time, the Cristero rebellion was neglected by both contemporary and subsequent commentators and historians. As early as 1935 one foreign expert on Mexican Church–state relations appeared oblivious:  ‘For a time, what is admitted to have been “guerrilla” warfare was undertaken by the Catholic body known as “Cristeros”, but it appears to have been short lived.’93 The reasons for omission lie partly with the revolutionary hegemony and legacy of twentieth-century Mexico. The American journalist and politician Ernest



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Gruening noted at the height of the Cristero War how official Mexican history was at once entirely politicized and at the same time completely divorced from everyday reality.94 The Catholic hierarchy held that the revolt was provoked by President Calles rather than either the Church or even by the revolution itself, and this representation has been reinforced in the popular mind by the 2012 Hollywood film. This Catholic version is best represented in academic circles by the historian Fernando Guzmán Pérez Peláez.95 The fundamentalist Cristero Sanz Cerrada offered a ‘moral economy’ (Social Catholic) defence of the virtues of the hacienda system. More critical historians have still been drawn to the popular idea of the Cristiada. Thus there was a strong trend in the historiography both to accept popular support for, and participation in, Cristero militancy and to invest in this a social and often millenarian dimension. This trend itself was always overshadowed by what both Mexican and foreign historians considered the major debate, namely the Mexican Revolution itself. Four phases in this historiography can be identified:  (1) contemporary and highly sectarian works written during the 1910–40 period, (2)  optimistic and empirically rigorous works written during the Mexican economic miracle years of 1940–60, (3)  revisionist works written generally between 1960 and 1990 questioning the results of the revolution, especially the inequalities of industrialization, and in some ways even rehabilitating the Porfiriato as the real breakthrough in modernity and (4)  post-1990 cultural currents influenced by postmodernism and empathetically stressing subjective revolutionary experiences, including the resistance of culture, ritual and local power networks to centralized power.96 Logically, the Cristero War proved hostage to these overarching currents. During the first 1926–40 phase the conflict was presented either as resistance to a regime bent on destroying the Church or a progressive campaign to thwart the Church’s pretensions to make itself the ultimate arbiter of the public sphere. Religious representations in many ways harped back to premodern myths and language. The religious language of the Cristeros was very much that of ‘Old Spain’, of Santiago and Cervantes. This Hispanic language chimed with the Jalisco highlands (Los Altos), whose population was mostly ethnically white and inward-looking religious practices resembled the Catholic highlands of Europe.97 Novelist Fernando Robles in 1932 published his La Vírgen de los Cristeros which depicted Cristeros as rediscovering their ‘old Spanish moral

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structure’ as defence against ‘Saxon conquest’.98 Twentieth-century Spanish traditionalists repaid the Cristeros this compliment. Carlist expert, Alfonso Bullón de Mendoza, praised Jean Meyer’s exaltation of the Cristeros’ spiritual motivations and cited Meyer’s work as inspiration for his own magnum opus on Spain’s First Carlist War.99 El Cruzado, a 1930s Mexican newspaper designed for workers, praised the counter-revolutionary Vendée and damned the French Revolution for having killed 1.6  million people.100 This harping back to a golden age was not unique to Mexico. The Canudo rising of Brazil in 1896 was inspired by the late medieval Portuguese legend of Sebastian. When the emperor of Brazil was overthrown in 1889 it was the dispossessed Catholic and Indian peasants, inspired by their religious devotions and liturgy, which rose up.101 Even so, in many ways, the sudden identification of provincial middle classes with the rites and ceremonies of Catholicism was a political statement rather than the effect of genuine re-evangelization (much like the case of Spain’s middle classes espousing Catholicism during the anticlerical Second Republic102). Romantic and nationalistic interpretations of the Cristiada have endured among veterans, writers and amateurs. Historian José Fuentes Mares, mirroring Meyer’s portrayal of the Cristiada rather than the revolution being the first popular revolt, wrote that ‘the Cristiada was the achievement of the Mexican people, not of the government or its soldiers. That war proved that the Mexican people exists, even if they are usually dormant or silent’.103 Amateur interest in the Cristeros, as witnessed in blogs and social media, also tends to celebrate the Catholic rebels as quintessentially Mexican. Most popular agency historians have been inspired by Catholicism. But some attempts have been made to paint the Cristeros as being in some way revolutionary. Enrique Gorostieta, commander-in-chief of Cristero forces in Jalisco from 1927 and of all Cristero forces from October 1928, claimed that his army was the ‘people’ abandoned by wealthy and intellectual elites.104 Popular and romantic representations of the Cristero War have partly fed off individual memories which have been used by oral historians. There is a generational difference regarding how the conflict was remembered. Historians are now entirely reliant upon written and second-hand oral history sources, given that the last known veteran of the 1926–9 war died aged 103 in 2016.105 Those born in the late nineteenth century tended to merge and



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confuse their memories of the Cristiada with that of the 1910–17 revolution (coloured by reminiscences of theft, rape and hunger). Memories of rural Zacatecas were shaped by the drought of 1915, hunger of 1916 and the flu pandemic of 1918.106 Those born in the early twentieth century, by contrast, tended to remember the 1910–17 revolution as a precursor to the Church– state conflict of the Cristiada.107 The current author was fortunate enough to conduct an interview in 2018 with a 102-year-old daughter of a Cristero war veteran whose memories of her father’s times were mixed up with such passing post-revolutionary upheaval as the de la Huerta revolt, the Cristiada and the Escobar rebellion. One of the best researchers in the field of oral history and memory, Lourdes Vázquez, drew important conclusions about how the passing of decades affected the memory of veterans and their evaluation of the conflict. Most of her interviewees of the 1980s and 1990s thought that the war happened because of Calles and his insistence on closing churches and banning Catholicism (in other words, a simplistic analysis). There were some social grievance explanations too (about land and poverty), but these were in a minority.108 In the Zacatecas–Jalisco borderlands several oral history accounts were published in the 1980s and 1990s by leading regional historians, especially Luis de la Torre and Xorge del Campo. The Mi Pueblo: pueblos del viento norte journal of the 1990s in many ways offered readers a last chance to read first-hand accounts from veterans and eyewitnesses.109 The Cristeros vanished from the historiographical radar during the ‘optimistic’ 1940–60 phase. Instead costumbrista and regionalized literary and dramatic representations, mostly sympathetic to the Cristeros, kept awareness of the conflict alive. Antonio Estrada’s Rescoldo, los últimos cristeros and Goyortúa Santos’s Pensativa stood out as literary gems which also approximated historical objectivity. In 1952 a literary account first used the term ‘Cristiada’, 20 years before Jean Meyer popularized this term.110 During the 1950s and 1960s the Catholic historian, Juan N.  Carlos, wrote not only pro-Cristero but also critical studies. But criticism was not welcome among veteran circles. Former Cristero General Aurelio Acevedo, like Carlos, came from the state of Zacatecas and during the 1950s began editing the Cristero veterans’ newspaper called David. Acevedo by 1958 had lost patience with Carlos’s criticism and refused to accept any more submissions from him, defending Cristero conduct with such barbed replies as: ‘robbing one cow for

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food is one thing, but stealing whole herds as the Federation did, quite another’ and ‘you insist on seeing the worst in the Cristeros, forgetting that they were men, not angels, and that there never was a more restrained revolution or armed movement in history’.111 Substantial academic studies of the Cristero War emerged in the 1960s as pessimistic anti-state writings joined the academic bloodstream. Local, regional and provincial studies showed that agrarian struggles and class conflict played second fiddle to the factional disputes of landowners and caciques.112 These pessimistic studies were boosted even more by the post-1990 arguments that Mexico’s revolutionary state depended upon regional caciques who in turn needed to maintain the loyalty of dependents in a transactional power relationship that was ‘vertical’ in nature rather than ‘horizontal’ in terms of class or ethnicity. Meyer’s regional analyses have since been taken further by Lourdes Vázquez, who has diversified the highland image of Jalisco’s Cristiada by focusing on lowland Cristeros and including the Cristeros’ hated enemies, the agraristas, as part of the dichotomy of conflict. More broadly, post-Cold War studies have embraced such themes as subjectivity, culture, religion, gender and everyday traditions (costumbre).113 The Cristeros, like their Carlist forebears in nineteenth-century Spain, have also been represented as being ‘objectively revolutionary’. Jim Tuck stressed how smallholding peasants in Los Altos of eastern Jalisco were both Catholic and also revolutionary in their attacks on Federal-protected haciendas.114 David Brading tried to link the Cristeros’ rejection of state power to the similar rejection expressed by the Zapatistas, the popular agrarian movement which dominated the state of Morelos.115 But the Zapatistas’ demand to destroy the hacienda system (symbolized by their cry of tierra y libertad) was at odds with the Cristeros, whose attitude towards the hacienda system was ambiguous at best. That said, ambiguity also shrouds the behaviour of the Zapatistas. Pace some radical intellectuals, Zapatismo in theory was not extremely revolutionary. Zapatismo in theory accepted a gradual rather than revolutionary redistribution of hacienda lands. Nor was Zapatismo anticlerical or ascetic in nature like most Latin Anarchist movements to which it has been compared. It was also backwards looking in its defence of the village against modern exploitation. As historian Alan Knight quipped,



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‘revolutions are what you make them’, and scholars should not dwell upon sterile ideological debates, especially as the excesses of war drove Zapatistas to some revolutionary violence, the ‘logic’ of which played out in the same way as the violence instigated 10  years later by the Cristeros. Thus Zapata’s revolution in Morelos was not exceptional, but typical of agrarian revolution in revolutionary Mexico.116 Both Zapatismo and the Cristiada were motivated in part by a sense of representing ‘deep Mexico’ – pre-Hispanic in the case of the former and pre-revolutionary in the case of the latter – which contrasted with official or ‘imagined’ Mexico of elites in the capital.117 Militarily, similarities pertained between the two rural insurgencies, as both were limited by a lack of artillery and ammunition.118 Only in the realm of representations does Zapatismo enjoy a clear and leading difference over the Cristiada. Whereas the Cristero War had an afterlife in Mexican ballads, regionalized folklore and right-wing politics, Emilio Zapata remains the most manipulated figure in Mexico’s post-revolutionary political history (given his ‘rebrandings’ by the 1968 student movement, 1994 Chiapas rebellion and millenarian visions of him as Quetzalcoátl).119

The Cristiada and historiography since the 1960s The most important study incorporating the techniques of modern social history came from Jean Meyer. Jean Meyer’s study was ground-breaking and held the field in large part because of the Mexican lack of respect for ‘regional’ history. Meyer’s focus was long overdue, given how historians hitherto had tended to use Mexico City as the prism for understanding wider Mexican politics. But as the British consul in Guadalajara confided at the start of the Cristiada, ‘In the capital of the republic, the waves of feeling are not so noticeable, because they are not permitted to become visible, nor is the capital ever a place to judge very surely of the real temper of the people.’120 Meyer depicted the ‘Cristiada’ as the real popular revolution of Mexico’s revolutionary era and cast the Cristeros as an amalgam of traditionalist–religious and futuristic (democratic, egalitarian) freedom fighters. In other words, Meyer depicted an epic, dualist view of the struggle, pitting the Catholic ‘people’

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against a ‘colonial’ revolutionary dictatorship. He was influenced by the 1968 intellectual revolt and possibly by liberation theology, which in his case changed the 1920s traditionalist Catholic peasantry into an objectively radical force for agrarian democracy and autonomy from the Church hierarchy.121 His case was boosted by the peculiar absence of leadership for the revolt, as the three elements which might have been expected to champion the Cristero cause were either opposed or equivocal. The Church hierarchy was divided and vacillating, most parish priests fled to government-controlled cities and wealthy Catholics in the cities, and to a lesser extent in the war-torn countryside, tended to side with the government. Even the leadership which did emerge, the LNDLR, concentrated on economic boycotts in 1926 and formally championed military force only from the start of 1927, five months after the first Cristero risings had taken place. As Marxism declined as a major interpretative framework, fresher interpretations entered the historiography. Ramón Jrade argued that religion, neither in Meyer’s positive sense nor in the Mexican revolutionary-Marxist sense, really explained the Cristero insurrection. Rather, the decision for local groups and communities to rebel, or not to rebel, was the product of class divisions and power struggles emerging out of the revolution.122 Jrade’s work heralded a shift away from viewing the Cristero War as the finale to a century of conflict between a traditional, Catholic society against a modernizing liberal state. As Guy Thomson argued in respect of the nineteenth century, and Matthew Butler and Nathaniel Morris in respect of the post-revolutionary era, local communities were often willing to embrace state power if in doing so this promised to advance or protect long-standing local interests. As Butler observed, ‘the ray of liberal enlightenment passed through the looking glass of peasant perspectives instead of merely bouncing off it’.123 In particular, Matthew Butler has demonstrated how popular Catholicism channelled diverse forms of protest and non-violent militancy, very different from the dualist interpretation offered by Jean Meyer.124 What remains, however, for the centre-west region is the impression given by rural eyewitnesses that unlike the campaigns of Villa and Carranza during the ‘armed phase’ of the Mexican Revolution which were merely ‘fleeting’, the Cristero revolution was ‘lasting’.125



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Locating the Cristiada in military history Historians have tended to view the Cristero War through the prism of religion and, to a lesser extent, politics, society and economics. Yet the Cristiada also offers an obvious case study of the oldest form of warfare waged by a side which cannot directly confront the forces of its enemies: guerrilla warfare. History shows how regular forces underprepare to fight irregulars, stigmatize them as bandits and terrorists, and overestimate their ability to defeat such ‘unworthy’ opponents. Only after applying inappropriate tactics, and usually inflicting collateral or collective casualties on civilians, do some armies in some theatres manage to quell insurgencies to a nuisance level, and even then usually only after much blood and treasure has been shed. Yet despite these modern guerrilla struggles, there was a repeated refusal of major armies to recognize guerrilla warfare as ‘real’ war. Instead only conventional and intensive warfare was seen as ‘worthy’ of study and doctrine. As one US general remarked in a 1970 interview on the intractable situation in Vietnam, ‘I’ll be damned if I permit the US army, its institutions, its doctrine and its traditions, to be destroyed just to win this lousy war.’126 Such intransigence is remarkable considering that the United States by then possessed a century of counter-insurgency experience. US officer academies today will generally not engage with military history before the Second World War, because US military doctrine is so wedded to the centrality of technology, and the emphasis in other world academies tends to point in the same direction.127 Thus insurgencies before the Second World War do not attract much attention from technical experts. But nor do they attract much attention from academic historians. There remains a suspicion among many academics that writing about war is to glorify it, even though ‘new military history’ approaches have grown in universities since the 1950s, banishing the unreflective and nationalistic campaign literature of yore.128 Historical methods notably improved during the second half of the twentieth century. Even so, the era of anti-colonial and revolutionary warfare swayed academics once more in a direction removed from pre-1945. Historians drawn to the study of Maoism, African independence and Che Guevara’s revolutionary focalism tended either to identify with those left-wing movements or to accept the Marxian premise of class conflict in their analysis. Insurgencies before

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1945 retained less interest for them, as most – with obvious exceptions like Zapatismo – looked more like counter-revolutions than revolutions. The vast majority of left-wing thinkers who inspired post-1945 revolutionary struggles were unimpressed with the potential of guerrilla warfare during the time they were writing: neither Engels, nor Marx, nor Lenin, nor even Trotsky saw great political potential in guerrilla warfare.129 Even though some historians, especially Jean Meyer, have offered extensive military analyses, many of the ‘new military history’ techniques developed in other civil wars – experiences of morale, occupation, logistics, civil–military relations – remain absent from the Cristiada. This book fills this gap, in part using theories drawn from political science  – such as ‘logical violence’  – to explain the motives behind actions in asymmetrical conflict environments. Several historians have mentioned how the asymmetrical ‘hit-and-run’ nature of the Cristero insurgency resembled the famous chouannerie in the 1790s Vendée.130 The alliance of petty nobility allying with peasants, labourers and artisans against the dechristianization edicts of Paris obviously suggested a parallel, as did the atrocities which anticipated and exceeded even the worst episodes of the Cristiada. Militarily, the Vendée compares with the Cristiada in its guerrilla dimension and in the fact that the intimate nature of irregular warfare witnessed the corruption of government troops selling arms to the very insurgents they were fighting.131 Mexican archives from the time regularly show pleas from Federal authorities for stricter gun control.132 Yet comparisons with other counter-revolutionary wars are complicated by two factors. Whereas the Vendée revolt was mainly a protest against Paris’s forced conscription, the Cristero revolt was not motivated by hostility to conscription (which did not formally exist in Mexico until 1939)  or systematic levies on the traditional Mexican model. The Cristiada also sits uneasily within the different models identified by experts on asymmetrical warfare. Meyer’s attribution to both religious and anti-colonial motives of the Cristeros would span two historical guerrilla warfare models identified by Walter Laqueur. The Cristeros were motivated by Laqueur’s first model of religion, akin to several of the insurgencies during the French and Napoleonic Wars, Spain’s Carlist Wars or Brazil’s Canudo revolt of the 1890s. Meyer implies that the Cristeros also conformed to Laqueur’s second model of liberationist anti-colonialism, akin to Latin America during 1810–24, Cuban



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independence revolts in the 1868–78 and 1895–8 periods, and Mexico’s own Reform Wars of 1857–67.133 Other factors place the Cristeros on more familiar ground, especially the nature of ‘voluntary’ recruitment into Cristero forces. The belief repeated by many historians was that Cristero recruitment was ‘voluntary’,134 but as with other asymmetrical wars, ‘voluntary’ did not really exist. The realities of abduction, economic devastation and ‘moral’ pressure, not least the imposition of penalty payments and reprisals for volunteers seeking to return to civilian life, all betrayed the coercion behind choices to fight or flee, even when these were cloaked by propaganda. Certainly the LNDLR, the political leadership of the Cristero revolt, stressed the voluntary and temporary nature of Cristero soldiers who ‘leave their homes, families and interests to offer their lives for the cause of God and the Church’.135 Cristero propaganda stressed the religious virtue of its soldiers, ironically reversing the experience of the French revolutionary ‘army of virtue’ repressing the Vendée, when the revolutionary rather than reactionary campaign identified itself as virtuous, in Montesquieu’s understanding of the term.136 Both Cristero propaganda and heartfelt Cristero memoirs presented the insurgents as soldiers of Christ, or at least decent men, knowing full well that government propaganda damned them as brigands and fanatics. In this regard the Federation’s attitude was to be expected:  regular armies have always seen themselves as honourable and lawful and irregular forces as outlaws who undermine fairness and reciprocity in warfare.137

Preparing for war The Cristero War was presaged by a number of anticlerical and clerical tensions mounting in the months and years before, a famous example being the state of Tabasco the year before, whose governor effectively ended Catholic worship by ordering that only priests who were married and over 40 could minister.138 But real power lay at the centre, and the person of Elías Plutarco Calles is essential for understanding the conflict. From a colourful background distinguished by a succession of shady business failures and an extreme anticlericalism, as president in 1926 Calles issued an order to state governors that they should strictly enforce the anticlerical decrees of the 1917

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Constitution and ‘stop the bitching’.139 Enrique Krauze argued that Calles and Church were irreconcilable, for the former viewed the latter as illegitimate in its very origins.140 The Soviet historian Anatol Shulgovski, like all good Cold War Marxists, judged Calles’s extreme anticlericalism to have been a form of ‘cheap social reform’ in the absence of social and anti-imperialist transformation for Mexico’s working classes.141 The British Consul, reporting early in 1927 from beleaguered Guadalajara, saw foreign policy calculations in Calles’s hard anticlerical line: ‘My theory is that Calles deliberately attacked the Church in order to split opinion in the United States, where Knights of Columbus would be bitterly opposed by Ku Klux Klan, the Masonic lodges and the vast majority of Protestant people.’142 What does seem clear is that Calles’s hard line in 1926 was an act of free will divorced from reality. Not only did his friend and former president, Álvaro Obregón, advise him to leave the religious question alone, but Calles’s anticlericalism came at the worst possible time considering the religious revival gripping the centre-west in the wake of the ravages of the revolution. The countdown to war began with the ‘Calles Law’ of June 1926 which demanded that the Mexican Church submit to state power in all matters, including, crucially, matters of internal ecclesiastical organization and discipline. Rather than submit to this law, the Church responded with a nationwide boycott of all acts of public worship, to be indefinite starting on the eve before this law was due to come into effect (31 July 1926). Hence the Church exercised the moral pressure of peaceful non-cooperation with the state. But given the heightened political tensions and the recent legacy of civil war, it would not take long for the stand-off between Church and state to become violent. In particular, the Church’s response to the Calles Law undermined the religious ritual of marriage by withdrawing it from the public realm. As Pope Pius XI’s encyclical on marriage, reiterated in 1930, made clear, since the sacrament of marriage was of divine origin, it could not be subject to human laws. Secular innovations like divorce, civil weddings and burials were so many attacks upon the sacred.143 Given this tension, it is unsurprising that it was the conservative state of Zacatecas which was the scene of the first hostilities. Along with Jalisco it had witnessed agitation in the months before the actual rising by outraged Catholics calling themselves delahuertistas, a failed army revolt against



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Obregón’s anti-militarist measures which ended up radicalizing progovernment and anticlerical forces and easing the election to the presidency in 1924 of Plutarco Calles.144 In Jalisco delahuertismo enjoyed wide social support: during a meeting of Catholic landowners months before the rising, one enthusiast fantasized about an army of three hundred thousand from Jalisco, a figure based on more than thirty thousand haciendas and ranches in the state offering an average of ten labourers each under arms.145 But the events of Chalchihuites (see p. 36) made Zacatecas the first Cristero state. As Jean Meyer noted, the state of Zacatecas was also exemplary from a cognitive point of view, as it happened to benefit from a wealth of archival material thanks to the local man Aurelio Acevedo, who became one the Cristeros’ leading strongmen and from April 1928 acting Cristero governor of Zacatecas (and from 1933 chief strategist of the ‘second’ Cristero revolt).146 The Cristero zones of Zacatecas (and Alto Jalisco) also attracted militant priests migrating from less secure areas of Cristero control (such as Durango), giving Zacatecas a morale boost in terms of popular Catholic militancy.147 Cristero rebels who found their cause hopeless in other states, such as Isidrio Pérez Vázquez’s failed attempt to seize Parras in southern Coahuila early in 1927, fled into Zacatecas as for refuge.148

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The suspension of Catholic worship on 31 July, combined with inchoate risings starting in Zacatecas, makes August 1926 the start of the Cristero War. But for the last months of 1926 authorities in Mexico City never recognized the Catholic rebellions in the centre-west as a ‘civil war’. President Calles on 21 August held a secret meeting with leading clerics, but neither side changed their positions on the religious question.1 War Minister Amaro was more concerned with crushing the Yaqui Uprising of 1926–7, in what would prove to be the last armed rising by that indigenous group. President Calles’s decision to prioritize a campaign against the northern Yaqui arose for three reasons. First, his desire to enforce state jurisdiction over even the remotest parts of the republic was a deliberate shift from the neocolonial practice of successive revolutionary regimes to pay the Yaqui tribes a subsidy in reward for ‘good behaviour’. Second, news reached him that the Yaqui, too, were protesting how anticlerical legislation was impeding their annual pilgrimage to a Catholic shrine. Third, enraged Yaqui militants on 12 September 1926 held a passenger train hostage for 16 hours. The train happened to be carrying the ex-president, Álvaro Obregón, and even though the incident was resolved peacefully, President Calles felt that he had enough reason to instruct his war minister to divert troops away from what still appeared to be glorified bandit-hunting in the centre-west and to concentrate them in Sonora. Even though the rebellious Yaqui tribes were definitively beaten in the autumn of 1926, heavy-handed Federal policing stretched well into 1927, providing a breathing space for the Cristero risings in the centre-west. Federal troops remained concentrated in the north-west over the winter as the government ‘reconcentrated’ Yaqui populations, causing immense suffering, in order to cut off diehard militants

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from their supplies. At the same time, President Calles was still pursuing the left-leaning obregionista policy of reducing the size of the Federal Army and could not concentrate against two fronts simultaneously. By the time that Federal troops began to return to garrison the centre-west early in 1927, Cristeros had already extended their control over the rural Zacatecas–Jalisco borderlands.2

The start of hostilities The Yaqui rebellion obscured the violence in Chalchihuites (Zacatecas) in August which triggered war. Almost half-a-dozen Catholics, including a priest, were either massacred in cold blood by Federal troops or caught in the crossfire caused by Pedro Quintanar’s rescue attempt. This caused the influential Valparaíso rancher, Pedro Quintanar, to rise for the Cristiada. Quintanar had local military knowledge by having led local Carrancista forces during and immediately after the revolution and by having led the local Defensa thereafter. The Defensas were generally organized into groups ranging in size from squads to platoons, averaging between five and thirty members, depending on the size of the community and the power of the cacique (power broker).3 Alan Knight categorized caciques into five ‘tiers’: national (such as General Calles), ‘state’ (such as General Ortiz), ‘regional’ (traditional caciques known for their longevity), ‘municipal’ (men powered by their municipality or town) and ‘mini-caciques’ (village and neighbourhood leaders).4 Most Defensa commanders came from the last three categories, especially the last two. Pedro Quintanar was a rancher who despite his rural power base might be considered ‘municipal’ in his influence. Like most insurgent leaders of 1926, Quintanar was tied to his particular region and commanded local respect and intelligence networks. Quintanar was leader of the early 1920s Defensa, later delahuertista, and rose in the 1926 Cristero rebellion. Defensas therefore were not uniformly pro-government, even those celebrating their revolution stripes. There was not only defection to the Cristeros but also infra-Defensa rivalry between communities (usually about land), and Defensa resentment of agraristas who were viewed as being mercenary and without revolutionary honour.



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The Quintanar example moderates Jean Meyer’s view that former villistas were most likely to turn later into Cristeros. When a Cristero recruitment team reached Villa Guerrero in northern Jalisco in November 1926, they sought out veteran villistas and carrancistas in equal measure in order to bolster the inchoate risings in this region. The team’s overriding consideration was military experience rather than previous political affiliation.5 Indeed, early insurgents tended to be characterized by inflated beliefs in their military prowess and by their flexible politics. Valentín Ávila (1898–1926) was a local rancher notorious as a macho wedding crasher who at first sight appeared to conform to Meyer’s interpretation. Villistas had killed his parents, and Ávila was on good terms with local agraristas. But Ávila came out as a Cristero by joining Quintanar’s revolt and fought against the first failed Federal assault on Huejuquilla. Ávila later left the town to round up cattle and had the bad luck of running into Ortiz’s 600-strong column tasked with avenging his earlier defeat. After convincing the column that he sought to join the government side, Ávila re-entered Huejuquilla as a turncoat, and his real loyalty was betrayed to Ortiz by an anti-Cristero housewife on whom he was billeted. Ávila was arrested and escorted out of the town and even then appeared to suffer delusions when his escort gave him the chance to escape during a water break, only for Ávila to return to the column all the same. Ávila was hanged early in September at the hacienda of El Refugio (Zacatecas), and his grave thereafter became a local centre of prayer and pilgrimage for women honouring Valentín, the ‘Cristero’ martyr.6 Thus, identity is difficult to pin down given the pendulum swings of armies and opportunities, something attested by the numerous examples of former carrancistas who became Cristeros. As for the Defensas spawned by the revolution, in many instances these switched allegiance to the Cristeros in 1926. Longer-term local resentment at Federal attitudes, for example, of generals who during the armed phase of the revolution had often let bandits maraud as a way of forcing compliance from weak state regimes, also probably played some role in raising the appeal of the Cristeros. In southern Durango indigenous local power networks sided with the Cristeros and so did the Defensas. Huichol communities inhabiting conflict zones in the centre-west initially remained aloof from the civil war because they believed that neither side seemed able or willing to protect their ancestral lands that were being eroded by the march of

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the state and capitalism. Eventually Juan Bautista, Huichol cacique, produced a force for the Cristero side.7 In Huejuquilla especially (but also in a few less important locations in Durango and Jalisco), the Defensas’ defection to the Cristeros at the outset guaranteed Cristero political control. Local power brokers (caciques) like Quintanar had considerable power in their communities, but they should not be considered as satraps. Federal authorities tended to exaggerate the power held by caciques over their communities, especially in serrano and Indian contexts. In fact caciques maintained their power by accommodating popular local anxieties, and villagers in return made their support conditional.8 The cradle of the Cristero rising was in many ways conditioned by local anxieties forcing the hand of the authorities. A local historian noted how Huejuquilla, San Juan Capistrano and Valparaíso were twin towns, so that whatever fate befell one place was immediately known in the other.9 Thus, local elites, Defensa commanders and ranchers, made rapid decisions to pick a side without deferring to state authorities or due process. The vía de hecho, a phrase coined in nineteenthcentury Mexico, was a custom operated by local leaders who ignored legality and resolved disputes on their own, if need be with violence. Sometimes the vía de hecho was a parasitical tool of power, but often it was used in order to further the interests of villagers.10

Cristero victories Pedro Quintanar joined Aurelio Acevedo, Valparaíso leader of the ACJM (Catholic youth organization that would become affiliated to the Cristeros11), and stormed Huejuquilla on 29 August. Acevedo’s twenty men were strengthened by the arrival about the same time of Quintanar’s thirty men and a further twenty sent from the Peñitas (Zacatecas). All were poorly armed scratch forces, fondly remembered by a Cristero captain as ‘poor country folk who had risen in arms in defence of their religion’, but they terrified the municipal authorities into flight. Huejuquilla’s mayor, who had tried to flee across the river, was caught and stoned to death in the town square.12 The Cristeros held the town against initial counterattacks launched by Federal troops and their proxies, pro-government members of the local Defensas. Many of the latter



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came from the rival and richer town of Mezquitic whose initial support for the Cristeros had been turned by rebel exactions and military failures. But the pressure became overwhelming and after initial defensive victories on the first day of occupation the Cristeros were flushed out of Huejuquilla. Quintanar accepted an amnesty and returned to his ranch and would not rise again until the LNDLR’s proclamation in the new year.13 But this pacification did not last long, as insurgents took to the hills once more and later reoccupied the town, making it the centre of the Zacatecas and Alto Jalisco Cristero heartland. Huejuquilla remained in government hands for only two weeks out of the entire 1926–9 war.14 Yet the ‘three fingers’ of Jalisco which Huejuquilla dominated were not the sole centres of insurrection. During August there were six risings and several more riots besides, and during September–October another twenty-five Cristero risings took place, mostly in the centre-west. By the end of 1926 the centre-west had become a civil war zone, with 20 of Jalisco’s 118 municipalities in open rebellion. The crowning local victory for the Cristeros came at the end of December when their outnumbered forces manoeuvred brilliantly to defeat General Arenas’s 59th regiment near Colotlán. The coup de grâce came when Cristero marksmen crawled unseen through undergrowth in order to fire at the horses of the Federal mounted infantry whose positions were betrayed by the movement of vegetation.15 Durango also witnessed small Cristero risings. The ‘Indian’16 village of Santiago Bayacora, 25 kilometres from Durango city, was the ‘cradle of the Cristero rebellion in Durango state’ according to Jean Meyer and had been generally under Cristero control since 31 July 1926.17 On 29 September 1926 Trinidad Mora led a force of local ranchers to seize control of the village, after which it repulsed a hastily organized Federal attack.18 The Santiago Bayacora rebels claimed to be avenging the killing by Federal troops of several priests, but the British Consul at Durango thought that the real motivation was the authorities’ heavy-handed application of a forestry law: Santiago Baiacora’s (sic.) inhabitants for many years have eked out their life by supplying Durango with wood and charcoal. I  do not know if the practice is universal but in this State the bosque (forest) inspectors have been grafting and charging all and more than the traffic would bear for the permits which have to be taken out in order to cut even on your own

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property. The woodcutters are refusing to pay and continuing cutting on communal lands. A small force of about thirty men was sent out to stop them and walked into an ambush and very few got back. Next General Paez went out with about 150 men and repeated the same tactics. He was wounded and lost about half his force. Then General Leon went out with 400 men. This force was too strong for the woodmen who retired to Mezquital leaving their village. The troops sacked the village and destroyed it but I cannot learn that any casualties to speak of were suffered by the revoltosos. Mezquital became headquarters for the disaffected who partly by conscription and partly by persuasion now number about 600 men all apparently well armed. To break up this force General Leon and General Paez went out with about 350 infantry and 150 cavalry. On the 5th they divided their forces in order to attack from two sides. The infantry walked into the usual trap (the country is very broken) and were practically annihilated. General Paez was killed and Leon got back to Durango with 35 men, having lost all their rifles, machine-guns, etc.19

Leon’s defeat unleashed a panic in the poorly defended state capital, and the consul thought that the rebels could have taken Durango and sacked it, ‘as they did twelve years ago’. But the government rushed five hundred troops to Durango from Torreón, and the state capital was saved.20 It would not be until 27 June 1929, days after the Arreglos were agreed, that Santiago Bayacora would be retaken by the Federation. The 61st regiment of Captain Ramón Méndez Jímenez occupied the place after a brief firefight in which a few diehard Cristeros fled to the hills.21 The forested plateau of Durango’s Sierra Madre supported conflict elsewhere in the closing months of 1926, largely characterized by a standoff caused by static government defences and mobile Cristero forces. The mountain terrain favoured the insurgents, who often moved around with their whole families, pinning down government garrisons and attacking those who dared leave to expose themselves to ambush. In November 1926 the army garrison at El Salto, some 180 kilometres west of Vicente Guerrero, had been instructed by the state governor to stay put and to leave in pursuit of Cristeros only if directly commanded to do so by the army command.22 In Durango, Cristero insurgent bands led by Longino Rodríguez, Fidel Flores, Guadalupe



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Galarzo and Nicolás Fernández exploited the terrain and remoteness of mountain settlements in order to pillage and escape ahead of government pursuit.23 High peaks, especially those at strategic locations, were occupied by a few armed men and munitions, thereby becoming mountain forts known as ‘fortines’. In symmetrical warfare forts had been rendered increasingly obsolescent ever since the advent of mass armies in the Napoleonic Wars and artillery innovations in the late nineteenth century. But smaller forts remained relevant in people’s wars to the extent that insurgents could plan to use forts for supplies.24 The fortín was a feature of Latin American warfare in inaccessible regions, as the fighting of the 1932–5 Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay demonstrates,25 and in Mexico’s Sierra Madre fortines made for impregnable defensive positions. Cristeros proved Clausewitz’s lesson that irregular warfare succeeded most in ‘rough, inaccessible, mountainous, forests and marshes’.26 Dámaso Barraza, a Tepehuano leader who had declared for the Cristeros out of fear for his grazing lands, understood better than most how to use his native topography for defensive advantage. But he was killed on 17 January 1927 by General Anacleto López’s forces at Capulín after illadvisedly leading a charge out of a ‘fortín’ into the plains below.27 Cristero movements achieved greater successes elsewhere. Particular violent raids on 1 and 2 December 1926 saw Nicolás Fernández attack a train in Tepehuanes and burn down the settlement of Puente Norte.28 Later telegrams revealed how the Federal Army was powerless to stop the escape of Nicolás Fernández’s band northwards Chihuahua, which raided and ransomed isolated settlements as it went.29 But the death of Barraza fragmented the different Cristero units operating in southern Durango, and during early 1927 they did not present much of a critical threat to the Federation in this region.30

Organizing the revolt Thus the last five months of 1926 had witnessed sporadic rebellions and uprisings like the incidents witnessed at Chalchihuites, Huejuquilla and Colotlán. During these early engagements Cristero militants exhausted scarce ammunition through poor fire control and worse discipline. They were also badly armed:  one teenage volunteer recalled being issued with a

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nineteenth-century bolt-action rifle that was as long as his body. Thus only a few localities like Huejuquilla (see below) were held by the insurgents, and risings throughout the second half of 1926 tended to remain localized. They were also poorly coordinated on a regional level, the only exception being the rising in Guanajuato in October of the recently retired General Rodolfo Gallegos who led a force of several hundred Cristeros from Celaya into the Sierra Gorda.31 The nationwide campaign remained peaceful as the LNDLR concentrated on the Catholic boycott, which was escalated to a nationwide level from 31 October and which in itself fuelled the general atmosphere of civil disobedience. But on 10 December 1926 the League issued its ‘Manifesto to the Nation’, calling for a mass insurrection to begin on 1 January 1927. During the first week of the new year there were armed Cristero risings throughout the centre-west. Mezquital (southern Durango) witnessed a concentrated mobilization by Cristero leaders, Trinidad Mora, Dámaso Barraza and Valente Acevedo, and rural areas of Los Altos, southern Zacatecas and even momentarily northern Zacatecas came out in force for the rebellion.32 The LNDLR had long found its political voice, demanding the abolition of the socialist and anticlerical legislation in the Constitutions of 1917 and 1857, respectively. But the LNDLR proved largely ineffective in military leadership. Its Directing Committee nominated a ‘special committee’ concerned with military affairs, which was just one of five subunits of the League. The LNDLR membership was mostly urban and middle class, far removed from the ranchers and labourers who were the vast majority of the Cristero militants in the centre-west. The League’s confused command structure, and rumours that it was enriching itself on scare war funds, poisoned Cristero attitudes towards its political leadership by the end of the war. The League proved especially ineffectual in Zacatecas, where by the end of 1927 it had collapsed, impeding fundraising and propaganda efforts considerably.33 The LNDLR was not the only urban, well-to-do organization at odds with the militants. The secretive ‘U’ organization was even more socially exclusive. As left-wing militants attacked churches in Guadalajara during autumn 1926, the Cristero Carlos Blanco urged a clandestine meeting of the ‘U’ to defend them by funding fifty men and five trucks. But the ‘U’ refused, citing the estimated 250 pesos daily cost for this operation as ‘exorbitant’.34



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A military command structure was organized, to be headed by the ACJM leader René Capistrán Garza, even though this man possessed no military experience and even though the League had only achieved vague and tacit support from the Mexican episcopacy about the right of Catholics to rebel.35 Even so, the formal alliance of the LNDLR and insurgents from the start of 1927 gave the civil war a more formalized aspect which attracted international attention, which by then was identifying the violence as the work of no mere ‘bandits’ or ‘revolutionaries’ (who were often confused with agraristas), but of religiously motivated insurgents. Foreign diplomatic and press reports often revealed intelligence which might not be obtained from Mexican sources owing to censorship. Conflict photojournalism was not developed until the Spanish Civil and Second World Wars, and the ‘democratized’ reports of suffering which this medium offered36 was mostly absent from the remote fighting zones of the Cristero War, except in an often grim propagandistic form. Thus, the foreign, especially US, press often rivalled Mexican reports in their accuracy. The Calles regime imposed strict censorship on 21 April 1927, leading the New York Herald Tribune to report that ‘there is a complete ban on telegrams, whether press or private on religious troubles, revolution, presidential campaign, state legislative differences … . Only the most onesided and inaccurate reports are permitted to go out by wire’.37 Nonetheless, by spring 1927 the foreign press became as aware as the Mexican authorities of the scale of the rebellion. Thus the Cristero revolt was reported as making slow but sure progress, supported by arms smuggled across the US frontier, in defiance of the US law of 1924 which reserved arms exports south of the border exclusively to the Mexican government, or smuggled by coast, and it was reported that the Federal Army’s loyalty would determine the duration of the revolt. But the Cristeros themselves thought that the duration depended on munitions. The Cristeros always suffered from a deficiency in arms. Many militants relied at least in the early stages of the war on their own sidearms, Mauser rifles and older varieties from the time of the revolution and before. Over time, the Cristeros augmented their arms with those captured from the enemy. But the vast minority of arms remained small in nature: rifles, pistols and lassoes. As Cristero territorial control increased in the centre-west they fashioned their own explosives, using dynamite from mining areas near their control and making makeshift grenades, and even small cannons and

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mortars, essential for reducing fortified church-steeples which often remained the last redoubts of Defensa resistance in villages in the centre-west. The meagre arms supply was augmented throughout the war from illicit smuggling from as far afield as the United States and via the corruption of Federal and Defensa officers.38 Even as the Cristeros established their grip around Huejuquilla, in other areas of the centre-west they were generally unable at the turn of 1927 to mount more than raids and riots. In the eastern and north-eastern parts of Zacatecas state, their cause seemed hopeless. Some 150 miners in the northeastern Zacatecas mining town of Concepción del Oro answered the LNDLR call for a New Year’s Day insurrection. They liberated prisoners from jail, stole dynamite from the Mazapil mining company and ransomed local businesses. But the Federation rushed troops from Saltillo (Coahuila) and proclaimed martial law in the town.39 By spring 1927 General Amaro, the energetic war minister, had identified Jalisco as the greatest threat and was concentrating reinforcements in this state, including seasoned aircraft, artillery and Yaqui warriors fresh from suppressing the last major revolt of their ‘bronco’ brethren in Sonora in 1926.40 But the focus on Jalisco had to be compensated elsewhere. Neighbouring Aguascalientes had been in revolt since November 1926 and in February 1927 the former Zapatista, General Genovevo de la O, was sent to command the 27th military zone covering Mexico’s second smallest state. After early successes repelling Cristero José Velasco’s attacks with the help of cavalry and aircraft, de la O lost his cavalry which redeployed to Mexico City at the orders of a Federal government concerned at the insubordination of General Francisco Serrano and lost his air support which switched operations westwards to Jalisco.41

The consolidation of the revolt Jalisco, especially Los Altos, became the centre of insurgency in the wake of a key Cristero victory in March. Victoriano Ramírez’s (known as ‘El Catorce’) won a Cristero defensive victory at San Julián on 15 March 1927. The first great urban defensive victory for the rebels since Huejuquilla came as a shock for the government. General Rodríguez’s 78th regiment had been detached



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from the presidential guard and entrusted to seize the gateway to the southern Altos, which meant that the defeat was all the more humiliating. Even though Rodríguez’s troops pushed El Catorce’s men back into the centre of the town over the course of the day, causing defeatist panic, the defenders were rescued by General Hernández’s force which rushed from San Diego de Alejandria, turning the presidential guard’s flank and defeating it over the course of two hours. A  young woman of San Julián, Josefina Arellano, recalled how Cristero panic turned to triumph that afternoon:  ‘we heard the terrifying shouts of “Long live the Supreme Government!” Two hours of sacking and two hours with the women! … The panicked Catholics shouted that they were losing, and several quit their posts to hide in their homes. But then General Hernández’s force approached and all cries were of Viva Cristo Rey and the Virgin of Guadalupe!’.42 Most of the 78th regiment was destroyed, and General Rodríguez fled disguised as a woman. Captured and wounded Federal soldiers begged for their lives, but as they were considered enemies of Christ and Church, their pleas were hopeless. All were shot, including some eighteen wounded and their medic who were captured at a makeshift hospital the besiegers had abandoned on the outskirts, increasing the government fatalities to eighty-four. The Federation returned to impose upon the inhabitants of San Julián a particularly vengeful reconcentration order, a term soon to become ominous throughout Mexico and the wider world. But El Catorce’s victory handed the Cristeros enough local initiative to perform raiding activities over the summer of 1927 and thereby keep the rebellion alive amidst redoubled Federal efforts. On 24 August 1927 El Catorce scored his greatest victory since San Julián. In a raid against Tolotlán, Zapotlanejo (Jalisco), on 24 August 1927, El Catorce’s troops drove out the town’s small Federal garrison and killed some two hundred agraristas who had formed the main defensive force.43 The Federation faced problems far from the Cristero battlefields. Whereas Jalisco would continue to refuse to yield to redoubled government counterinsurgency, there was some comfort for Mexico City in the failure of the army plotters. General Serrano’s plot to seize Mexico City backfired, and with it any hope of rival generals blocking Obregón’s return to the presidency after Congress had amended the Constitution allowing the ‘re-election’ of nonconsecutive presidential candidates. Serrano was executed on 3 October 1927, and his accomplices in Veracruz met the same fate a month later. The rebel 16th

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battalion at Torreón (Coahuila) was massacred at the orders of overzealous officers commanding loyal units nearby.44 Unlike the De la Huerta rebellion of 1923, the Serrano-Gómez revolt of 1927 failed to attract popular following from junior ranks, which was testament to the greater cohesion of the Federal Army under War Minister Amaro’s tenure. But the weakening of de la O’s forces (as well as others in the centre-west) gave the initiative to the Cristeros, in a manner which anticipated the more serious rebellion of General Escobar in 1929. The diversion of Federal troops enabled Huejuquilla to consider rural Aguascalientes as part of its ‘liberated zone’. Most importantly, the Federal Army found that it could not concentrate forces against the Cristero centrewest for any length of time during 1927. Even though the Yaqui tribes were beaten, ongoing counter-insurgency and reconcentration efforts held up a large part of the army in Sonora until the summer. Even when War Minister Amaro was free to deploy his troops to the centre-west, the Serrano-Gómez crisis sent the troops away again, this time to Veracruz and the capital. During this time, General Enrique Gorostieta, who was appointed to command a key sector of Cristero forces in July 1927, enjoyed a breathing space in which to strengthen the Cristero military organization. The south, west and north-west of Zacatecas state over the course of 1927 likewise fell under Huejuquilla’s control. During January and February 1927 the revolt grew in Zacatecas state, with Fresnillo being sacked in April 1927, and raided two months later by a platoon-sized force targeting the funds of the mining companies.45 But frontal attacks on larger population centres were rare. Zacatecas city was too big and well garrisoned, whereas even smaller Fresnillo offered little cover to approaching Cristero forces because it was surrounded by hills and spoil tips that lacked vegetation.46 By April the foreign press was reporting Federal troop concentrations in Jalisco, including four thousand cavalry, and the appointment of a staunch callista as zone commander.47 On 1 May 1927 the Quintanar Brigade deployed two hundred men near Huejuquilla to repulse an attack of nine hundred, suffering the same losses (and therefore proportionately greater) as the Federal side.48 Government resolve was stiffening, and there would be no more easy victories for the Cristeros. Reinvigorated government activity, including the onset of the reconcentration policy, ended the period Aurelio Acevedo referred to as the ‘peace of Calles’, the months between autumn 1926 and spring 1927. During



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this period the Cristeros had extended their control over the Jalisco–Zacatecas border municipalities of Huejuquilla, Mezquitic, Chalchihuites and large areas surrounding Valparaíso and Fresnillo, pinning Federal and Defensa garrisons back into the actual urban areas of Jerez, Fresnillo and Valparaíso.49 The US press speculated that the insurgent zone would be boosted by defections from the Federal Army to the Cristeros, bolstering the hitherto patchy leadership offered by the hard-line Archbishop of Guadalajara, Francisco Orozco y Jiménez, and the LNDLR.50 At the end of 1927 the operational bulletin of Pedro Quintanar’s ‘Libres of Huejuquilla’ reported that their numbers had grown from about fifty in April to five hundred in December and that this unit had been engaged in ten major confrontations with enemy forces in Zacatecas, Jalisco and Durango, with nineteen minor clashes besides. Quintanar’s unit had sustained forty-seven fatalities, forty-five wounded and fifteen captured by the enemy. In return, the Libres claimed to have inflicted some 468 losses on Federal troops and agraristas.51 By the end of 1927 there were some twentyfive thousand armed and organized Cristeros and over seven thousand more isolated Cristero insurgents across Mexico, besides. The insurgents were concentrated in Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit and part of Zacatecas.52 By March 1928 the LNDLR estimated some fifty thousand armed Cristeros across Mexico, one-third in Jalisco, and also estimated a favourable loss rate of seven thousand Cristero losses compared to twenty thousand suffered by the government.53 Mobile Cristeros could rustle cattle, ransom and rob municipal treasuries. When local authorities in front-line Chalchihuites (Zacatecas) in April 1927 pleaded their ‘rather difficult’ economic situation in refusing to contribute the princely sum of ten pesos for a state congress, their penury reflected the financial devastation of irregular warfare.54 The government grip on settlements became all the more tenuous. A US diplomatic source noted how ‘rebel groups pass so frequently from one to the other state that it is very difficult to determine whether they are operating in one state or the other’.55 The demoralizing effect produced by Cristeros raiding apparently at will upon multiple lines of advance conformed to a feature of colonial warfare, explained by the small wars expert Charles Callwell. As Callwell explained, the mobility of an army was inversely proportional to its size, and the dispersion of mobile forces is often not prejudicial to security. Indeed, raiding upon multiple lines

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was justified by ‘the moral effect produced on the enemy by the occupation of wide stretches of territory, and in the influence that the appearance of hostile bodies on all sides must exert on a people who know how to turn the situation to account’.56 This fluidity, especially in the early months of the insurrection, bred a Cristero culture of clandestine behaviour. Militants faced great dangers moving in contested areas of control. Letters of safe conduct were essential, but a veteran later recalled that it was bad luck to tell comrades ‘see you later’ (‘hasta luego’), as that was a sure sign of being killed.57 For their part, government authorities were less inclined to trust in good luck when travelling in insurgent zones. When David Fuentes in June 1927 was nominated interim mayor of the Villa de Refugio, in the Cristero-dominated south of Zacatecas, he was despatched from the capital with a personal guard of fifteen mounted gendarmes.58 The Cristeros throughout 1927 came to dominate the rural frontier across Zacatecas and Jalisco and a few key towns besides. But unlike Huejuquilla, Mezquitic was much more divided in its loyalties. A local man later recalled how a certain Pancho Hernández was ‘Cristero, or rather, he used to pass from one side to the other’.59 Quintanar’s troops stripped Mezquitic of horses and guns on 9 December 1926, a sure sign that he doubted the well-to-do’s commitment to the Cristiada. Sure enough, in August 1927, Mezquitic formed a scratch Defensa of its own which pledged loyalty to the Federation. The seventy-odd men who formed the Defensa had been alienated by months of incursions by Cristeros from the surrounding ranches who, as one Defensa veteran recalled, ‘first demanded loans, then started treating Mezquitic like their home, antagonising locals’.60 In November the Cristero siege began, as Mezquitic residents abandoned outlying building to the enemy vanguard and sought shelter in central buildings, including the desacralized church. Mezquitic could expect no relief from Federal forces. The closest forces were General Vargas’s 84th regiment, based at the hacienda of San Antonio, where Vargas was sitting tight on the seed and corn for much of the region, in a deliberate attempt to starve the Cristero farmhands into surrender.61 On 27 December 1927 the Cristeros lured Vargas’s troops away from the hacienda, ambushing his rearguard and seizing what remained of the food in San Antonio. Vargas retook San Antonio the next day and publicly whipped labourers who had



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robbed from the dead and dying Federal troops.62 But the initiative throughout the region remained with the Cristeros, and nothing could be spared to help Mezquitic. Although Mezquitic’s outnumbered Defensa had been holding out since November, in January 1928 Gorostieta sent a bigger Cristero force which flushed out the defenders whose remnants were later defeated at Totuate (Jalisco).63 The Cristero attack on 3 January overwhelmed the Defensas, applying the advantage of human wave tactics against the vastly outnumbered but better armed enemy. Cristero captain Sebastián Arroyo Cruz recalled the bitter fighting for the town: 300 of us attacked Mezquitic at 10 in the morning. The enemy withdrew to the river and then the fighting began. We pushed them back into the town, where they fought ferociously in the streets and buildings they used as fortresses. We pressed on and they started torching the town. Smoke obscured our view, and the colonel and others and I  found that we were stuck in a mud-walled cattle pen, being pinned down from fire from a fortified building. The enemy firing at us were resisting bravely, and one Cristero who imprudently tried to get out via a patch of weeds fell dead (…) We decided to try our luck rushing the enemy under covering fire and trying to fire at them through the holes of their building (…) Eventually we got to within twenty metres of them, and four of them rushed back with rifles in hand before we had the chance to shoot at them. Then we saw a column of thick smoke coming up from the building. Francisco Bonilla, ‘Tufty’ (‘El Mechón’), had dragged a petrol butt and ignited it at the door (…) The valiant defenders evacuated the building, and as night fell the whole town was ours apart from the fortified church. All families on the government side were in the church and their menfolk were firing at us from above. Then they decided to dynamite the church, piercing holes through the adobe walls in order to place the charges (…) We had to retire that night, but when we returned the next day it seems that Providence had spared the innocent families from the dynamite which had not detonated (…) Finally, after six days without proper sleep, Mezquitic was ours, and over the next few days government families fled, leaving only the peaceful and Cristero people in our care.64

During lulls in the fighting, several compromised families fled Mezquitic. Adelita Carlos de la Torre came from one of the wealthiest families in Mezquitic, whose male in-laws were Defensa commanders leading the desperate defence.

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The womenfolk fled to a friendly mountain ranch where they found refuge in a secret cave. Decades later Adelita recalled how they spent the ‘coldest night of my life, 3 January 1928, sleepless in our jackets, soothed only by the soft sound of a stream in flow’. After a sleepless night their guide returned with tortilla and hot beans, and the news that Adelita’s father-in-law, the commander of the Mezquitic Defensa, had been killed in the fighting.65 Mezquitic remained in Cristero hands until December 1928, and its loss to the government was followed up three weeks later by General Vargas’s defeat at nearby San Antonio (Valparaíso, Zacatecas). But before it was recaptured Mezquitic was the scene of political controversies, including Acevedo’s May 1928 Cristero congress. Despite the incremental successes capturing territory and towns, a major fault line remained in terms of the poor discipline and the persistent guerrilla-style tactics of the Cristero ‘Liberation Army’ which were now proving more of a hindrance than a help in the Cristeros’ senior ‘Division of the Centre’. Adolfo Arroyo, the parish priest from Aurelio Acevedo’s puritanical Valparaíso, was among the minority of clerics who shared the privations of the Cristeros on campaign. His hostility towards the fence-sitting of most of his colleagues and the Church hierarchy was reinforced when at the Mezquitic congress a complaint from an officer in the Division of the Centre reached him of clerical connivance in wayward discipline: ‘our brilliant shooting stars, who in the long winter nights dazzle our eyes, disappear and never return … and Father Montoya has forgotten about us, and even seems to be cooperating with the changos’.66

Civilians on the front line As the war expanded throughout the centre-west during 1927, the scope for reprisals against civilians increased. Villages and haciendas devoid of garrisons were particularly exposed to the transit of militants from either side. Government authorities in Oconohua (Jalisco) who had executed some local reactionaries (‘mochos’) were themselves killed days later in reprisal when a Cristero band passed through the village. A passing Cristero band committed a similar reprisal killing of a local agrarista chief – ‘a murderer protected by the tyrant’ – in Techaluta (Jalisco) the same week as the Oconohua incident.67



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Communities in prolonged conflict zones faced a cycle of reprisals. The personalisms of caciques often dictated village allegiance, which in turn excited hostile attention from surrounding settlements opting for the other side. Fernando Basulto, who commanded the pro-government Defensa of Zacoalco (Jalisco), had to despatch agraristas to sow the field with rifles on their shoulders as protection against local Cristeros.68 Research in Jalisco has shown how neighbouring villages picked different sides even when they shared near-identical social conditions. Just as political allegiance was swayed by local factors often divorced from ideology, so were the motives for taking up arms. Recent research into Latin American conflict has ‘decentred war’, showing how internal conflicts, however bloody and outwardly ideological in nature, also provided opportunities for ethnic and socio-economic subalterns to acquire freedoms and status which their former civilian lives denied them.69 In effect local power networks included dependents with private interests in violence. Low-key civil war like in 1920s and 1930s Mexico entailed much ‘privatization’ of violence, in a manner familiar to post-1945 anti-colonial conflicts. Privatized war (agraristas, Cristero bandits, etc.) produced eternal war, as the economic gains of violence were so intimately connected to the civil war that a peace threatened to extinguish them.70 The factor dictating why one village was pro-government, and the other Cristero, was usually the cacique, who seized the momentum of one side or the other in order to assert age-old claims and entrench power networks.71 Caciques in Cristero zones tended to have survived the upheaval of the 1910s, and as such remained classic barriers to centralized nation-building (as in the rest of Latin America), especially whenever they supported armed and regionalized counter-revolution.72 The Guzmán family that dominated the village of Chimaltitán in northern Jalisco had profited from the upheaval since 1910, controlling the local Defensa, alienating rival families who became Cristeros as a consequence. As the Federal Army seldom garrisoned isolated Chimaltitán, the Guzmáns reigned supreme, engaging in vendettas against local Cristeros with impunity. The random killings committed by José Guzmán Chico led to his denunciation by the priest of nearby Bolaños and his imprisonment at the penitentiary of Oblatos in Guadalajara. But once Gorostieta threatened to overwhelm pro-government outposts early in 1929, the authorities released Guzmán, reinstating him in his Defensa command.73

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The pro-government town of Teúl de Gonzalo Ortega (southern Zacatecas) soon found itself at war with surrounding pro-Cristero villages. As soon as the first winter of the war, El Teúl was attacked by the former villista turned Cristero, Pedro Sandoval.74 Throughout 1927 El Teúl remained in the thick of fighting, and in July the state governor was reassured that the embattled town’s Defensa Social had been resupplied with 1,000 rounds of ammunition.75 It had to accommodate refugees from outlying villages like San Lucas, whose largely Indian population had faced the brunt of violence from hacienda interests in nearby Florencia as soon as the first locals had bid for ejidos (communal land grants). Thus El Teúl was both burdened by refugee families and bolstered by surrounding agraristas who bore arms in the town’s defence.76 Sometimes the Defensa went on the offensive. Local Cristero veterans in the early 1970s remembered Teúl’s raids into Cristero villages: News came that those from Teúl were attacking, killing many of us … a poor man named Arellano was ill in his bed and unarmed, and when the attackers figured out where he was, Arellano shouted to the woman of the house to give him a knife to defend himself. The poor lad was brave but they shot him dead in his bed.77

The impact of the war on this front-line was also traumatic in El Teúl, as the local writer Luis Sandoval Godoy, born in El Teúl in 1931, remembered:78 During my childhood there (El Teúl) there was no electricity and the roads were unpaved. There were many mud-walls and several houses were abandoned. The Cristero revolution had reshaped the village. El Teúl was always on the side of the federation, the government. It suffered numerous assaults from surrounding villages, especially one called Florencia where there were very radical cristeros. It was burnt and sacked. They took the people away and all the stories we know happened. I was born in the village after the first Cristero war, but it was still a sad and forgotten village bearing the scars of conflict. The very silence of the village made a great impression on me, its abandonment, the ruins, the roofs always on the verge of falling down. It was a village which had been destroyed. There is where I began to look at life.

Localized fighting gave the edge to local fighters, whether Cristero or Defensas. Whenever Federal troops showed initiative, they were often bested by local



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topography and intelligence. Gorostieta, who had been operating near El Teúl since his local defensive victory at La Mesa del Coyote in his first-ever battle of the war on 14 September 1927, launched a successful assault on Jalpa the following month. The topography near El Teúl was witness to a major Cristero defensive victory early in November 1927. The outnumbered and outgunned forces of Jose María ‘Chema’ Gutiérrez defeated General Anacleto López’s attempted pincer movement to encircle the Cristeros by marching concentrically along the sierras of Tlaltenango and Morones. In fact López’s eight hundred troops fronted by two hundred agraristas met ‘Chema’s’ 250 troops who were entrenched on higher ground. ‘Chema’ repulsed the attackers who abandoned to the Cristeros their dead and wounded, as well as precious arms and ammunition.79 In June 1928 Tepehuano guides led Colonel José Ruiz’s column into a deathtrap at the Cerro de las Papas in Mezquital (Durango). The guides led the soldiers into a valley and rolled up their white cotton trousers at a pre-arranged moment. This gave the signal to the Tepehuano Cristero force led by Juan Andrés Soto on the surrounding peaks to open fire on the column, and even to roll boulders with devastating effect. Boulders were the weapons of counter-revolution, just like in the Tyrol in 1809. The massacre of the Federal column remains the most celebrated Tepehuano Cristero victory in local memory. It demonstrates the weakness faced by the counter-insurgency in mastering civil–military relations, doubly so in the case of the indigenous who, being mostly monolingual, rendered great power to leaders like Soto who could also speak decent Spanish.80 In at least some instances Federal commanders developed local intelligence in order to fight the Cristeros on their terms. The barber of San José de los Guajes (Jalisco) remained under the radar of the Federation and hostile agraristas from nearby Juchitlán for nearly two years. Teodoro Santana’s camouflage was quite a feat given how he tended to Cristero, and even Federal, wounded after firefights, including after Cristero General Degollado’s victory at Juchitlán on 29 September 1927, and besides transported communion wafers to fugitive priests (with the instructions to devour them the moment they threatened to be seized or profaned). But General Ortiz had a mistress in the village and army intelligence eventually closed in on Santana, who was confronted but then left alone in an apparent concession to his peaceful and hospitable nature and in return for agreeing to act as a double agent.81

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In some instances the Federation managed to turn local intelligence to good account. General López’s troops once successfully ambushed a Cristero column passing through Portrero de Gallegos (Valparaíso, Zacatecas) by replacing their army caps with the sombreros worn by locals. Presenting a harmless appearance to the Cristero column, surprise was complete and they opened fire killing half of the column.82 But government guerrilla tactics were the exception to the rule, and in the case of front-line Portrero de Gallegos might have been conditioned by civilians developing a modus vivendi with the passage of forces from both sides. Gabriel Cosío, for example, was a respected landowner in Portrero de Gallegos who often interceded to protect locals from the arbitrary actions of passing Cristero and Federal forces, and appears to have been recognized as an honest broker. When Federal troops collected weapons they uncovered on Cosíos’s property, General López handed them back to their owner saying, ‘Here are your weapons, Don Gabriel. I’m giving them back to you because I know your sons, and if the Cristeros didn’t take them, and they need them more, we won’t be taking them either’.83 Civilians usually suffered reprisals for storing surplus weapons, and could even face double jeopardy if arms left untouched by one side marked them out as allies and therefore targets for the other side. Further south in Jalisco a similar pattern prevailed, even though insurgent zones in this state, like in neighbouring Zacatecas, were cavalry territory par excellence. In some instances battles took place between Cristeros fortifying themselves in population centres against government attacks from the countryside. San Sebastián (Jalisco) was defended by Cristeros, including several women, using buildings to ambush the Federal vanguard, forcing a retreat.84 But generally speaking, government forces were reluctant to try to occupy small settlements or to venture into hilly and forested areas, rendering these environments natural Cristero territory. A  contemporary describing Federal counter-insurgency in early 1927 Los Altos wrote, ‘In the small villages General Garza’s Federal troops were nowhere to be seen … they stayed away from the hills, sticking to major roads and plains in 15- or 22-day campaigns during which the Cristeros (still) short of arms hid in the hills.’85 The Cristeros, by contrast, tended to know rather more about the movements of the enemy, not only because of local spy networks but also because of the dissemination of the campaign newspaper, Peoresnada.86 A British hacendado



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fled from his Cristero-occupied estate at Alcihuatl (Autlán, Jalisco), complaining how ‘the government troops confine their attentions to guarding the small towns and rarely venture in pursuit of the rebels’.87 Even when Federal reinforcements reached Autlán by December 1927, the hacendado complained how ‘the rebels are absolutely in command round here. The few Federals there confine themselves to sitting on the plazas on the towns’.88 Thus, for all the complaints by the Federal Army against Defensa insubordination, in localized, asymmetrical warfare, the Defensas in the centre-west actually tended to perform better than the army, in much the same pattern as has been identified in Michoacán.89 In 1928 the interim governor of that state admitted: ‘the 3,000 Defensas … (in this state are vital because) … the rebels attack as guerrillas, placing Federal troops at a disadvantage, whereas the Defensas, in being formed of men often from the same regions as those infested by the rebels, in many instances have inflicted severe defeats on them, decimating the rebellion in this state’.90 In October 1928 Defensas at San Gaspar (Los Altos) fought the Cristero forces led by Ramírez and Oliva, defeating them after exploiting intimate knowledge of terrain and communications to the full.91 Local activism versus central inertia often described civil–military relations throughout government areas of the centre-west. In some ways local elites’ desires to keep the state at arms’ length was a continuation of the tendency evident since the revolution for local authorities to prefer to tolerate local wrongdoing over the worse chaos often unleashed by heavy-handed Federal police actions.92 Only when local pro-government elites were overwhelmed did they seek out the Federation. In 1927 civil authorities in Ameca (Jalisco) petitioned the secretary of war directly for protection because local army units ‘viewed with indifference’ the growth of nearby Cristero bands.93 Even a garrison of morose troops was no guarantee of security. Federal Army soldiers had nothing to gain or defend by fighting in unfamiliar surroundings, even when the government gradually improved their conditions of service (such as a presidential decree early in 1928 awarding the dependants of any serviceman killed in action 50 per cent of his salary, payable until dependants attained their majority).94 Even when government authorities might have wished to pursue a harder line, the ability of Cristero militants, especially in the early months, to drift into their surroundings complicated counter-insurgency efforts. An attack

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by General Ubaldo Garza in January 1927 succeeded in expelling a group of 30 Cristeros from Arandas (Jalisco). But a contemporary recalled how the insurgents managed to escape ‘disguised in plain clothes’ and to regroup in the hills ‘out of sight to recover more strength’.95 Preconceptions of civilian hostility formulated during periods of calm were activated by the shock of modern, mobile warfare. Operating in Los Altos where every adult male seemed to be a Cristero, government forces were driven to drastic measures. A colonel raiding a hacienda at Huaracha (Jalisco) suspected of harbouring Cristeros forcefully checked labourers’ hands to see whether they were calloused by weapons and, upon finding them normal, stripped their shirts to check for telltale rifle-butt marks on their shoulders. Discovering marks on one labourer’s shoulder, the colonel grabbed the suspect shouting, ‘hand over your ammunition pouch (carrillera), you bandit’, turning to the sheriff saying, ‘See? They’re all Cristeros, pure Cristeros!’96

Woe to the agraristas While civilians in general suffered from the passing of Cristero bands, particular violence was targeted at agraristas and captured Federal officers. González Navarro’s study of Jalisco has revealed a continued low-level terror meted out to agraristas, including assassinations, lynchings and torture, often in reprisal to agrarista or Federal murder of Cristeros and priests.97 In being seen as the ‘kept’ beneficiaries of the government, agraristas were singled out for gruesome reprisals. Whereas Federal troops were resented and even pitied by the Cristeros, agraristas, just like Federal officers, were generally hated. In 1927 General Saturnino Cedillo mobilized agraristas from the Huasteca (San Luis Potosí) for service in Los Altos, whose dire poverty would supposedly be alleviated with land grants in return for military service. But with little military training and ‘nothing more than sand in their sandals’98 the Huastecans were routed with ease. Their comrades who had the misfortune to be captured were hanged with small bags of earth dangling at their feet displaying the words: ‘here is your land’.99 Agraristas who came from Cristero-held villages often faced vendettas. Nostic, ten kilometres south of Mezquitic (Jalisco), was deep in Cristero territory. Isidoro Fernández was a marked man who like many other wealthy enemies



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of the Cristeros fled Nostic at the outset to seek refuge in Jérez (Zacatecas). In October 1928 a muleteer betrayed his whereabouts to the Cristero authorities while Fernández was making a clandestine visit to his family in Nostic. He was arrested and condemned to death by hanging, a sentence changed to death by firing squad after his daughter had offered to pay for the bullets in return for a more honourable execution for her father.100 Agraristas who formed Defensas in Cristero areas felt like cannon fodder for the regular army, and some even suspected a government plot to sacrifice them because of their troublesome social demands. Agraristas, who sometimes tragically came from divided families, felt despised by government and Cristeros alike. In May 1928 an agrarista leader in Tepospizaloya (Jalisco) blamed state officials: ‘We can no longer endure these assassinations and therefore we ask you if in fact we have been tricked by the state militia organiser? Or was this a government conspiracy for the fanatics to finish us off and exterminate our defenceless families?’101 In Aguascalientes awards of land to agraristas declined steadily during 1927–9, in part not only because of the ingrained conservatism of the authorities but also because agraristas knew that their Defensas would be targeted for reprisal by José Velasco’s Cristeros raiding at will from the Zacatecas and Jalisco border areas.102 Sometimes ambitious agraristas hoped to gain by being deployed away from their Cristero neighbours, where their anonymity might offer protection from reprisals. The tragedy of a smallholder in rural Colima who was lured into the Federal Army to campaign in Durango with the promise of land illustrated the enormous risks involved with transgressing local opinion. Zepeda later deserted from miserable campaigning in Durango as it became clear that no land was forthcoming and made his way back to Colima, claiming to have been coerced into serving the Federation in the first place. Pursued as a deserter by the Federation on the one hand and as a traitor by local Cristeros on the other, he was caught and lynched by an enraged Cristero mob in his home town who shot him dead as he tried to escape crawling along a blanket over a passageway between two buildings inhabited by his relatives.103

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This chapter analyses the Gorostieta era of the Cristero revolt and efforts by the Federal Army and Federal and local paramilitaries (agrarians, defensas, gendarmes) both to maintain territorial control and to deny territory to the Cristeros. The government forces proved able to defend state capitals and most large towns, as well as main road and railway communications, yet they were hard-pressed to control the adjoining border areas of the four states, where most of the conflict, in being localized and more devolved to paramilitaries, was marked as much by village versus village rivalries as ideology. To some extent government deficiencies were compensated by what Jean Meyer described as colonial warfare, reconcentrating populations in order to create free-fire zones and using aircraft whose morale impact proved greater than their limited strike capabilities. This chapter will also explain how government operations were limited by logistics straining in an adverse environment of arms smuggling, cattle thefts, corruption, intelligence interceptions and the economically counterproductive embargoes on the circulation of goods and persons. This chapter concludes with a study of the culmination of fighting during the first half of 1929, as the government concentrated forces in the region in response to both a maximized Cristero effort in coordination with the escobarista rebellion within the Federal Army, leading to the qualified government victory with the agreements of June 1929 and the formal end of hostilities. The life of Federal soldiers during the Cristiada was grim. In theory army service was voluntary, but in practice young men on the margins of society, including supposed martial races like the Yaqui Indians of Sonora, were recruited by force using the traditional methods of impressment (the leva). Campaign service was adverse in the extreme, as soldiers faced casual brutality

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from their officers, hunger and pay arrears often exacerbated by corrupt commanders who possessed neo-feudal control over their men and who were prone to withhold men’s pay and to inflate their own (via exaggerated returns to the War Ministry) besides. Unsurprisingly, desertion was rife among Federal soldiers. American journalist Ernest Gruening was struck by the abuse of alcohol by most troops and of marijuana in the case of Indians.1 By contrast Cristero forces suffered not so much from desertion but from absenteeism. Cristero units tended to be permanently below full strength because militants only slowly accepted formal military hierarchy and tended to operate close to their homes and to the pull of families and agricultural labour. The mobility of the Cristeros, and their frustrating ability to blend into their communities, pushed the Federation by spring 1927 to enact a policy on a grander scale which commanders had already been doing locally: reconcentration.

Reconcentration By spring 1927 the Federal authorities embarked upon a ‘reconcentration’ policy targeting the Cristeros, which has been characterized in history as a grisly cycle of atrocities and counter-atrocities.2 Certainly, the military rationale for reconcentration was just as clear for the Federal Army as it had been for colonial armies in Africa and elsewhere fighting rural insurgencies. Reconcentration promised to cripple the enemy’s economic network, forcing the enemy to give battle on disadvantageous terms, while also enriching the supplies of the troops performing the reconcentration. Unlike in urbanized Europe or the United States, where an enemy army capturing a few key cities could then dominate the countryside, the centre-west of Mexico offered the enemy army no decisive population centres to capture, only grain, cattle and villagers getting in the way of razzias. The practice of ‘reconcentrating’ civilians had nothing to do with the concentration camps made notorious in genocidal and colonial wars in the rest of the twentieth-century world. Spatial rather than custodial concentration distinguished Federal policy, as already witnessed in the ‘pacification’ of Indians. The Yaqui revolts of the 1900s, which in part reflected traditional tension between unpacified ‘broncos’ and tamed ‘mansos’, had accelerated at the start of the twentieth century in response



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to the encroachments of haciendas and a US cash economy in agricultural production. In response, foreshadowing similar Federal actions during the Cristiada, the late-Porfiriato ‘reconcentrated’ the Indians as part of its counter-insurgency strategy.3 Reconcentration involved physically separating insurgents from civilians and the supplies and shelter the latter could offer the former voluntarily or involuntarily. Spain’s war against Cuban insurgents in the 1890s involved the brutal reconcentration of civilians into ‘towns’ which became centres of hunger, disease and death. The Cristero War followed a similar Hispanic pattern of driving civilians to existing urban centres rather than special camps. Civilians whose presence was considered essential, such as hacendados whose political loyalties were unquestioned, were often left in place and armed in lieu of the removal of Federal guarantee of their safety. The Federal policy of reconcentration began on 22 April, in the wake of the political pressure caused by Cristero priest Vega’s barbarous train massacre and the embarrassing Federal failure to take the town of San Julián. Some thirty-six communities were targeted, seven in the ‘Three Fingers’ of Jalisco and the rest in Los Altos. The wealthiest residents were best placed to respond to reconcentration orders, either by securing exemptions in the case of known pro-government landowners or by securing their own or hired motor transport and choice of lodgings.4 But the majority faced the horrors of disease, overcrowding in host communities, swindled prices for refugee livestock (and even its outright theft), all of which created a human tragedy for the tens of thousands cramped into Federal urban centres, to say nothing of incidents when civilians were targeted by indiscriminate Federal ‘free fire’ on account of not being able to leave proscribed areas by the required time. A father and son of the San José de la Presa ranch near San Diego de Alejandria (Jalisco) defied the spring 1927 reconcentration order in order to attend to their cattle daily. But on 8 May 1927 their luck ran out as a passing Federal patrol fired upon them without warning, killing the son.5 Moreover, even though the Federation intended the reconcentration to last little more than a month, enough time, it was hoped, both to pacify the region and to allow cultivators back for the sowing season, in reality many more refugees remained displaced out of privation or fear of Cristero reprisals in the case of neutral or pro-government reconcentrados.6 Thus even if the rains of May 1927 persuaded the authorities to permit the return of the reconcentrados

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to their sowing duties, planters returning to their devastated farms could barely recover production, and much produce in any case found its way to the invigorated Cristero units in the area.7 Still more reconcentrados gave up altogether and emigrated to the United States. Mexican emigration reached a new peak over the Cristero War, with disproportionate numbers leaving from the centre-west states, and whole families rather than single men becoming the dominant model of expatriates for the first time.8 Even regarding the majority who remained, the Federal Army glumly appreciated that reconcentration was a double-edged sword. It tended to drive male reconcentrados into the army of El Catorce’s growing irregular forces over the summer of 1927, irrespective of whether these newcomers had harboured Cristero sympathies beforehand.9 In several instances refugees defied Federal orders by returning to their deserted homes without permission. Josefina Arellano could not bear the privations of León which had led to the death of her 10-month-old baby son and made her own way back to San Julián (Jalisco) 60 kilometres west with her surviving older children. She even crossed paths with her husband, who was a Cristero officer leading a mounted infantry section in the free-fire zone. Upon reaching her home Josefina resigned herself to a life in a ghost town subsisting on stored maize and beans. But her children ventured out to discover that they were not alone, as another Cristero family lived nearby, who themselves seldom ventured out so as not to be seen by passing Federal patrols. Eventually, the town refilled even before the military authorities formally lifted the reconcentration order, and a ghost town was transformed into a front-line town once more. Federal troops patrolled the town at will, as did Cristeros clandestinely penetrating the town for food and intelligence. Reconcentration was replaced by evening curfews and a safe-conduct requirement for travel beyond the locality. Safe conducts in turn were subverted by several women of San Julián, including Josefina Arellano, as a means of smuggling information and arms into their town to be received by clandestine Cristero patrols. Civilians under this front-line occupation suffered several hardships. Federal soldiers, especially those commanded by General Quiñonez, acquired a reputation for sexually assaulting women, who accordingly spent months at a time behind doors and who relished moments of liberation whenever it was deemed safe to go outside. Smugglers also faced the peril of raids by Federal patrols, including Josefina herself on one occasion when quick-witted



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neighbours saved her by evacuating her illegal stores of alambre meat, religious propaganda, uniforms and explosives the moment after their own houses had been searched. The worst burden facing civilians was the relentless curfew, generally imposed between sunrise and 6  p.m., after which only medical needs allowed civilians to be outside, and trigger-happy soldiers opened fire on anyone not answering promptly and correctly to the command ‘Who goes there?’.10 Josefina remembered: ‘The government has us well trained. We are awake at 8 and shut away again at 6, just like our hens.’11 The military flaws in reconcentration were obvious. It represented a mass government reprisal against the ‘weak but strong’ threat posed by the asymmetrical Cristeros. It drew the Federation into a war on their terms, placing the weaker side on an equal footing with the stronger, very much according to the ‘escalation dominance’ theory developed by Carl von Clausewitz. Small wars were more predisposed to atrocities than symmetrical warfare because the stronger party (the state) will seek to demoralize the weaker rebels by inflicting atrocities. The weaker rebels then escalate in kind and in number. ‘Escalation dominance’ thus lies with the weaker insurgents.12 The imposition of collective punishment via the ‘reconcentration’ ordinances thus represented the government’s counter-escalation. The pattern of reconcentration was set early in 1927, as the British consul at Guadalajara reported: The tactics which were followed earlier in the year of bombing rebel villages from aeroplanes is to be extensively practiced. With a view to separating the disloyal from the peaceful sections of the rural population living along the borders of the States of Jalisco, Colima and Zacatecas, the evacuation of many villages has been ordered, and all persons remaining there after the expiration of a given period of time are to be subjected to a bombardment by the army air forces.13

Some of this reconcentration was enforced by government authorities burning settlements in Los Altos in an attempt to arrest the spread of the Cristeros and to create free-fire zones.14 Throughout 1927 government forces performed their own local reconcentrations, driving real and imagined Cristeros towards secure centres. In November 1927 some seven hundred men under General Urbalejo’s command decided to liquidate the Cristero-held

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village of La Soledad (Durango). As Cristero military intelligence reported, ‘Some 700 callistas under Urbalejo’s command arrived in La Soledad where they killed the hacienda administrator and ten more unarmed men. They confiscated all they could, torched all the buildings, and drove the families towards Durango city’.15 By mid-1927 his reconcentration policies aimed at creating free-fire zones were in fact increasing local support for the Cristeros, to such a degree that by 1929 Ortiz was comparing the Cristeros to the Zapatistas. Most likely the inherent brutality in a reconcentration strategy designed to filter civilians found to have supplied food and intelligence to the rebels backfired on government forces.16 One Los Altos smallholder recalled 50 years later how Federal troops targeted food supplies in communities they suspected as Cristero:  ‘the government burnt pasture and kicked over beans, they didn’t leave even one tortilla to the people’.17 A  child growing up in the front-line village of Potrero de Gallegos (Valparaíso) later recalled how the dining table at his uncle’s house fed passing Cristero and Federal soldiers with indifference, and that their pillaging behaviour was indistinguishable. For Miguel Cosío the Cristero War was waged ‘against the poor, against peaceful people’.18 The British vice-consul of Guadalajara observed that ‘with lamentable frequency (Federal) troops wreak vengeance upon quite inoffensive and decent people in default of being able or perhaps willing to capture and punish the actual evil doers, under the pretext that the country people have aided the rebels’.19 What this meant was that the region which General Calles liked to dismiss as the ‘henhouse of the Republic’ was being starved. Mexico’s food production in general had declined due to the upheaval of the revolution: maize and beans production, staples of the poor, had fallen by 40 and 31 per cent, respectively, between 1907 and 1929, at a time when the population had increased by 9 per cent.20 In the centre-west this decline was relatively greater still during the Cristero War, increasing malnutrition and weakening immune systems. Even areas exempted from reconcentration suffered declining food production as agraristas were repeatedly mobilized for action during harvest time.21 Authorities in Zacatecas city pleaded with the state governor in September 1927 to authorize the production of transport carts in the city in order to help revitalize the depressed agricultural and industrial economy in the region.22 The Federal reconcentration order of April 1927 was made even worse by



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the simultaneous outbreak of a smallpox epidemic which ravaged refugee communities in state capital areas and smaller reception centres, placing ‘Cristero’ civilians even more at the mercy of the hated Federal authorities.23 The ensuing misery for refugee civilians was related by a Cristero costumbrista: ‘children crying of thirst, the elderly bent over with fatigue … the path shed groups of old and young who could move no more, all the while the heat of the sun in the cloudless sky beat down on those poor walkers’.24 Roads were clogged with exhausted peasants struggling with chicken-hutches, birdcages, piglets and newborn babies. The death of infants was captured in Jesús Quebedo’s tragic poem:  ‘Poor flower badly born, how grave your fate, the first step you gave, led to your death (…) to leave you alive, is to leave you with death.’25 Those refugees reaching their designated haven had no more energy other than to ‘sleep in the town square ... (or) seek such shelter as offered by surrounding arches and doorways’.26 Towns under government control in Jalisco were quickly overburdened. Tepatitlán (Los Altos) was ordered to accommodate twenty thousand refugees during the spring 1927 reconcentration, doubling the town’s size. But refugees who managed to reach the state capital, Guanajuato, Zacatecas or Aguascalientes, faced better chances of finding decent shelter.27 Certainly the Cristeros responded with measures in kind. Victoriano Ramírez (aka ‘El Catorce’), commander of the ‘fourteen dragons’ squadron of the Cristero San Julián regiment, proclaimed a counter-blockade over the winter of 1927–8, warning that all trains travelling in Jalisco would be attacked without notice and that safe conducts would be demanded for motorized transport.28 But the Cristero resort to guerrilla tactics via this ‘counter-blockade’ was telling of a crisis in their effectiveness. The Federation’s ability to concentrate and indeed reconcentrate against the Cristeros over the winter of 1927–8 was not encumbered by any significant revolts elsewhere. Gorostieta could do little to arrest the decline in the number of his soldiers which by some measures would reach a low of five thousand by the end of 1928.29 By Christmas Mexico’s chief of staff reported a notable reduction in rebel activity in Jalisco and Guanajuato, thanks to surrenders and return to agricultural work.30 The Cristeros’ chronic shortage of ammunition grew worse. A bold attempt in May 1928 to seize the port of Manzanillo (Colima) in order to land supplies by coast failed as the attacking

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Cristeros, being essentially guerrillas, were unused to coordinating attacks against large towns in a high-casualty environment and were operating beyond their intelligence networks.31 Nonetheless, persistent guerrilla activity in the centre-west continued to trouble the Federal authorities. Throughout the course of 1928 evidence mounted of concerted Cristero attempts to invest Guadalajara. By June 1928 the Mexican government sought to calm foreign diplomats by explaining, for example, that a Laredo–Mexico City express train had been derailed by ‘accident’ rather than local Cristeros sabotaging rails.32 By September 1928 British diplomatic correspondence revealed plummeting morale among railway personnel facing increased Cristero attacks, including the bloody massacre on 30 August of guards and passengers on the transoceanic train derailed near Puente de Ixtla and more concentrated Cristero efforts in the main war zone.33 Remote railway stations also presented targets, as the Cristero plot to abduct the station master at Chavinda (Michoacán) demonstrated, an attack which was beaten back just in time when the master telegraphed for help from nearby army units.34 In November the British Consulate at Colima reported rebel plans to put the Southern Pacific Railroad out of action for six months, cut the line from Guadalajara to Mexico City, seize control of Ixtlán del Rio, Tepic and even Guadalajara itself: ‘These bands are so large as to suggest a military force which must, for the sake of their own morale, soon seek issue with the Government troops, and it is their own opinion that by achieving some such victory as the taking of Guadalajara they can animate the morale and spirit of revolutionaries throughout the whole country, thus causing many to join them.’35 Between 15 and 18 October 1928 some four hundred Cristeros were beaten back into the mountains by Federal forces near San Marcos (Colima). On 10 December 1928 the Cristeros ambushed the Colima–Guadalajara express train. A bomb on the track derailed the engine and luggage carriages, but the ensuing firefight appeared to have been half-hearted, no casualties having been sustained by the passengers.36 In February 1929 the Mexico City– Laredo train on which President Portes Gil was travelling was dynamited while crossing a bridge in Guanajuato state. The president was unharmed and in a diplomatic reception later invited US ambassador Dwight Morrow to accompany him on a railway to observe the government’s agrarian reforms, ‘provided he did not fear the risk of being blown up by his enemies’. Morrow



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replied that he ‘would consider it a great honour to share in any untoward accident which might occur to the President’.37 The Colima–Jalisco region preoccupied the Federation more than any other region from late 1928. In November the British ambassador reported anxiety in Mexico City about the strain on public finances posed by military demands. Twenty-one Cristero attacks on government troops were carried out on one day in the Colima–Jalisco region, leading the ambassador to remark that ‘the rebels, having carried out simultaneous and coordinated attacks, should be considered something more than mere marauders’.38 Elsewhere, particular damage was done to the forestry industry straddling the frontier between Durango and Zacatecas. Not only did the precipitous landscape aid guerrilla attacks, but insurgencies in general tend to thrive in forested areas, given their better foraging opportunities, camouflage and the obvious excuse men could give that their blades and firearms were really meant for forestry and hunting rather than military action.39 Authorities in Zacatecas in spring 1927 imposed the draconian forestry law against ‘illegal’ logging in rural parts of the Guadalupe municipality. The combination of the law and unregistered gatherings of men ‘armed’ with sharp tools in areas sometimes penetrated by Cristero raiding parties was too much for the authorities to bear, even though fuel prices in Zacatecas city rose significantly as a result of the crackdown.40 By early 1929 lumbermen working for the Negociación Manufacturera de Maderas S.P.C.  had their work suspended owing to ‘the incursions made by revolutionaries into their camps’, a crisis which doubly harmed the lumbermen as they had lost their ‘only source of income and means to pay the hefty taxes demanded by the state government’.41 A few days later a detachment of troops was despatched to guard the lumber camps.42 But, as a Durango senator complained to the state governor, the troops were too few and lacked mounted infantry. Anguished by the lumber company’s threats to withdraw from the state altogether, Senator Estrada complained that ‘the ten armed men are unable to protect workers from the rebels swarming around our camps robbing workers of their workhorses, food, and even their clothing … and I therefore beg you and General Urbalejo to dispatch 20 or 30 mounted infantry (to dissuade further attacks)’.43 But the presence of garrisons was no guarantee of security. An American foreman at the ‘Mineral de Vacas’ mine near Vicente Guerrero (Durango) in

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March 1929 complained to the military authorities of the flight of a guard of seventeen agraristas. The agraristas ‘had mistaken the sound of rockets for the approach of rebels and fled to the hills’, returning the next morning demanding coffee before departing once more in the direction of Vicente Guerrero, even trying unsuccessfully to commandeer the foreman’s lorry en route.44 The governor, much anguished by the economic paralysis caused by Cristero militancy, asked the military to dispatch fifty Federal troops to guard this vulnerable mine.45

Towards peace In this context of escalating violence came peace proposals from the leading strongman of the revolution. Former President Alvaro Obregón tried to find a compromise with Catholics on the back of his re-election ambitions, but these attempts failed. Obregón was the subject of a failed assassination attempt in the streets of Mexico City, and the would-be assassins were captured and executed on the express orders of Calles. On 17 July 1928, however, soon after his election to the presidency, Obregón was assassinated by José de León Toral, the photogenic Catholic whose execution received newspaper coverage around the world and provoked his popular canonization by Cristeros.46 As Obregón was assassinated before his second term, Calles dominated politics as jefe máximo until his placeman, Emilio Portes Gil, won the extraordinary elections held on 17 November 1929. Calles still remained the dominant figure behind the scenes as the ‘Maximum Chief of the Revolution’ until 1934. While turmoil enveloped the presidency, 1929 was the bloodiest year of the civil war, and the Zacatecas insurgency was at the vanguard. The Federal government had become exasperated at the intractability of the struggle. In April 1929 President Portes Gil, responding to pleas from the military commands of Michoacán, Jalisco, Colima, Zacatecas and Aguascalientes, instructed civilian paramilitary organizations (locally organized volunteers and agraristas) to take systematic care to guard weapon stocks in order to avoid ‘the enemy getting hold of the government ammunition expended so frequently during firefights’, and charged both military and civilian governors in the insurgent states to render accounts of ammunition supplies targeted



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for seizure by ‘the fanatics’.47 The close-quarter nature of most of the fighting often led to the exchange of arms, horses and friendly fire amidst the dust, smoke and confusion. The most chaotic engagements were akin to what in nineteenth-century South American battles were known as the entrevero, cavalry clashes in which horsemen slashed, trampled and shot friend and foe alike in the dust, noise and chaos, from which the side with the strongest nerve and horsemanship tended to emerge victorious.48 Cristero forces tended to relish such clashes also because they minimized the expenditure of chronically scarce bullets, unlike the long-range rifle volleys favoured by their well-equipped government enemy. The adrenaline produced by close-quarter fighting contrasted with cold-blooded marksmanship which could produce opposite emotional responses in men. Some Federal soldiers on guard duty in Jalisco soon after the war chatted how they never aimed to kill the Cristeros, rather they fired blind, praying to the Virgin of Guadalupe to save them.49 But close-quarter combat allowed for no such inhibitions. During repeated clashes between 6 and 11 April 1929 near Jérez (Zacatecas), Cristero horsemanship proved superior to that of their agrarista enemies. The government side held the field thanks to a ruse when a quick-witted agrarista who had lost his mount found himself caught up among the Cristeros. He ditched his red-black armband and pointed the Cristeros in the wrong direction when one of them asked him, ‘Where are the agraristas, those sons of whores?’ The government side rallied in outrage at the sight of the Cristeros dragging captured agraristas along as human shields. But the Cristeros managed to retire in good order, in part because they torched the dry grassland at their rear, upon which the dead and dying from both sides lay. These were the last major clashes around Jérez before the Arreglos.50 Federal forces spent January and February conducting an all-out offensive which included fresh troops from Tabasco and Chiapas and offensive aircraft. There was more reconcentration of civilians in Jalisco, Querétaro and Guanajuato, and the armed agrarians were mobilized as a paramilitary reserve.51 Such reconcentration overwhelmed the piecemeal exercise of this policy in 1927, when some ten thousand pro-government ‘reconcentrados’ from rural Jalisco were more or less accommodated in Guadalajara and other urban centres, aided by voluntary campaigns.52 The sudden concentration of Cristero civilians in cities under Federal control concerned the authorities

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that the refugees might become the focus for something more subversive than voluntary charity. Dark-clad refugees from San Julián (Jalisco) reconcentrated 60 kilometres east in León (Guanajuato) presented a spectacle of a sea of black as the mourners amounted to a symbolic Cristero occupation of public spaces. Panicked authorities ruled that anyone caught wearing mourning attire in public would be imprisoned, stripped and turned back out onto the streets, and an eyewitness claimed that this penalty was repeatedly carried out.53 Thus the misery of refugees tended to continue in the absence of security. By May 1928 matters seemed to improve as the government press reported the return of many reconcentrados to several alteño communities, thanks in part to the surrender of six hundred Cristeros following government air attacks.54 But relief was only temporary. The return to mass reconcentration early in 1929 led Jean Meyer to describe the government as waging a ‘colonial’ war against its own people.55 Several government generals were alleged to have used the opportunity of reconcentration to steal cattle, sometimes brazenly and sometimes disguised as ‘contributions’ to the Federal Social Defence Fund.56 Army elites faced an often difficult choice about whether to enforce any modicum of discipline during reconcentration. On the one hand, revolutionary élan and logistical demands made organized pillage the most convenient way to supply troops, punish the enemy and enrich commanders. When Colonel Santos ordered reinforcements from San Luis to Guanajuato, he claimed ‘by hook or crook those landowners (hacendados) will feed us … our Revolution won’t be sustained by strawberries and cherries, but by meat, whenever we can find it – that’s why they called us cattle thieves (robavacas); down there in Guanajuato they have fine horses, which we’ll have to take from them, as well as their oxen’.57 Santos’s desire for horses made military sense. Despite War Minister Amaro’s enthusiasm for cavalry, horsemanship on the Federal side seldom matched that of the Cristeros, not least because the horses which Amaro imported in increasing numbers from the United States performed worse in rugged topography than native breeds. But on the other hand, the corrupt interests of commanders produced an economic interest in perpetuating warfare. General Maximino Ávila Camacho, flamboyant zone commander in Zacatecas at the height of the reconcentrations, was notorious for enriching himself on the distorted cattle industry in the state.58 In February



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1929 Zacatecas ranchers denounced Federal General Anacleto López for stealing cattle.59 The long-term effects of letting troops burn, pillage and rape hardened sensibilities and ended up distorting any tangible political or military goals beyond devastation and brutality. The economic misery of reconcentration was compounded by terror. In particular, aircraft often ended up killing civilians very much in the colonial style of interwar ‘aerial policing’, inflicting terror on Cristero soldiers and civilians alike.60 Faulty intelligence and absence of air-to-ground communications also led to mistakes, such as an incident near Acatic (Jalisco) when a government air attack mistakenly targeted civilians. Around seventyfive were killed and rumours spread that the aircraft was American.61 Only one Mexican Air Force plane was fitted with radio from 1921, and this number doubled to two in 1929.62 Radios in general offered another avenue for corruption, such as in 1926 when government agents charged with importing radios for the Mexican Army from the United States bought second-hand sets and pocketed the difference.63 Thus, Cristero units usually had ample time to relocate and avoid being compromised if they were unfortunate enough to be spotted by a government aircraft. In fact the greater impact of aircraft was registered by civilians rather than soldiers, in a way recognizable to scholars of airpower. Interwar popular culture was marked by terror caused by the prospect of bombing from the air. Indeed bombing is one of the very few examples in history of a military revolution being imagined before it was enacted, given how airpower before the Second World War remained unsophisticated even when interwar culture imagined apocalyptic terror from the skies.64 On 13 August 1928, when London lay beneath a mock air battle involving some 250 machines, El Informador covered the story on its front page.65 In mid-1927 the Federal government established an airbase at Ocotlán (Jalisco) from which to launch air attacks against Cristero units, including those of El Catorce.66 By the start of 1928, three airbases had been established for missions against the Cristeros: in addition to Ocotlán, another Jalisco base at Ameca and a third at the capital of Colima were all in use flying reconnaissance and attack missions.67 Civilians in the vicinity of aircraft taking off crossed themselves in the hope that God might protect the pilots’ targets, and local children often made a game of tricking their way into heavily guarded airfields in order to approach the

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machines.68 Soon Cristero units in Durango were complaining to Huejuquilla about increased Federal air activity, which obliged them to keep on the move in order to keep enemy reconnaissance frustrated.69 By the following year the Cristeros deployed anti-aircraft guns in the area, according to diplomatic reports.70 An 11-year-old in 1927 later recalled how small-arms fire brought down a Federal aircraft that had been releasing bombs and hand grenades over Cristero forces encamped near Arandas (Jalisco).71 Even though Cristero soldiers suffered only a limited menace from the air, civilians caught on the wrong side of a reconcentration order had no defence against air attack. One contemporary described how some Cristeros in Los Altos ‘took out religious medallions as protections against … flying machines never before seen by the Mexican people … as if they were a malign spirit … even the animals fled before the deafening noise in terror’.72 Usually aircraft would drop leaflets on an area earmarked for reconcentration with an ultimatum for civilians to leave on pain of being shot on sight. Whereas this ultimatum might expire in as long as a month, in some cases it expired in two days, placing evacuees at risk of Federal reprisals.

1929: denouement The regionalized nature of the fighting obscures the reality that Mexico’s civil war played out internationally as well as nationally. Support for the Cristeros from outside Mexico was admittedly limited. Nothing more than propaganda support and humanitarian funding came from such shady groups as the US Knights of Columbus for the Cristeros and the even shadier and more negligible Ku Klux Klan for the callista side. At diplomatic levels, the US approach was divided. The Americans did not know whom to trust. The temporizing wing of the Cristeros under the secretary of the episcopal committee under expelled bishop of Tabasco Pascual Díaz was first seen as the Cristero representative. But Díaz’s argument that armed resistance could not prevail alienated the armed wing. In the end Capistrán Garza, pro-Cristero businessman exiled in the United States, became the leading face of peace negotiations underway in the United States. Even though the 28-year-old Capistrán failed to enlist formal support from either US bishops or Catholics, he made a good impression



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among the Cristero generals: Carlos Blanco remembered him as the ‘Mexican Mussolini … prototype of the modern statesman, bristling with willpower and clear ideas’, and as a ‘real Cristero’ unlike Enrique Gorostieta, the northern liberal whom the LNDLR appointed to the key Jalisco command in July 1927.73 Meanwhile, US diplomacy shifted between ambassadors. Ambassador Sheffield’s replacement, Dwight Morrow, tried to get Calles and Vatican representatives to talk. Calles met priests but nothing more than dialogue was achieved. Admittedly, Dwight Morrow saw the war as a matter of Calles versus the Vatican and, to a secondary degree, the Vatican’s bishops.74 The Vatican itself, according to British diplomatic reports, was enjoying ‘schadenfreude that Washington is apparently awaking to the face that the arch-enemy of the Church is revealing himself as the arch-enemy of American interests, material and even strategic’.75 A black-and-white view of the conflict persisted among American observers. Foreign observers were prone to exaggerate the foreign influences in both the Mexican Revolution and the Cristiada. But just as Alan Knight argued that foreign influence upon the Mexican Revolution was marginal, the Cristiada, too, was fundamentally Mexican in origins and outcomes, for all the obvious power of foreign interests, especially those of the United States. As the American Charles Macfarland put it, ‘Mexico is now ruled by two generals: General Calles and general discontent.’76 While peace talks began, battlefield losses peaked on both sides. Gorostieta, leader of the Cristero Guardia Nacional (early in 1929 the ‘Liberation Army’ changed its name to the ‘National Guard’77), was killed in action during late May 1929, but the struggle continued under his replacement, Jesús Degollado Guízar. The peace deal of 21 June 1929 came at the peak of this bloodshed.78 Gorostieta as supreme commander of Cristero forces between July 1927 and his death had proved his skills as a professional officer of the Chapultepec Military Academy by reviving the flagging Cristero insurgency into a stronger guerrilla movement and ultimately a properly organized army. Gorostieta’s appointment to the supreme command was controversial, as local commanders did not like his severity, demotion of most generals and his insistence on shadowing the Federal Army in terms of organization. He also divided up Cristero zones of control into sectors, ending the haphazard practice of roving commissions, always with a strategy of controlling the largest possible number of population centres.79 Gorostieta was appointed in large

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part because he offered a national vision to transcend the intense parochialism of Cristero forces which had so vexed the urban-based League. His northern and liberal background, barely disguised by his photogenic sporting of a large crucifix around his neck, alienated true believers in Catholic Jalisco as much as his militarization strategy. Even though Gorostieta claimed to undergo a genuine religious conversion, the spectacle of a professional soldier adopting a convenient religious garb for careerist ends bears comparison to the ‘National Catholicism’ hastily adopted by the professional soldiers who rebelled in Spain in 1936.80 In any case, Lieutenant Jose Guadalupe de Anda, Gorostieta’s aidede-camp, waved aside claims that his commander was irreligious and affirmed that Gorostieta was charged with ‘organising free men, not fanatics, and leading an army, not a religious brotherhood’.81 Gorostieta alienated most of the LNDLR and divided the ACJM. Several of his subordinates, led by Brigadier General Carlos Blanco from April 1928, effectively ran their own zones of command without deference to Gorostieta. Blanco was a ‘true believer’ who nonetheless lacked military experience and ended up leading a group of hard-line Catholics in intrigues against Gorostieta. A  show of strength early in 1928 backfired, as virtually all Cristero leaders sided with Gorostieta, and Blanco fled westwards pretending to be setting up an autonomous command. When Blanco reached the western theatre of operations in Jalisco and Nayarit, he discovered that local agents were asking for his whereabouts and his thoughts moved to whether he was being targeted for assassination. In the end, Blanco went into exile, where at San Antonio, Texas, he joined a circle of ACJM exiles opposed to the ‘liberal’ Gorostieta.82 Gorostieta’s command also caused friction with local Cristero authorities. In theory Gorostieta served at the pleasure of the League, but civil supremacy was easily overturned using the pretext of military necessity in the front-line state. Thus, Cristero commanders frequently overruled the locally elected municipalities whose powers had theoretically been safeguarded by the May 1928 congress at Mezquitic. Policing, justice and administration were reserved to local civilian authorities, including the authority to prosecute soldiers accused of crimes. But this civil supremacy could be suspended the moment the military command declared the area a front-line zone, which meant that all civilian authority was subordinated to the military for the duration of the ‘campaign’.83 All manner of requisitions and violence thus persisted, not least



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because any part of the ‘liberated zone’, even Huejuquilla and Los Altos, could realistically be threatened by enemy action. Admittedly, these internal conflicts were obscured by the defeatism which by early 1929 had begun to sweep elements of the Federal government, as the fighting peaked on terms often favourable to the Cristeros.84 The Cristeros were rescued by Providence, not divine in nature, but in the form of a generals’ revolt in the enemy army. The escobarista rebellion of one-third of the Federal Army persuaded the Portes Gil-Calles government to go on the defensive in the Cristero centre-west in order to concentrate against the rebellion of the erstwhile praetorian guard of the assassinated President Obregón. Clausewitz explained how the ultimate aim of the insurgent was to be a ‘thorn in the side’, distracting an enemy who also had to face a regular army in combat.85 The escobarista rebellion presented this prospect on a scale far greater than the Yaqui revolt of 1926–7 or the Serrano-Gómez affair of 1927. The lesson was not wasted on the Federal government who concentrated against the new threat while leaving only armed agraristas to hold off the Cristeros. General José Gonzalo Escobar in Coahuila dubbed his rebellion a movement of ‘Renovation’ (‘Movimiento Renovador’) and he was backed by such other regional commanders as generals Francisco Manzo in Sonora, Francisco Urbalejo in Durango and Jesús Aguirre in Veracruz, along with Roberto Cruz (ex-police chief in Mexico City), Gilberto Valenzuela (former secretary of gobernación) and the governor of Durango, Juan Gualberto Amaya, who worked closely with General Urbalejo. Although the rebel escobarista army was located mainly in the Cristero-free north, it allowed an alliance of convenience to be agreed with Cristeros in the event of victory against the Calles regime, including commissions for Cristero officers in the Federal Army and some accommodation of the political aims of Gorostieta’s ‘Plan de los Altos’. For the first time the Cristeros were able to forge an alliance with a section of the Federal Army, albeit a section of Federal Army rebels. Although Gorostieta was very sceptical of the honour of the Federal rebels he could not fail to appreciate the sudden military advantage offered to his National Guard by the Federals’ stripping Guadalajara’s garrison to the bare minimum and the abandonment of several outposts as their forces had to concentrate against the rebellion in the north. Civilians in front-line San Julián noticed how the character of their government garrison changed from regular soldiers

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to ‘agraristas, rough and scheming people, interested only in the postwar promises of land, even though some of them didn’t even know how to ride a horse’.86 By March 1929 Gorostieta was set to exploit the escobarista rebellion to the full by an audacious attempt to seize Guadalajara, involving a plan to fill an ambushed train with Cristero soldiers to seize the city from within while other units attacked the city from without. Gorostieta was not the most enthusiastic advocate of the Guadalajara campaign. His Los Altos commander, Carlos Blanco, admittedly a sworn enemy of the ‘liberal’ commander-in-chief, claimed that Gorostieta was obsessed with remaining on the defensive in the Bajío rather than risking bold offensives.87 The divisions in the Cristero command in any case were obscured by the Federation’s counter-offensive against the new front, resolving to defeat the Federal Army rebellion before dealing with the Cristeros. In early March 1929, the ‘jefe máximo’, General Calles, himself replaced Amaro as war minister for the duration of the new campaign, and Calles ordered the assembly of some thirty thousand troops around Irapuato (Guanajuato). They divided and moved northwards towards Durango and Torreón and were amply supported by aircraft showing renewed vigour in aerial bombing.88 For once, government aircraft proved effective both in reconnaissance and in attack. Unlike the Cristeros in the centre-west whose wooded and rocky theatre offered natural protection, most of the escobarista forces were deployed in open, desert and semi-desert areas in northern states like Coahuila. Not only were they easier targets from the air, but the Federal offensive proved to be not solely dependent on the railway network as Porfirian counter-insurgencies had been, and the escobarista rebels themselves were still proving to be. Rather, the Federation deployed mounted infantry and motorized transport ably, wrong-footing the railway-bound rebels. In the event a decisive Federal victory in the north at Jiménez, combined with the collapse of escobarismo in Durango on 14 March, allowed reinforcements to reach Guadalajara and the train in question just in time, frustrating the Cristeros in their attempt to seize Mexico’s second city.89 The government campaign was also helped by divisions within the rebels’ camp, as subunits demonstrated their professionalization for the first time by choosing loyalty to the national government over nineteenth-century loyalty to their own generals.90



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Thus the defeat of escobarismo opened up the chance for the government to roll back the Cristero command over the countryside that had peaked by spring 1929. Even before the Federal victory at Jímenez, Gorostieta was filled with a sense of foreboding, writing that, Our situation, instead of improving because of the military risings, has actually grown worse. It does not seem so, but analysed with calm it proves to be so. The northern revolts face running the same risks as the Veracruz revolt, because their leaders lack honour and ideals. After they are crushed the Turk (Calles) will bring his battle-hardened, proud and well-supplied troops to bear down on us.91

Gorostieta was right. Thereafter, the Cristeros would face the most concerted Federal counter-offensive of the war. The government war effort was becoming ever more professionalized and regularized, and a presidential decree in spring 1929 ordered the disbandment of ad hoc law enforcement organizations in the wake of the defeat of the Escobar rebellion.92 General Cedillo’s offensive was marked by a relatively humane treatment of Cristero civilians, including a lack of the hated reconcentration, in part because there were unmistakable signs of growing the war weariness in the Cristero heartland. A presidential decree in January 1929 outlawed the killing of captured Cristero soldiers, a sign of intent at least. Combined with the Federal government’s opening of peace talks with the Church hierarchy via the good offices of the United States, the message to Gorostieta was ominous:  the Federation was now determined to pacify the Cristero rebellion for once and for all. For the time being, the Cristeros could hold their own against the reinvigorated Federal Army. General Degollado’s column of seventeen hundred marched into Cocula (Jalisco) on 18 March amidst a rapturous welcome. In an action at Tepatitlán (Jalisco) on 19 April the Cristeros scored a tactical victory against forces more than three times their number, inflicting almost five times as many casualties as they suffered themselves. But the Cristeros had lost the strategic initiative.93 Attempts to get Federal troops to defect to their side were usually ineffective. During the Cristero attack on Tepatitlán, it was the notorious cleric and train attacker, Father Vega, who tried to turn the defending garrison:  ‘Come over to our side my sons and fight on the side of God. Your ranks will be recognised.’ The defending Colonel Castro replied, ‘Come closer, my little priest (padrecito).

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I  can’t hear you.’ Breaking cover, Vega was killed by a volley ordered by Castro, who then took advantage of the Cristeros’ confusion by launching a counterattack which dispersed them in panic.94 Mercifully for the Federation, Gorostieta’s alliance with the escobaristas had brought the Cristeros only theoretical help – a commitment to suspend anticlerical legislation upon victory – not the arms and ammunition overflowing in Federal stores which would have bolstered the terminally under-armed Cristeros immensely. Even so, Gorostieta seized the opportunity to mount a last desperate offensive. By May 1929 most rural parts of Jalisco, western Zacatecas and southern Durango were under peak Cristero control. But the logic of the Federation’s decisive defeat of the escobaristas was not long in coming, as the battle-hardened Federal Army used combined arms operations against the outgunned and outnumbered Cristeros. Matters culminated in the last significant campaign of the war, the 23 May–23 June 1929 General Ortizled offensive against the Cristero redoubt in Colima. He led a combined naval– land operation, including a squadron of aircraft, along with several thousand cavalry, infantry, artillery and irregulars. But the outnumbered Cristeros used terrain to their advantage and exacted terrible casualties against the attacking Federales (sniping, hand-grenade lobbing down hillsides) who in any case faced a stiffer task than hoped because the naval bombardment had been ineffective and aerial bombing killed friendly troops as much as the enemy. At the narrow pass of El Borbollón, the Cristeros achieved their Thermopylae, as fewer than fifty men repelled Federal assaults, killing hundreds of the attackers. In fact, Cristero resistance in Colima was ended not by Ortiz but by news of the Arreglos.95 Elsewhere other Cristero strongholds fell to the Federation. Gorostieta thought he could still cope with the redoubled Federal offensive, but he could not comprehend the peace moves that were taking place between elements of the League and Catholic hierarchy on the one hand and the callista regime on the other. On 16 May the Cristero commander-in-chief wrote to the Mexican prelates:  ‘Each time the press reports a bishop parleying with the callistas, we take it like a slap in the face which hurts even more when delivered by a source from whom we expected support and encouragement for our victory.’96 Eleven days later Gorostieta relayed his despair at a meeting of his general staff, blaming the surrender of several Cristero units on ‘the appeasing attitudes of the bishops’.97



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Gorostieta’s agony did not last for long. He was killed in an ambush at Atotonilco (Jalisco) on 2 June 1929, after his small escort stumbled across a larger force of off-duty Federal troops. The death of Gorostieta derailed the Cristeros’ strategy at a time when the Federal government in advanced negotiation with clerical representatives at home and abroad agreed for peace providing for the reopening of public worship. The ‘Arreglos’ were announced 19  days after Gorostieta’s death and made a nonsense out of the late Supreme commander’s painstaking military strategy. Federal calculations were hurried along by the knowledge that José Vasconcelos, former education minister and aspirant for the presidency, was involved in talks with Cristeros to supply him with military force to overcome the official candidate in the forthcoming presidential elections. On 10 February 1929, Gorostieta’s emissaries had met Vasconcelos in Guadalajara, where both sides agreed to a Vasconcelos presidency pledged to enact the Cristero programme of freedom of religion and education. The ‘Arreglos’ arriving as they did ensured that Vasconcelos would not have an active army at his call, come the elections in autumn.98 This peace deal amounted to the defeat of the Cristeros: they disbanded and the Calles law remained the law of the land. The reasons for the Cristero defeat were many: the Holy See ‘orphaned’ the rebellion by instructing the bishops neither to bless nor condemn the armed movement, despite the personal sympathies of most bishops. The Holy See knew that a militant course of action would have resulted in the Church’s obliteration and its replacement by the schismatic ‘Mexican’ Church in the capital. Also Mexican Catholics were no monochrome; rather, they varied from anti-Cristero to belligerently proCristero sentiments.99 There was no prospect of international intervention on the Cristero side. The Peruvian President Augusto B.  Leguía y Salcedo was the only foreign power in 1926 to offer a moral defence of Mexico’s Catholics, and non-state actors, largely in the United States, did not transform the situation for either side.100 Cristeros had also proved unable to convince the Federal Army to defect, as this force had very much been reconstructed in the revolution’s image. The persistent guerrilla tactics of the Cristeros was not, as Meyer contends, a sign of the strength of ‘people’s war’, but a sign of weakness. The 21 June 1929 peace agreement barely obscured just how little the government had conceded, and in fact local anticlerical dynamics and other

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motives saw several Cristeros, including high-ranking officers, being killed despite official amnesties. Unsurprisingly, veterans and descendants have remembered this ‘betrayal’ with bitterness, pointing the finger of blame at the exiled Mexican bishops. In the case of Zacatecas, for example, neither the residents’ committees guarding closed churches nor the Federal military occupying some of them were in any hurry to hand back the properties. Rather the priests must ‘comply with the law’ which in Zacatecas, among other things, restricted the city to only ‘three priests per religion’.101 Seventy years on, Cristero veterans related that pressure for the ‘Arreglos’ came from the United States which was worried that the generals’ revolt in northern Mexico might work in Cristeros’ favour. Many Cristeros suspected a dastardly US plot to destroy Catholicism, the nerve system of Mexico, which would then have led to US dominance, even absorption, of Mexico. The ‘betrayal’ of the Arreglos led priests to judge another mass counterrevolution impossible owing to the bishops’ betrayal. This attitude, perhaps more than any other, influenced the way that the second Cristero rebellion of the 1930s has been seen as a wave of brigandage. Another reason for this ‘brigandage’ representation is that the 1930s rebellion, unlike that of the 1920s, was explicitly condemned by the Catholic hierarchy.102 The prospects for peace after the Arreglos might have been good, certainly given the Federal government’s halving of its army strength from seventy thousand to thirty-five thousand.103 But tension was never far from the surface, even as church bells defiantly rang out across Mexico on 22 June after almost three years of silence. The countryside around Huejuquilla was devastated and the guns that armed the former Cristero capital’s Defensa ended up shooting deer and rabbits more than they did veterans targeted in vendettas. Mezquitic was in ruins, and even though pro-government families returned to rebuild after the Arreglos, grudges remained as the Federal government refused it financial help and even demanded that the backlog of taxes caused by the war be settled.104 Luis de la Torre, a pre-war Defensa commander who had spent the Cristiada working in the United States, returned to his home town after the Arreglos. But his commercial success dealing with ex-Cristero ranchers from the countryside alienated the returned families. After he was denounced as a ‘Cristero’ and after his half-brother was murdered, de la Torre fled into



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Zacatecas in order to settle in Monte Escobedo in 1935, where the violence of the Segunda disturbed his peace once more.105 Aurelio Acevedo bitterly criticized the surrender, and many surrendered Cristeros refused to recognize their defeat.106 General José Gutiérrez Gutiérrez circulated a letter to officers of the disbanded División del Sur that ‘WE WERE NOT BEATEN!’ and that Cristeros might return to the battle if the Arreglos failed to safeguard religion.107 Even though Catholics in Fresnillo (Zacatecas) on 28 June 1929 publicly knelt in worship of Cristero Rey, the festivities were followed by troops violently disarming armed agraristas from Rio Grande.108 Agraristas tended to believe that their mortal enemies were being treated leniently, and confrontations like that at Rio Grande were repeated elsewhere in the centre-west. The inhabitants of Ayutla (Jalisco) greeted General Luis Ibarra’s surrender to the Federation with offerings of flowers and cries to Cristo Rey and the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Federation laid on a joint banquet and festivities, and veterans from both sides seemed to be about to part on good terms. But the agraristas, who did not attend the banquet, thought otherwise. After an altercation, the authorities confined the agraristas to barracks and also disciplined an officer who had robbed a Cristero of his fancy pistol. General Ibarra was able to pension off his men with 10 pesos each in circumstances which felt like more peace than surrender.109 Ayutla’s managed surrender contrasted with the violence and killings committed elsewhere.110 Cristero General Gutiérrez’s own headquarters in San José de los Guajes (Juchitlán, Jalisco) informed him of the general view that ‘it’s not worth surrendering because there are no guarantees, the few that have surrendered have been killed’.111 Captain Sebastián Arroyo Cruz’s commanding officer gave him a letter of safe-conduct signed by Federal General Anacleto López. But Arroyo had heard of the killings and did not trust his chances. He tore up the letter and made his way from the Huejuquilla region towards the safety of Zacatecas, accompanying Aurelio Acevedo and his wife for part of the way. Passing inaccessible paths, inhabitants warned him that the Federation was on his trail. Near Cruces (Zacatecas), locals shouted to him about the approach of a force led by General Madrigal from Huejuquilla. Arroyo hid behind a bend in a stream just in time and just out of sight of the passing troops. Arroyo eventually made it to the safety of Lobatos, and then

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risked taking a bus to Fresnillo. After laying low with sympathizers, Arroyo travelled to Zacatecas city and stayed in a house run by Cristero women who had fled Laguna Grande (Zacatecas). The city proved safer than the Cristero countryside and Arroyo survived.112 But virtually all local Cristero leaders in Zacatecas except Aurelio Acevedo and Justo Ávila would be killed by the end of 1929.113

4

Cristero home fronts

This chapter studies the experience of non-combatants in Cristero areas of control of the centre-west. It shows how loyalty to the insurgency was caused by various factors. These factors ranged from the enduring anti-state culture of indigenous communities in southern Durango (for whom becoming Cristeros seemed the best way of preserving autonomy and costumbre), to white and mestizo communities in the sierra driven by religiosity, serrano anti-state autonomy and economic hostility to Federal land reform and education, to the opportunism offered by violence in times of flux and to the ‘push’ factors caused by Federal actions, especially government reconcentration efforts which provoked civilians into becoming Cristero combatants or into dependency on Cristero forces. This chapter also explores the moral, social, political and economic life of civilians inside the ‘liberated zone’ (a Cristero mini-state centred on the Jalisco–Zacatecas border town of Huejuquilla). It pays particular attention to civil–military relations, acts of passive resistance to Cristero control and to tensions between the politics of Catholic traditionalism and the realities of everyday life.

Religion, politics, ethnicity Catholicism underpinned all Cristero social and political endeavours, but it would be simplistic to define the revolution as socially progressive and the Church as reactionary. Marjorie Becker’s research, for example, has shown how divisions were sometimes blurred, producing contradictory consequences (i.e. peasants pushing for land reform while also being devout Catholics).1 Cristero veterans later claimed that real private landownership, unlike the collective

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government ejidos, would have become widespread if only their ‘liberated zone’ had endured.2 Equally, government authorities supposedly receptive to petitions for land redistribution allowed their anti-Cristero feelings to obstruct them, as was the case when a community petition in Amacueca (Jalisco) was rejected by authorities on the grounds that it was promoted by Cristeros.3 Mapping the Cristero ‘home front’ is challenging given that the Cristero political community obviously ranged beyond what the Huejuquilla authorities could tax and control. Regions with a higher penetration of revolutionary ideals, especially in the forms of Federal education, the presence of Protestants and the relative weakness or superficiality of Catholicism, were likely to oppose the insurgency. By contrast, regions where the Church was more embedded, Federal education superficial or ‘hijacked’ by conservatives and Protestants minimal or non-existent were more likely to support the Cristiada. This pattern, explained in the research of Matthew Butler in Michoacán and Mary Kay Vaughan in the Sierra Norte de Puebla,4 also applies to Zacatecas and its borderlands, albeit in a context in which popular clericalism and conservative culture were generally much more embedded. Even in towns and cities controlled by the Federation, Church life went on thanks to fugitive priests and the protection of powerful families. The latter factor opened up a proxy ‘class’ conflict in Catholicism, as these powerful families were often accused of selfishness by enacting proprietary control over the priests and preventing the local poor from receiving Mass.5 Local differences ranged between and within regions determining whether the revolutionary programme of the ejidos undermining the ranchers and hacendados prevailed or there was counter-revolutionary resistance to it. For the former to prevail, a legacy of participation in the nineteenthcentury National Guard, a collective identity of peasants being mobilized for anticlericalism, liberal patriotism and the presence of Protestantism all increased its chances. For the latter to resist the ejidos, the lack of these factors plus the moral pressure of the Catholic Church (and its Social Catholic trade unions) were required, very much as pertained in most areas of the highlands of Jalisco. An additional factor was the ‘moral economy’, which in part saw rancheros and hacendados protest against the revolution which was giving ‘beggar’ Indians land they did not ‘deserve’ or even ‘know how to use’.6 When in 1927 some forested lands attached to a British-owned ironworks in Hidalgo



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state were claimed by local Indian communities, the British owner appealed for protection from the ministry of agriculture, claiming that ‘Indians will burn down fine old trees to plant a handful of corn’.7 Local Mexican propertied classes in cahoots with Cristeros tended to deride land recipients (agraristas) in a similar vein. Some Cristeros punned the agraristas ‘agarristas’ (snatchers) who snatched land not rightfully theirs.8 Proponents of revolutionary land reform, by contrast, pointed to the Church’s ‘usurpation’ of Indian land in the colonial era, accusing clericalism of being the long-standing saboteur of the Mexican ‘nation’.9 Anti-Revolutionary racism was particularly evident in the region of Alto Jalisco and its sociologically similar adjoining lands in Zacatecas, areas populated by modest landowners who were disproportionately white and who saw the disproportionately indigenous and mestizo soldiers of the Federal Army as thieves and ‘changos’, in much the same way as their colonial ancestors saw the indigenous communities. The irony behind this white racism was the fact that the post-revolutionary government was really trying to tame and control rather than liberate the indigenous population, and the image of the submissive Indian was central to post-revolutionary propaganda and iconography (Diego Rivera’s 1920s Christ-like mural of a sanitized Zapata flanked by two docile corn-bearing Indian women being a case in point as a counterpoint to the Cristero rebellion).10 Recent research in southern Durango suggests that indigenous communities choosing to fight for either side in the Cristero War did so for canny reasons of safeguarding or entrenching existing local power networks. A priori religious motives, as Jean Meyer maintained, or even ‘anti-state’ motives, were subordinate to the overall patterns of indigenous communities accepting either Cristero or government allegiance in order to protect costumbre and the local political–religious order.11 Alto Jalisco offered a cultural difference to the rest of Mexico which partly explained and shaped its support for the Cristero rebellion. The region had a far higher proportion than the national average of inhabitants of Spanish ancestry, many of whom had arrived as immigrants in the wake of the demographic devastation caused by the early nineteenth-century Independence wars, and still more as early as the sixteenth century.12 Smallholding and sharecropping dominated the region, and even those who worked on the ranches and haciendas usually had small ‘common-law’ plots of their own. Revolutionary

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land redistribution was therefore not necessary here as the land was already ‘divided’. The men were considered to be robust and good-looking  – highbacked or lomilargos as they are still known today  – and the women were known both for their beauty and for their dominant yet traditionalist role in the private sphere of the household. This region was also the Mexican ‘Corsica’, with a thriving culture of vendettas. Above all it was the strongest bastion of Catholicism in early twentieth-century Mexico. Even by the end of the century, some 22 per cent of all Mexican priests hailed from this region. In the build-up to the rebellion, these priests preached against Protestants, the United States and emigration to that ‘atheistic’ country, socialism etc., psychologically preparing their flocks for the coming armed struggle. Materially the region was known both for its horsemanship and its good side-arms.13 To some extent, the belligerence of the Jalisco highlands conformed to a general tendency visible since the revolutionary violence of 1911–23 for serranos to be more belligerent than inhabitants of the low-lying (and ironically more abusive) plantations of the south.14 The issue of racism is relevant because of the fascistization of interwar politics across the world which, in Mexico’s case, adopted a mestizo variety owing to Education Minster Vasconcelos’s theory of a ‘cosmic race’, or master race, being born out of the hybridity of Mexico’s racial heterogeneity. Yet the Cristero heartland was one of the whitest, rather than mestizo, parts of Mexico. ‘Pigmentocracy’ had long characterized elite values in Mexico. Writing in the 1920s, Ernest Gruening, a historian who spent most of the 1920s in Mexico studying the origins and impact of the revolution, scorned Mexico’s Francophile elite: ‘they despised everything natively Mexican, much as they looked down on its embodiment in the flesh, the lonely Mexican Indian’.15 Although the alteños could hardly be described as elites, they were European in terms of ethnicity on account of the lack of mestizaje in their corner of Mexico, stretching back to the Chichimeca Wars of the sixteenth century and following through to the ethnic legacy of Marshal Bazaine’s troops (and deserters) during the 1860s war. Their Catholicism was also European in its traditionalism. The Indianism of the Mexican Revolution and its secularizing demands thus presented the inward-looking alteños with an ethnic enemy, which was manifested in telling ways (such as when the Cristero resident of San Julián, Josefina Arellano, demonized the brown-skinned Federal General Saturnino Cedillo, ‘his face as



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dark as his uniform’).16 As the Catholic El Cruzado claimed in 1924: ‘We are responsible for this fall because we have abandoned the Indian; the rich and unjust are to blame, as are the theorizers and all the managers.’17 The Indian was viewed as a passive object for assimilation by a superior culture, either Catholic or revolutionary, in a one-directional assumption of ‘progress’ which was evident as late as the 1990s in the Mezquitic newspaper Mi Pueblo.18

Cristero political community In terms of Catholic practice, one of the paradoxes of the Cristero War was how much clandestinity was celebrated in government-held areas. The fundamentalist pro-Cristero writer Jesús Sanz Cerrada, for example, blessed the Callista persecution, ‘for without it, Catholic Mexico would bear the stigma of cowardice. Blessed persecution that turned each home into a temple!’.19 An elderly Zacatecas priest, alluding to illegal baptisms, fondly recalled the illicit practice of Catholic rites in safe houses: ‘In this city we saw miracles happen. A  human being, a tiny one in fact, would enter a home as a heathen and leave it as a Catholic.’20 Illicit religious practices bonded the Cristero political community outside the ‘liberated zone’. Certainly, there were episodes in 1926 in which the religious appeared to turn the ecclesiastical boycott into a focus for explicit rather than illicit mobilization. In Durango city the religious boycott of 3 August 1926 led to the presence in the city of the Padre Jesús brotherhood threatening the lives of public officials if the priest was forced to vacate his church, and their demonstration was supported by ‘several individuals, including women, armed with knives and stones threatening to kill the first public official entering the church in an official capacity’.21 Cocula (Jalisco) on 2 August 1926 was the scene of an altercation between Catholic women led by a schoolmistress and the civil power. The women had mounted guard since the suspension of worship two days before, determined to prevent the premises being ‘profaned’ by the incoming stock-taking tasked to a residents’ committee. After the women had repulsed the mayor the previous day, he returned the following day to seize the church protected by the local priest who was forced to walk in front of him as a human shield. Yet judge Cedano was a marked man. When he was later seen

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walking without protection the women mobbed him, mortally stabbing him in the back. This lynching at the outset of the Cristero War conformed to the pattern of ‘defensive violence’ identified by Ben Fallaw in respect of the 1930s revolt. Spontaneous ‘defensive’ violence responding to specific provocations – often involving women as avengers – was different from bloodier and systematic ‘offensive’ violence as the war progressed.22 Guadalajara, meanwhile, witnessed deaths caused by an exchange of fire between Catholics and troops as local women seized control of the Santuario de Guadalupe ahead of the feared stock-taking.23 These standoffs usually ended peacefully or at least quickly after blood was spilled. But Catholic women’s activism can in many acts be considered the first insurgency of the Cristero War. The phenomenon of clandestine religiosity contrasts with the open practice of Catholicism in areas ‘liberated’ by the Cristeros. The Cristero liberated zone, centred on Huejuquilla, became a mini-state modelled on the 1857 Constitution minus its anticlerical ordinances, in other words, a Catholic state.24 The Mezquitic Congress of 1928 imposed a Catholic constitution on the liberated zone. On 5 June 1928, this congress ratified the charter and war aims of the Cristero movement in the form of the ‘Ordenanza General del Movimiento Cristero’.25 In October 1927 the LNDLR issued its ‘Manifesto to the Nation’: its peace terms included a return to the 1857 Constitution minus the Laws of Reform and including the 1926 ‘national plebiscite’ legislation (which required at least two million signatures) and desiring a peace settlement based upon the reconciliation of landowners and ejidatarios via compensation for the former.26 The 1928 congress turned Mezquitic into the second city of the rebellion behind Huejuquilla. Cristero Mezquitic’s civilian administration was led by Daniel Cruz, and liturgical life flourished alongside official puritanism. Priests married couples in the liberated zone, and after the ‘Arreglos’ these couples hurried to confirm their marriages in civil law.27 The ‘bottom-up’ practice of Catholic rites was not unique to the Jalisco–Zacatecas borderlands, as regional studies of Catholic communities in the Sierra Norte of Puebla during the 1930s and Michoacán in both Cristero revolts have shown.28 Clerical militancy was largely a spiritual affair. Certainly ‘spiritual’ support from priests often exacerbated the violence and insecurity, such as when Father Montoya of Valparaíso at the start of the war compiled a black list of the few non-Catholics in his locality.29 But the agency of local clerics also created tension between



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them and the bishops. The moral pressure of fugitive priests and the fugitive archbishop of Guadalajara gave moral authority and pressure to the Cristero militants without in any way being either accountable or responsible to them. The failure of the Church hierarchy to take responsibility had been a feature of the war since 1926, when the bishops, not the government, ordered priests to cease ministering in churches, and priests rather than higher ranks, suffered from the subsequent government repression.30 This complex relationship explains the popular bitterness at the 1929 Arreglos and, especially, the fury at the Church’s behaviour during the second Cristiada of the 1930s, when it effectively excommunicated Cristero militants.31 The Alto Jalisco, Three Fingers and Zacatecas heartland had its capital in Huejuquilla which claimed to represent the whole of Mexico. Unlike more exposed Cristero strongholds in Colima, Michoacán and Guanajuato, the heartland controlled by Huejuquilla was both contiguous and generally free from lengthy Federal invasions. The result was the most developed sociopolitical planning anywhere in Cristero Mexico, planning which nonetheless expressed its own paradox. The so-called liberated zone was dominated by highlanders (serranos) with their own innate scepticism towards state authority which sometimes railed against friendly authorities in Huejuquilla as much as the enemy in the surrounding state capitals. General Acevedo, for example, was very anti-militarist, not just because of his self-made ranchero background but also because of his association of militarism with the ravages of the revolution.32 In order to guard against the ravages, Acevedo insisted on order and discipline in the ranks, in contrast to Pedro Quintanar, whose ill-disciplined ‘Libres de Huejuquilla’ troops often provoked his censure.33 Acevedo’s plea not to attack agraristas outside his home town, knowing that such an act would provoke an unwelcome Federal army garrison, was overruled by Pedro Quintanar, and nearby Cristero ranchers were encumbered by a garrison as a result.34 Quintanar’s hard military line was accompanied by his hard cultural line of enforcing puritan prohibitions on leisure and licence.35 The Cristero statelet was officially in ‘mourning’, which resulted in puritanical prohibitions on alcohol, dancing and even religious festivities, a policy which hardened despite growing resistance by early 1929. The flourishing of Cristero ballads (corridos) in part reflected the prohibition of other entertainments, meaning that patriotic anti-Federal singing could reflect

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either hegemonic Cristero propaganda or an emancipatory protest at official puritanism, depending on the context.36 On 29 August 1928, Monte Escobedo (Zacatecas) was witness to a parody of the national anthem being sung whose words threatened death for anyone proposing a ‘shameful peace’.37 General Aurelio Acevedo’s native Valparaíso was celebrated in the Cristero press for its rigorous mourning, even if Acevedo himself rejected fundamentalist, puritanical dress restrictions on women.38 But the dark mourning attire of women also served a logistical function, as seamstresses working in such towns as Huejuquilla maximized other coloured textiles in order to produce scarce clothing (let alone decent uniforms) for Cristero soldiers.39 Areas fully under Cristero control like Huejuquilla were thus subjected to propaganda and logistically useful self-denial ordinances related to mourning. The only agrarian reform which took place in the Catholic statelet was contingent upon the war. Social Catholic pleas made during the 1920s to Zacatecas hacendados to redistribute land fell on deaf ears. There was a ‘Social Catholic’ discourse dedicated to helping develop smallholding, albeit either via state purchase of lands or via various forms of leaseholding, sharecropping or use-ownership from existing hacendados, in other words, anything short of ‘Bolshevik’ expropriation. In any case, the First Catholic Workers’ Congress, meeting in 1922, offered plenty of homilies about the selfish rich and the moral lapses of the poor, but none of this amounted to much in practice.40 The British ambassador believed that the primacy of the land problem swayed the countryside more in favour of agrarianism rather than of Cristo Rey. Esmond Ovey thought comparisons between the Cristeros and Irish nationalists were misplaced as Mexico’s ‘Catholic rebels are opposed to the distribution of land among their fellow peasants’.41 Certainly, Zacatecas shows little evidence of Cristeros playing to anti-hacienda feeling. Jerez (Zacatecas) flourished as a town precisely because the burden of surrounding haciendas was comparatively light, whereas Villanueva in the same state languished in poverty and misery because the burden of surrounding haciendas was so much greater.42 Where the burden of Zacatecas haciendas was great, this created proCristero sentiment, if not outright militancy. Villanueva’s beleaguered garrison was testament to the power of the Cristero haciendas. After skirmishes began in December 1926, local raids intensified the following year. A small rising by Leonardo Villa scored local successes raiding weakly garrisoned haciendas in



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southern Zacatecas and northern Aguascalientes, seizing horses and arms from their agrarista and Federal guards. Over the course of 1928 attacks increased, including on Villanueva itself, as Villa’s group was merged into the veteran ‘Libres of Jalpa’, hard-bitten Defensa veterans of the revolution who had sided with the Cristeros in 1926 and were led by Jose María ‘Chema’ Gutierrez. In operations coordinated with José Velasco’s force in Aguascalientes, some eighty agraristas from Villanueva were defeated in a pitched battle on 16 April 1929. Villanueva itself was occupied for a day on 3 May 1929 when the Cristeros burnt the houses of their enemies, while the agraristas fortified themselves in the church-tower until a Federal column arrived to flush out the invaders with losses on both sides.43 The ancient land question in Mexico rose to pre-eminence as the Mexican Revolution, a ‘farm’ revolution, was shaped by radical attempts either to reform the Porfirian abuses or to mitigate them through ‘Social Catholic’ ideas which informed Cristero political thinking. The landowners’ Agrarian League, inspired by the CNCA of Spain, proposed the Raiffeisen system of mutualism and cheap credit as a means of implementing the doctrines of Rerum Novarum.44 At local levels agricultural crisis was a factor in popular support for the Cristeros, as was the case, for example, in several areas of Jalisco (especially, Arandas) in 1926.45 Yet Mexico in general was gripped by agrarian conflict, which was typically expressed in disputes about access to water, as haciendas gradually lost their monopoly over irrigation and ejidos with varying success tried to secure their own water rights (and hence productive lands) for the first time.46 Revolutionary municipal reforms were answered by counterrevolutionary resistance. The municipal minutes of the Saltillo, Coahuila, on the eve of the war in 1926 were typical in their focus on Federal education on the one hand, and on a myriad of local land and water disputes on the other.47 Even before the Cristero rising in 1926, local disputes between agraristas and hacendados, sometimes violent and sometimes in the form of ‘dirty tricks’ (such as the flooding or damning of lands to be designated as ejidos), foreshadowed the conflict. It was not just a case of monolithical revolutionary authorities against a monolithical Church, but rather the Church, for one, could enlist all sorts of moral and psychological resistance to revolutionary land and education reforms which fell short of the armed rising of 1926. The early 1920s in Michoacán saw the resilience of the local Church hierarchy to

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agrarismo, such as excommunication, or the withholding of the Eucharist from agraristas, also of forming rival ‘white’ Social Catholic unions to militate against the anticlerical ‘yellow’ CROM. Other resilience was less subtle. Mob violence rose against the ‘shameless bandits’ of the agraristas and their reforms which disturbed the traditional moral economy of the hacendados, benefited ‘indolent’ Indian villagers, with the result that the award of government land cast its recipients as ‘beggars’.48 Finally, as Matthew Butler makes clear, no power vacuums were allowed to exist in areas dominated by the Cristero side. If moral pressure was not enough, ‘hacienda guns generally did the rest’.49 The stasis in Zacatecas and Alto Jalisco can be explained not just by revolutionary and reactionary hatred but also by the peculiarly millenarian discourse which captivated 1920s Catholics with regard to the threat of revolutionary land reform. Time and again their meetings and newspapers denounced the threat to property as a kind of divine punishment for Mexico’s ills. Contemporary Catholicism also viewed the mestizo poor as passive objects worthy of salvation. Catholic newspaper targeting workers (El Obrero) on 14 June 1923 shared the sentiment of the Fallen:  ‘Nowadays the hacienda dog is treated better than its servants.’50 Cristero General Carlos Blanco recalled that the revolutionary principle of land redistribution was excellent in theory, but badly applied: ‘Mexico, like the rest of Latin America, suffers from a land problem of backward production unable to keep pace with modern demands … leading to abandoned lands, underproduction, and the migration of labourers to the United States.’51 Social Catholic organizations during the early 1920s gave serious thought to redistributing land, partly motivated by social justice, but mostly by the desire to form a Catholic bloc in the countryside to arrest the growth of pro-government agrarianism. But once the insurrection began in 1926, the practice of Cristero land reform reverted to the ‘divine punishment’ of robbing and expropriating landowners on the government side. In this conflict it is important to stress that the Mexican bishops did not openly support armed resistance (and one expressly opposed it), but most supported it implicitly.52 The Bishop of Morelia called for a day’s fast to be observed on 8 December 1926 in order to atone for the ‘sins of the fatherland’, a measure which outlined a growing culture of mourning.53 Despite this ‘orphaning’ of the insurrection, we see a direct link between clericalized forms of Catholicism and later Cristero violence. The nine states with the highest



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density of priests per capita in 1910 (Nayarit, Colima, Jalisco, Michoacán, Aguascalientes, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Zacatecas and Durango) form a near-perfect geography of the Cristero revolt. The Cristero heartland, Los Altos, produced Cristero militants not only for itself but also for dispatch into Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, Colima and Michoacán, the reverse of what happened during the revolution when revolutionaries tended to migrate from Zacatecas to Los Altos54 The northern Jalisco–Zacatecas region produced not only a high concentration of Cristero militants but also a high number of militant priests. These priests came not only from this area but also as refugees from government-held areas elsewhere. The presence of priests in this region led to calls from Durango Cristeros for some to be spared for their own spiritual guidance.55 Also there were variations within these states between clericalized areas (e.g. los Altos de Jalisco, Calvillo in Aguascalientes) and ambivalent or anti-Cristero areas.56 What Calvillo and the Altos of Jalisco also shared with each other, beyond the clericalization model identified in the Butler model, is the predominant small farmstead (‘parvifundio’) form of agriculture which, like in Carlist Navarra in Spain, promoted armed resistance to revolutionary land reform.57 As Matthew Butler showed in the clericalized areas of Michoacán, as late as the 1920s tithes continued to be paid despite the lack of legal compulsion.58 Such moral compulsion links to Meyer’s more recent reappraisal of the geographic limits of the rebellion. Ciudad Hidalgo in this state was typical of this ingrained religiosity, as here the 1920s witnessed a Catholic integralism based on popular support and believing that its interests were superior to those of the civil authorities, and were exercised in both public and private ways. The belief was common that religious values should be defended with violence if necessary (and, in fact, most violent protestors later became Cristeros).59 The Calles regime sharpened the intelligence tools at its disposal with the creation in 1923 of the Confidential Department, which monitored the activities of Cristero sympathisers and militants exiled to the United States and violated the freedom of international travel guaranteed to Mexicans in the 1917 Constitution by exiling and barring from return real and imagined Cristero militants.60 The Constitution also empowered Federal authorities to expel any foreigner from the Republic with 24 hours’ notice and without giving cause.61

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This scenario of proto-Cristero resistance to revolutionary land reform and Federal education was even more blatant in the rebellion’s 1926–9 heartland of rural Jalisco. Land reform was decreed, leading to very mixed results. Local antagonisms, personalisms and score-settling distorted its implementation. Ejidos were decreed but often never created, or were assigned to marginal lands or lands that ended up being flooded by nature or malice. Often there was no pattern in rationale why particular haciendas were targeted for land grants whereas others were not.62 In 1927, the Unión Nacionalista Mexicana complained how the ejidos in fertile parts of the Bajío had depressed production to levels below those pertaining before the revolution.63 Local priests often led the resistance. The priest of Autlán (Jalisco) in 1924 threatened excommunication to whomever followed socialism or agrarismo.64 ‘Land or sacraments’ was the cry of Crescenciano Aguilar, the chaplain of the hacienda at El Castillo, Jalisco, who ended up being murdered on 13 September 1926, not long after the war had started.65 Many indigenous communities heeded Catholic priests in rejecting ejidos so as not to be excommunicated.66 The Church hoped to patronize the poor away from coveting the wealthy’s land (reserving excommunication as the ultimate sanction). Local attempts by Catholic hierarchy to fight ‘Bolshevik’ Protestant priests, or to depict them as agents of gringo imperialism, often led to the excommunication of villagers who dared send their children to state or Protestant schools, and non-Catholic doctors were considered beyond the pale except in emergencies.67 Certainly, the fear of land reform increased from 23 April 1927 when the Calles government issued the Law of Dotation and Restitution of Lands and Waters, streamlining the hitherto faltering land redistribution process and empowering most rural stakeholders apart from very small villages and resident labourers on estates.68 But the impact of this law was not yet felt beyond certain central states and a few pockets of the north. In Zacatecas haciendas proved remarkably resilient into the 1930s when the first ejidos finally appeared in significant numbers in this state. In the generally ejido-less centre-west, meanwhile, ‘land reform’ continued to rage as a visceral motive for Cristero versus government violence. As such the only official Cristero ‘land reform’ came with the expropriation of the property of known agraristas.69 Often such actions conformed to the pattern explained by Jennie Purnell in Michoacán, where local and often long-standing



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grievances persuaded villagers to become Cristero in a rational pretext to seize land from neighbouring ‘enemy’ communities.70 But, unofficially, Cristero militants performed their own ‘land reform’ by subsisting on estates that were not under their protection. The British owner of the 147,000-acre hacienda at Alcihuatl (Autlán, Jalisco) had hoped to remain ‘neutral’ upon finding himself in a war zone. Few conflict areas in Jalisco permitted rural producers to remain neutral. Large numbers of small producers in Villa Guerrero opted for ‘neutrality’ between the rival factions in their town, but discovered that this decision exposed them to confiscations from both ‘changos’ and Cristeros, the Cristeros proving more opportunistic with their cry ‘Viva Cristo Rey, traeme el mejor buey!’ (‘Long Live Christ the King and steal me the best ox!’).71 The owner of Alcihuatl being foreign could not help being ‘neutral’, and this exposed him as fair game for the stronger side, the Cristeros, who from spring 1927 lived off his estate. Bertie Johnson fled to the government-held local head town of Autlán. His case was taken up by the British vice-consul at Guadalajara who, having discovered that the local agrarista forces of Juan Sánchez Gómez had not lifted a finger to expel the Cristero occupiers, surmised that ‘Agrarista troops are scarcely to be depended upon for the defence of large, foreign estates, since they are constitutionally opposed to the theory of large land holdings and they are usually not well affected towards foreigners’.72

Control and collaboration As in several other civil wars involving an insurgent side, the Cristero methods of controlling civilian populations ranged from ‘hearts and minds’ to indiscriminate violence. As Stathis Kalyvas has explained, insurgents’ violence arises in inverse proportion to their territorial control. Kalyvas identifies five types of territorial control, ranging from areas entirely controlled by the incumbent side to areas entirely with the insurgents, with three progressive types in between, including, significantly for our study of front-line communities in western Zacatecas, the third type of fully contested territory where neither side seemed to have the upper hand.73 Fully contested areas, or areas mostly or entirely controlled by the Federation, were more likely to be subjected to indiscriminate Cristero violence. In these areas civilians and especially their

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paramilitary agrarista proxies were identified as a collective enemy because of their geographical location and political affiliation. By contrast, areas fully under Cristero control, like large areas surrounding Huejuquilla, and to a lesser extent areas mostly under Cristero control, were subjected to a range of political and religious forms of propaganda designed to shore up support, maximize military resources and minimize defection. Cristero violence in these areas tended to be selective, akin to law enforcement. For their part, Cristeros also penalized real and imagined enemies within. Certainly Protestants and Jews, rich or not, were targeted with special zeal.74 Violence, confiscation and threats emanated from Cristero authorities in the liberated zone against ranches and haciendas nominally already under their control. The chaos caused by failed maize harvests and stranded cattle led to excesses which were reprimanded by the puritanical authorities. Meat was consumed to excess by a Cristero rank-and-file who in peace time could afford little meat but who in wartime gorged on the haciendas while the intimidated hacienda managers looked the other way.75 Sometimes, warnings were issued against ‘immoral’ wrongdoing, couched in puritanical terms suitably devoid of explicit detail. In May 1929, a young Huejuquilla ranchero was formally admonished for ‘corruption’ on his ranch and his failure to attend Sunday Mass, setting an immoral example to his young employees who also failed to attend.76 Sometimes even very pious ranches attracted the ire of the Cristero administration. The lady of the hacienda at Mirandilla in Atenguillo was known for her piety, but she exasperated the administration by refusing to yield forced loans.77 This hacienda example conformed to a pattern identified by Jim Tuck of wealthy Catholics in Cristero zones of control treading a fine line between reluctant compliance and virtual collaboration with Federal authorities.78 Collaboration included a few extreme examples, such as Father Emeterio, parish priest of Chimaltitán (Jalisco), who was the brother of a local cacique and a light aircraft pilot who flew Federal officers around the region.79 The Cristero officer, Trinidad Mora, kept a diary of operations in Zacatecas and Durango from late 1926 to May 1927, complaining of the reluctance of landowners to supply his men:  ‘We have nothing more than God’s help for the wealthy of this areas have shown themselves selfish with their money. If pushed they yield some maize, and the rest they reconcentrate in Durango.



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We go without horses, money and clothes, and receive nothing from inside or outside the villages we traverse.’80 In the Cristero heartland along the Jalisco–Zacatecas borderlands, the Cristeros generally found a warmer welcome, or at least were successful at intimidation. One veteran recalled how some gave supplies ‘of their own will, others because they were forced, but most gave of their own will’.81 The vast majority of landowners who were not foreigners sometimes tried to ameliorate Cristero pillage by appealing to higher Cristero authorities. The ranchero of Tepehuey, Melquiades Sánchez, complained of the zealous and frequent visits of Cristero fighters and begged that these be reduced or that they at least be accompanied by armed priests in future who might control their men. Sánchez was disappointed by the reply reminding him to shoulder the burden of the war effort and that the Holy See forbade priests to take up arms, even though they might minister to Cristeros.82 Priests were often the fulcrum of Cristero civil-military relations. Jean Meyer’s analysis reveals ambivalence in the politics of the Mexican priests. Whereas he found 100 actively anti-Cristero priests, he also found forty in support, a further five actually in armed support, sixty-five neutrals and some ninety priests executed by the government (for either their real or imagined Cristero sympathies).83 It is hard to quantify the number of priests who indirectly supported the rebellion, such as Osio Leyva, a priest arrested early in 1928 in Mexico City for having distributed clerical propaganda and hosting a weapons laboratory in his home.84 Cristero priests were disproportionately found in Alto Jalisco and Zacatecas (feeding government propaganda representations). These tended to be ‘ranchero’ priests, strongly linked by family and environment to Cristero militants, and they tended to carry weapons for self-defence. The Federal 75th battalion occupying Colotlán (Jalisco) in May 1927 executed a priest and a presbyter in its custody. Popular mourning for the martyred religious had a sectarian dimension as the condemned men were finished off by a local Protestant, Primitivo Huizar, one of the first local agraristas who thus enjoyed the confidence of the government authorities. The Huizar heresy was assuaged by Primitivo’s cousin, a Protestant woman and director of the infant school, who endeared herself to the mourning townsfolk by successfully requesting coffins for the executed religious.85

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Martyred priests rallied Catholic civilians in passive opposition to the Federation. Mateo Correa, priest of Valparaíso (Zacatecas), was arrested leaving San José de Llanetes (Valparaíso) on an errand to administer last rites. Correa had made himself notorious accepting armed Cristero escorts for illicit Masses, including some in open air underneath the shade of trees. He was escorted to Durango and ordered to reveal details of confessions he had heard from condemned men. After Mateo Correa refused, he was executed, and his bloodied sweater and skull fragments later made their way as relics to his sisters in Fresnillo.86 They in turn cultivated a miracle story around their demised brother, claiming that he died ‘a martyr and innocent victim in Christ’s cause … even animals respected his corpse, and the faithful of Durango came from far and wide to collect his blood and hair like relics’.87 Innovations included popular martyrs and heroes being forged ‘from below’ and canonized by popular religiosity.88 This development led to a profusion of miracle stories, such as that of Cristero Lieutenant Luis Castañeda, who escaped being captured during an action at the end of 1928 by throwing a stone at a Federal soldier which miraculously struck his wrist forcing him to release his pistol. The pistol flew forwards into Castañada’s hands, allowing the prostrate Cristero to shoot dead his tormentor, recover his rifle and live to fight another day.89 These providential phenomena sustained military morale as well as revealing, as Matthew Butler’s research has shown, the imaginative and ideational world of civilian Cristeros and their refashioning of religious iconography.90 Miracles and martyrdom were not the preserve of the religious; they could also be attained by soldiers of faith. Cristero propaganda accepted death in combat as ‘martyrdom’, and even the post-war veterans’ newspaper David regularly reported regrets by ageing participants that they had not given their lives in the struggle in order to enter paradise. Apocalyptic propaganda, redemption and martyrdom were not unique to the Cristero War. The cult of revolutionary France idealized self-sacrifice, the Girondins’ ‘regeneration through blood’ and the Convention’s parade of the ‘atrociously mutilated’, romanticized martyrs for their perceived ideology and French revolutionary propaganda contended that ‘it is beautiful to perish’.91 Dying for a cause allowed Cristeros to give meaning to their lives, allowing their deaths to be



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publicly owned and venerated and thus turned into a type of unimpeachable discourse in a manner comparable to militants in other twentieth-century conflicts with a religious dimension.92 A  17-year-old Cristero from Los Altos, Jesús Asencio, was captured in an action with Federal troops at San Miguel el Alto (Jalisco) whose commander recognized his bravery. Ordering Asencio’s execution, General Martínez twice offered the young Cristero his life in return for defecting to the government side. But Asencio was reported as rejecting mercy, saying, ‘ten days ago I left home as a soldier of Cristo Rey, and I could never live down the shame of returning as a callista turncoat, so please shoot me’.93 Martyrdom absolved Cristero soldiers and priests of their frailties. Martyred priests sometimes served the Cristeros better than live ones. Whereas their morale-boosting presence in some ways could be welcome, in other ways the presence of a priest could turn against Cristero exactions like those attempted at Tepehuey, and in some cases could rebound on Cristero operations themselves. Imprisoned priests sometimes did the government bidding of writing letters to Cristeros pleading that they turn themselves in. When the priest of San José de Márquez (Jalisco) fell into the hands of defensas campaigning from Jerez, he successfully pleaded for his life in return for betraying the whereabouts of nearby Cristeros.94 Even Cristero priests who kept their nerve could still provoke government reprisals. After the priest Ángel Valdéz joined Carlos Blanco’s mission to Durango and Chihuahua, his father living in Totatiche (Jalisco) was hanged in reprisal.95 As the war intensified, so did the punishments meted out by the Huejuquilla authorities in the liberated zone to anyone refusing forced loans and reconcentration, outright confiscation for anyone obeying the Calles government or paying its taxes and death to outright collaborators with the Calles government.96 Particular effort was placed upon controlling and seizing arms, always the weakest link on a Cristero home front devoid of large-scale industry or secure ways of importing arms. The risks of artisanal arms production were laid bare on 13 November 1927 when General Dionisio Eduardo Ochoa, Cristero zone commander in Colima since January, died of burns he received manufacturing home-made bombs by hand.97 The economy of the Cristero ‘liberated zone’ was entirely mobilized for war:  50 per cent

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of taxes levied funded the National Guard, and a further 25 per cent funded regional defence. Besides the Huejuquilla authorities added penalty payments to leave the army, fees for safe conduct passes and a range of taxes, ransoms and forced loans, in their desperate bid to fund the war effort. The critical maize harvest was partly rescued by the enlistment for farm work of all non-fighting males from the age of 12 who did not redeem themselves with a 100 peso payment, and by the frequent employment of off-duty regiments for agricultural labour. Even so, the 1929 harvest in Zacatecas was only one quarter of normal production.98

Violence beyond the political community: Hard As the Cristeros were always a battlefield state, exposed at any moment to Federal incursions, the fluidity of territorial control dictated options for repression and control. Where Cristeros expected to remain largely in control, as one of the two of the five zone models described by Stathis Kalyvas, the Cristeros were incentivized to behave as ‘stationary’ insurgents, moderating their military and logistical demands as much as possible in order to shore up popular collaboration and the intelligence networks this offered. The short-term costs for ‘stationary’ insurgency in terms of forgoing pillage were high, yet the longterm benefits promised to be substantial. By contrast, areas beyond Cristero political control which offered only temporary occupation at best were more likely to be used for short-term benefit, namely by pillage and intimidatory killings, prioritizing the short-term gains over long-term costs. In these areas, Cristeros were indeed ‘bandits’ for they were targeting individuals either explicitly beyond the insurgent political community (in the case of agraristas and their pro-government Defensas) or implicitly by being civilians under Federal control.99 The Federation often exercised the same implicit calculations in their strategy. When General Ortiz’s four hundred-strong force of soldiers and agraristas raided Huejuquilla on 4 September 1926, his troops, even at this early stage of hostilities, treated the inhabitants as outside the political community, sacking shops, robbing private houses and rustling cattle.100 But the insurgent Cristero side, unlike the incumbent nominally in control of most territory, had to make these calculations on a daily basis.



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Confiscation was also enacted by Federal authorities as a means of punishing the relatives of Cristero rebels. Boys caught aiding the Cristeros were sometimes sent to reform schools in order to be deradicalized.101 In August 1927 the sacristan José Trinidad Mora, who commanded a Cristero band raiding Santa María de Ocotán (Mezquital, Durango), ‘liberated’ a reform school: ‘we released some youths from a boarding school (internado) where the Government was driving them to perdition, and we took all we could, including the son of the school director whom we have as our prisoner’.102 Families in Federal areas of control were punished if they had sons fighting with the Cristeros. A father in Nayar (Durango) who had fled with his Cristero son had his house confiscated in his absence and complained in December 1929 that Federal troops were still billeted at his property, preventing him from returning home despite the supposed amnesty offered under the ‘Arreglos’.103 Given the remoteness of the insurgency in Mexico’s centre-west Cristero reprisals usually fell upon isolated communities and individuals. In early 1928 Federal troops and defensas dispersed some 150 Cristeros after fighting in western Durango. The Cristeros retreated towards Nayarit in groups, including that led by Valente Acevedo, whose men en route made an example of an unfortunate farmworker from the Nayar called Fernando Santillana who, having refused to join the Cristeros, was shot and his body left to decompose hanging from a tree.104 The Cristero policy of reconcentrating livestock and population away from Federal incursions provoked complaints from cattle rearers that their animals had to be moved to inappropriate terrain and away from markets or be abandoned as ‘fair game’.105 In some instances renegade Cristero authorities also robbed cattle. A veteran recalled how Aurelio Acevedo disciplined a local judge who had falsified cattle ownership by abusing his official stamp.106 In many ways this Cristero counter-blockade aggravated the sufferings already inflicted on front-line communities by Federal reconcentration. By July 1927, for example, the local LNDLR was complaining of rising hunger across Los Altos-Zacatecas border region.107 In areas where the Cristeros managed to dominate a large area of countryside they managed to make provisions for their civilians. But in most areas control remained in flux and civilians were at the mercy of marauding soldiers. In May 1927 Cristero patrols near Santa Elena (Durango) encountered about ten large families living in a cave by a stream. The patrol approached two men bathing in the stream. The bathers ran

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for their rifles, but halted when the captain shouted that ‘we are on the same side’ and identified his unit to them.108

Violence beyond the political community: Soft As the war progressed, the Cristeros grew increasingly opportunistic in their battle for resources, sometimes targeting foreigners. In part this was felt in the targeting of small foreign communities perceived to have been profiting from the chaos. There was certainly no mass xenophobia in the government centrewest, any more than there had been during the revolution. The endogenous nature of the Mexican Revolution, Alan Knight argued, did not automatically mean that it was xenophobic. Even though some 250 Chinese were massacred in Torreón in 1910, they appear to have been targeted on economic grounds and there is little subsequent evidence of systematic persecution of foreigners, even against the deeply unpopular Spaniards.109 Admittedly, Chinese merchants in Durango state appear to have been expressly targeted for robbery in September 1926 by a band led by Juan Galindo, leading the Chinese legation to complain about security.110 In fact, foreigners were targeted for economic reasons, as a later ‘Miting Anti-Chino’ attended in Durango in December 1926 (which both legation and state government were relieved passed without incident), proves.111 Certainly, the presence of Spanish landowners and their agrarian allies who throughout 1912 defied the agrarian claims of villagers in such locations as Michoacán did produce a certain agrarista memory of antigachupín sentiment.112 During General Urbalejo’s ‘Renovador’ rebellion, for example, two Spaniards were arrested in rural Durango on charges of being his accomplices as well as conniving with hacendados to frustrate the provision of ejidos.113 But the accounts of kidnappings of foreigners working in mining and forestry are symptoms of economic opportunism more than anything else. The capture and ransoming of a Japanese who was unfortunate enough to have been in Cihuatlán (Jalisco) during a Cristero raid into that coastal town at the end of October 1928 is further evidence of opportunism.114 Foreign-owned properties, like the 145,000-acre hacienda of Alcihuatl (Autlán, Jalisco), could invoke diplomatic pressure against Cristero occupation. The British woman Joan Ryan, who managed Bertie Johnson’s hacienda at



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Alcihuatl, fled to the safety of the head-town of Autlán after the first night of Cristero occupation: About 125 of them arrived suddenly about 2pm. All of them and all of their horses had to be fed and the first thing that they did was to take all our horses out of the corral and tie them up with their horses – and that was just after one of the leaders had just assured us that they never stole anything. I was so annoyed that I asked him why if they never stole they had taken all my horses. He did not say anything but ordered his men to give me back my horses. I had a new mare which had just arrived and I was very much afraid I was going to lose her. However, they did not take any of our animals. They all stayed the night and we saw them off the next morning about 6 am, and were congratulating ourselves on being rather lucky when a woman who keeps the Johnsons’ little shop came over and said she had overheard one of the chiefs, a man Lucas Cuevas, and several others saying that they were going to carry me off on their way back and that if Barney made a fuss they would shoot him!115

So began the protracted Cristero occupation of Alcihuatl and its considerable food supplies. Repeated letters from hacendado Bertie Johnson pleaded with the British vice-consulate at Guadalajara to stress to the Federal authorities that neither he nor his dependents left on the hacienda were willingly collaborating with the rebels:  ‘We are NOT willingly helping the rebels, but if they come and fortify themselves in the Hacienda what are we to do? We do not invite them.’116 The vital support offered by the United States to the Calles sometimes motivated Cristero militancy. Cristero Brigadier-General Maximiliano Vigueras throughout 1928 allied with Zapatista elements in preying on traffic between Mexico City and Cuernavaca and Puebla. In December he was captured and executed after having confessed to a plot to kidnap US ambassador Dwight Morrow, author of the future ‘Arreglos’.117 But the general pattern of both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary targeting of foreigners appears to have been opportunistic. For example, American mining employees in July 1927 were held up by large parties of Cristeros near Colotlán (Jalisco).118 Two foreign employees of the San Nicolás Mining and Milling Company (based at Las Vacas, Durango), one British and the other American, were kidnapped by ‘bandits’ early in 1929 and taken to Cristero-held Huejuquilla, Jalisco.119 In

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other words, xenophobic activism during the Cristero War just as during the revolution, was opportunistic rather than ideological. For their part foreign mine owners were barely enamoured of the government. In Etzatlán (Jalisco) the Amparo Mining Company early in 1929 cooperated with their Cristero occupation not just because of Cristero strength but also because they feared the greater evil of communist infiltration, as had already happened on a greater scale in Jalisco’s textile industry.120 ‘Soft’ violence ranges beyond extortion into the realm of propaganda. Propaganda transcended the political community (and non-community). It was an inherently modern device used by both sides:  reaffirming the Federation’s claim to govern every corner of the republic on the one hand, and the Cristero claim to be a regime-in-waiting on the other. The Cristero home front was subjected to government propaganda just as much as it generated it. In March 1929 the ‘liberated zone’ was subjected to a new type of bombardment. Government aircraft dropped onto Cristero villages copies of the Mexico City press, including El Universal and Excélsior.121 Propaganda campaigns persisted after the Arreglos, even when military campaigns had formally ended. The LNDLR, already bristling at the Church hierarchy’s support for the armistice and facing clerical pressure to drop the ‘Religious’ from its title, switched to peaceful propaganda for the time being, which during the second half of 1929 meant supporting the anti-system presidential campaign of Jose Vasconcelos. The pro-Cristero propaganda effort reached its apogee at the end of 1929. During June–September the LNDLR published some 43,056 propaganda sheets, 863 pamphlets, 291 photographs and 1,961 assorted instructions, circulars and reports. These 46,171 documents were distributed across Mexico City and sent across the rest of the country in 82 illicit dispatches.122 Even though the fighting of the Cristero War was over, the LNDLR used the election campaign to urge Catholics to vote against the official PNR candidate and feeble placeman hand-picked by Calles, Pascual Ortiz Rubio. Throughout October 1929 the LNDLR maximized its propaganda budget, distributing across the country some 40,000 leaflets titled ‘Hay obligación de votar’.123 An LNDLR member reported her concern at the rioting caused by pro-Vasconcelos election meetings in San Luis Potosí.124 The government press decried the violence, but without pinpointing its main



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culprit in the PNR: ‘All social classes are lamenting the onset of this violence, contrary to the tolerance that should exist, and it is hoped that once passions have abated all will work towards national reconstruction.’125 José Vasconcelos had no chance against the revolutionary ‘steamroller’ of fraud, threats and corruption, and the official PNR candidate won by a landslide.126

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This chapter analyses the strains caused by the war on non-combatants living in areas normally free of fighting. It shows how the economic strains caused a collapse of normal local government, provoking a spiral of blockades and blockade-running, driven as much by necessity and opportunism as by identification with the Cristero or government side. It studies civil–military crises, tensions between police and paramilitaries operating under Federal Army command and how the presence of garrisons and expeditions impacted on non-combatants. The chapter also studies passive collaboration with, and passive resistance to, Federal and state ‘political counter-insurgency’. In particular, it explains both passive pro-Cristero and passive anti-state responses to anticlericalism and Federal education, and how these reverberated across long-standing local conflicts and gender. As explained in the previous chapters, the economic paralysis caused by Catholic boycotts, government reconcentration and Cristero counterblockades devastated front-line communities in terms of treasure as well as blood. Yet the effects of this paralysis were also felt away from areas of fighting, in what we might term the government ‘home front’. A  better measure of the economic crisis can be gauged in a study of the municipalities. Even government communities spared Cristero assaults were nonetheless devastated in economic terms. By spring 1927, in the context of the ‘Great Strike’ affecting railways throughout Mexico, municipal budgets in Zacatecas reported impossible financial strains. In early 1927, miners, bricklayers and associated trades staged a lock-in against municipal layoffs. Their leader, Francisco Hernández, rejected police accusations that he was a ‘red’ (even if he admitted that reds had tried to recruit him) and stressed that he was a loyal member of the official CROM union.1 Authorities in early 1927

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were anguished by working-class radicalism, partly in regret over Federal authorities’ recent decision to bolster the leftist elements in Cristero zones. The closure of churches in August 1926 had been accompanied in Guadalajara by a Cristero defacing of statues of Benito Juárez with reactionary slogans.2 The British Vice-Consul at Guadalajara, who judged local opinion to be polarized between ‘fanatical’ Catholic and a ‘large socialist or Bolshevik’ class,3 reported the arrival in January in his city of trainloads carrying 2,000 carbines with about 1,000,000 rounds of ammunition … which are being distributed, it is stated, to persons interested in agrarianism. It is apparent, however, that other people are also recipients of these arms, and I have come across one or two waiters, porters and such people, who have received carbines and ammunition …. It would appear that the Confederation of Labour is interested in the distribution of these arms to their brotherhood.4

The authorities were still more worried that agraristas in Catholic Jalisco might turn the guns over to the Cristeros and preferred to arm the lesser evil manifested by urban workers instead. But this move was in itself risky given the surge in labour militancy and municipal bankruptcies. A particular measure of municipal insolvency was registered during spring–summer of 1927 when state requests for funding were answered in proportion to how close the local authorities were to conflict zones. Extraordinary costs were required to fulfil article 28 of the Constitution requiring town halls to fund the costs of delegates to attend a state-wide Commercial and Industrial Regional Advisory Board (‘junta regional consultiva del comercio y de la industria’). Whereas the large and relatively peaceful northern municipality of Mazapil had no problem funding its costs,5 the civil war had reduced central and especially southern and south-western regions of Zacatecas to misery. Vetagrande rejected a request to part-fund the costs of a ‘municipal assembly’, citing ‘the poor conditions afflicting this municipality’.6 Ciudad García also rejected the funding demand, citing ‘the endless costs that this municipality is incurring carrying out the campaign in the south of the state against the armed rebels’.7 Tlaltenango de Sánchez Román, for its part, was suffering ‘empty coffers caused by a complete lack of income’.8 Monte Escobedo, a municipality bordering the Jalisco ‘three fingers’ of the Cristero heartland, complained that it was receiving ‘even less



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income than others, due perhaps to the revolutionary movement dominating this region’. Monte Escobedo had enforced half-salaries on municipal employees, and even these were in arrears, and the municipality could no longer afford postage costs.9 The onset of Federal reconcentration burdened municipal finances even more, as evacuated communities obliterated the tax base in one area while burdening reception communities elsewhere.10 Over two years strongly Catholic Totatiche (Jalisco) seasonally hosted reconcentrados out of planting season. In 1933 the priest would complain that church finances had still not recovered from the crisis.11 The misery was thus shared not just by the refugees but also by their impoverished host communities. Chalchihuites (Zacatecas) in August 1927 notified the state capital that it could not fund its share of the Commercial and Industrial Regional Advisory Board because ‘recently the commander of military operations in the state ordered the reconcentration of the entire population of San Andrés del Teul in this place’.12 Even when the planting seasons led Federal authorities to permit the return of reconcentrados, not all returned and subdued economic activity was targeted afresh by the Cristeros. Returning villagers encountered devastated ranches and frightened animals which fled upon sensing the approach of humans.13 By the spring of 1928 normal administration had collapsed in the south and west of Zacatecas. Southern communities had no postage communications beyond Colotlán:  the last sorting office safe from Cristero interceptions. A courier travelling along the Juchipila–Nochistlán road in southern Zacatecas was abducted and dragged into the sierra where the Cristeros subjected him to a mock hanging, threatening to make it real the next time he broke the communications blockade. Whereas the details of a subsequent altercation imply that this courier was turned into a double agent running the blockade, other couriers either refused to take the risk of travel or were killed if they dared.14 This communications blockade, like in most asymmetrical civil wars, can be explained by the Stathis Kalyvas model of ‘logical’ violence. Combatants in asymmetrical wars prioritize establishing geographical areas of control in order to subdue real or imagined enemies within and to control information about enemies without.15 ‘Logical’ violence tends to produce atrocities at the outset of civil wars when territorial control depended on neutralizing real and suspected enemies. When the Defensa of Valparaíso (Zacatecas) in August

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1926 captured a vanguard of Cristero ‘thieves’, its commander found on one of the men ‘a list of more than a hundred people who had to die at their hands’.16 As the asymmetrical nature of the war persisted in Mexico’s centrewest, authorities remained anxious about territorial control and intelligence. Desperate to regain control, the Federal government early in 1928 created a ‘Corps of Special Services’ which, British diplomats recorded, ‘were to operate under the orders of the Guadalajara military command, and will be employed in all kinds of intelligence work involved in investigating the activities of the persons involved in the Catholic rebellion’.17 As the Cristero grip tightened on the countryside local government authorities responded ruthlessly to similar attempts by Cristeros to penetrate urban centres on intelligence-gathering operations. In September 1928 two Cristero scouts who had penetrated Tuxpan (Jalisco) were shot dead ‘while trying to escape’ after local gendarmes had arrested them under army orders.18 Local authorities in many cases either deserted their posts or remained reconcentrated in Fresnillo or Zacatecas city. And zone commander Ortiz’s mobilization of armed agrarians and Defensas had proved costly not just in blood but also in treasure. Unlike gendarmes, whose counter-insurgency activities were charged to municipal budgets, agrarians and Defensas were supposed to have their costs funded by the Federation. But by the end of October 1927 the latter two groups had incurred costs of over 26,000 pesos and had yet been reimbursed only some 6,000 pesos.19 The onset of spring in 1928 brought no relief, as a renewed round of reconcentration devastated local economies once more throughout the centre-west. Federal reports of Durango state in the spring and summer of 1928 related the virtual bankruptcy of the state government, mass layoffs of public officeholders and anarchy outside the state capital which the following year would be exploited by the ‘Movimiento Renovador’ Federal Army rebellion in cahoots with Cristero forces (see Chapter 2).20 Such economic chaos incentivized the supplying of Cristero rebels with arms and food. Official anxieties of smuggling grew as the Cristeros went onto the offensive from the spring of 1927. The Zacatecas mayor’s office complained of lax regulations at the city railway station in the wake of intelligence that a certain Antonio Soto had been allowed to transport three wagon-loads of cattle to Mexico City without having to be subjected to rule of origins paperwork and



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the relevant fee.21 Not only was the municipality impoverished still further, but unregistered cattle movements were generally seen as supplying the rebels. By the end of March the beleaguered authorities in Valparaíso (Zacatecas) asked the police inspectorate to enforce checks on all cattle being sold from their municipality, seeing as ‘rebel bands have been stealing cattle for fraudulent sale’.22 By autumn, in the wake of redoubled Cristero insurgency in the centrewest, Ciudad García (now called Jerez, Zacatecas) wrote to the Zacatecas mayor’s office requesting strict registering of all cattle being offered for sale throughout the state, in view of a wave of cattle thefts by ‘agents of the rebels targeting animals belonging to the Defensas Sociales’.23 By autumn the scale of the Cristero seizure of cattle and horses had escalated to an army matter. Under army orders the Zacatecas municipality also prohibited all market trade in iron studs (for horses) unless sellers were expressly licensed by the army deployed in the state, a measure for the ‘best success in the campaign against the fanatical rebels plaguing parts of this region’.24 The army continued to escalate its counter-blockade. In October 1928 a complete prohibition was enforced on the movement out of Zacatecas city of goods of any kind, unless otherwise authorized by the authorities, and letters of recommendation were demanded of strangers entering the city, with the signatories being held responsible for the strangers’ conduct.25 Unlike Cristero insurgents in Michoacán and coastal parts of Jalisco who often relied upon illicit supplies being landed by coast at remote beaches, Zacatecas insurgents relied upon exclusively overland supplies.26

Civil–military relations Mexican political history had been characterized by negotiation between oligarchs. This led to ‘careerist episodes’ of actors in key political events whose high politics entailed clientelist networks of low politics.27 Where the packaging of revolutionary or counter-revolutionary ideas were implemented in practice, there was always a process of negotiation.28 The Chihuahuan-born General Eulogio Ortiz was made chief of military operations (jefe de operaciones militares:  JOM) of zone XXVI, mainly the state of Zacatecas, and it was a detachment of his prized cavalry which on 3 August 1926 raided Chalchihuites,

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causing the massacre which opened the Cristero War.29 Ortiz’s flamboyant machismo was laced with a tendency to utter theatrical expletives, to the apparent amusement of his subordinates, a preponderance towards violence and imprisonment of civilians (mainly suspected Cristero sympathisers during 1926–9, but after the war also left-wing agitators), and by ostentatious callista anticlericalism, Ortiz being most famous in Zacatecas for his devouring of confiscated communion hosts with salsa and tacos in the main Zacatecas marketplace. Thus Ortiz’s counter-Cristiada was in part civil–military and contributed to a black legend about his character. He imprisoned priests in Zacatecas, ransomed prominent Catholics in Zacatecas and Aguascalientes, tortured family members of real and imagined Cristeros and in Durango his black legend reached his own men who dubbed him ‘matamarrados’ (killer of bound men) in recognition of his killing of so many suspects in his custody.30 A Cristero veteran recalled Ortiz’s raid into Huejuquilla, where he ‘stole and murdered like a coward. He was not brave, but he was a Mason’.31 Ortiz may have been an extreme example of military high-handedness towards civilians, but his pattern of behaviour was repeated across the government-held centre-west. In some instances repression targeted blatant acts of sedition. In June 1927 a certain Catarino Saucedo was arrested in Zacatecas city distributing such Cristero pamphlets as ‘Circular of the Ecclesiastical Government of Zacatecas’, ‘Triduum in Honour of Cristo Rey’ and ‘Catholic Alert’.32 Worried about the religious infiltration of public spaces, in July 1927 General Ortiz decided on a show of strength, marching in July 1927 a large force (the ‘Tihu’ expeditionary legion) through Zacatecas city en route to its operations further south-west.33 But often army actions were triggered merely by rumours of Cristero sedition. Luis Álvarez, owner of the ‘La Mercantil’ printshop in Guadalajara, complained to authorities of police acting under army orders seizing control of his shop and barring his entry. The month before, in March 1927, Enrique L. Gama, editor of Guadalajara’s El Mundo, was arrested on army orders, as were a number of men working for El Heraldo, all of whom were detained without charge.34 Usually the civil authorities managed to release such victims from army custody by citing constitutional rights or securing bail in the case of misdemeanours. In March 1927 a Guadalajara’s district judge lodged a writ (amparo) to release a number of ‘innocent’ men and women who had been



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seized from a private home without warning.35 Yet, such civil intervention usually happened only after considerable damage to property and livelihoods had already been done. High-handedness towards opinion formers was part of a pattern of anxiety towards expressions of sympathy with clericalism. In particular, Zacatecas state authorities were busy suppressing showings of such pro-clerical films as Cristo de Oro (1926).36 By autumn 1927 the military command at Guadalajara believed that the city itself harboured support for rural rebels via fanatical propaganda and illicit supplies of money and ammunition.37 Moreover, the army was quick to resist a perceived encroachment on its power and privileges emanating from civil authority. The neighbouring military zone centred on Aguascalientes (XXVII) imposed its will on civil police by ordering the municipality to release soldiers held in civilian custody and to ‘ensure that no more such irregularities take place in future’. The civil authorities had meekly to concur, promising to punish officials found guilty of undermining the military in this manner.38 Not easily appeased, Brigadier-General Cristobal Rodríguez demanded civil authorities punish cantina owners guilty of serving alcohol to soldiers in uniform.39 The following month federales arrested a police superintendent when he intervened to stop an altercation between two civilians and a soldier in plainclothes. General Pineda dismissed the police officer’s credentials and the superintendent was detained in barracks with other civilians, ‘his dignity publicly besmirched by this outrage’.40 In February 1928 Aguascalientes municipal authorities instructed gendarmerie forces to adorn their uniforms with distinguishing sashes in order to avoid the repeat of ‘disagreeable confusion that has resulted in both forces operating under army command’.41 The confusion caused by the gendarmes’ military pretentions had a more tragic parallel in the agraristas mobilized against the Cristeros, many of whom wore similar attire to the enemy and accordingly proved victims to friendly fire incidents. Often fratricidal casualties were avoided by combatants wearing particular armbands, or rolling up trousers and sleeves, in order to distinguish themselves correctly. The federales proved sensitive on matters of honour. Two months after the false imprisonment incident, Brigadier-General Rodríguez complained of police music bands parading the streets of Aguascalientes ‘playing tunes exclusively reserved to the army’, and the army requested and received

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advance notice of all future police parades.42 Two months later, in March 1929, Rodríguez had cause once more to protest the army’s honour, when he complained of a certain Mario Ortega, second-in-command of a (civilian) security committee, who masqueraded as an army colonel, abusing his usurped status by blackmailing cantina owners for alcohol, ostentatiously cocking his pistol, and other general unpleasantness.43 The army cursorily recommended to the civil authorities that they should distinguish their gendarmes from the army by obliging them to wear green sashes ‘like in other parts of the republic’.44 The police immediately dismissed Ortega and the municipality accepted Rodríguez’s recommendation about uniforms.45 The army thus sometimes had just cause for resenting local police. In January ten mounted gendarmes were dispatched from Guadalajara for a ‘special mission’ at the Cristero-dominated town of Los Lagos de Moreno near the borders with Aguascalientes and Zacatecas states. Barely after arriving the men complained of being detained in army custody. Guadalajara’s request for their release was rejected on the grounds that the men were being held on the orders of a local judge. Reasons for their arrest are unclear, but might be connected to an agreement with their home municipality that a certain Ricardo Anaya V would fund all costs for the special mission.46 In neighbouring Aguascalientes Brigadier Rodríguez continued to be indignant at the behaviour of gendarmes coming under his command. He complained to the civil authorities of two gendarmes who appeared to have connived in the thefts and highway robberies plaguing their own neighbourhood.47 The police investigated its colleagues and cleared them of any wrongdoing.48 Usually ties of kinship and local networks predominated among gendarmes much more than they did among soldiers on campaign, exasperating army commanders. In November 1927 the Guadalajara military command despatched reinforcements southwest to pacify Cristero insurgents around Acatlán.49 Stopping in Acatlán de Juárez (Jalisco) on the way, army commanders asked the Guadalajara mayoral office to dismiss a corporal and private of mounted police who had been insubordinate towards officers and inconsiderate towards other ranks in terms of accommodation. The main problem, a sergeant explained, was that the corporal and private were blood relatives.50 Clearly, such zealous militarism, epitomized in Ortiz’s fusion of brasscacique and ‘Revolutionary new man’ politics, could be harmful to



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civil–military relations. Early in 1928 the Federal government introduced a regulation that generals in command of districts should be removed every six months, ostensibly in order better to understand Mexican ‘topography’, but in reality in order to impede local factionalism from gaining military champions.51 But even amidst measures such as these, several army officers managed to dominate politics. The British ambassador, commenting on the fragility of civilian politicians during the 1929 presidential elections, was scathing of Mexican militarism: Any deadlock between the civil candidates may induce turbulent Generals in Mexico City to propose their own saviour of the country at the psychological moment. The glamour of a uniform, the almost Prussian arrogance of the military commanders in a country which has recently emerged from a ten years’ internecine strife, and their practical immunity from punishment for any summary execution, or even murder, arising from a drunken brawl, gives to these supermen flashing through the country in their usually unpaid-for Lincoln cars a prestige for which we have no parallel since the days of the barons and their liveried retainers.52

General Ortiz, as Ben Fallaw has revealed, conformed in many ways to this stereotype. His weighty influence over Calles demonstrates that the role of militarism in Mexican state formation was greater than usually credited in works published at the height of the success of the PRI regime.53 Yet in other ways militarism promoted what in conservative Zacatecas was still quite a slow consolidation of revolutionary social justice. Like President Calles (who stated that the land question was ‘his’), Ortiz had a northerner’s respect for small property owners, ‘discipline’ – including in the military colonies enacted by some of his colleagues – and a military man’s simplistic and Jacobin care for the plight of the poor. During the Cristero War, for example, Ortiz redistributed to the poor the clothes and personal items he had impounded in a clandestine convent in the city of Zacatecas.54 Ortiz’s presence seemed to improve the climate for aggrieved workers, and in April 1927 the municipality responded favourably to a mass petition for the re-distribution of lands near the city.55 Even then land grants happened only fitfully, and conservative opposition meant that the first ejidos (communal land grants) did not appear in the state in serious numbers until the mid-1930s.56 Luis Cabrera as long ago as 1912

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promoted the corporate property principle of the ejido in what was an affront for the prevailing classical liberalism of the Madero regime of the time. In many ways the ejido was conceived to create a constituency for the government in the countryside. The urban working classes were ‘government supporters’ by definition, even when rural revolutionary violence increased food prices. Yet the urban-based character of revolutionary moderates left unanswered the unreconstructed Porfirian nature of the rural economy, and Cabrera himself grew critical of the Madero government’s prioritization of the urban workers at the expense of rural grievances.57 By the time of the Cristero revolt, not much had changed in Zacatecas, because of resilient conservatism in the countryside. There were cases of agraristas being radicalized into ostentatious anticlericalism. The story of the agraristas at Valparaíso (Zacatecas) dancing in a church with an image of the Virgin (whom they later threw out for being ‘drunk’) may or may not be apocryphal.58 But the agraristas who organized a firing squad against a statue of Jesus at El Fresnal, Tonila (Jalisco), and who decapitated another Jesus statue in order to use its head as a football, certainly were radicalized by the war against the religious symbols of their enemy.59 Popular anticlericalism united callista elites with their agrarista forces, but political radicalism was not a substitute for social radicalism. During a wartime protest in Ameca (Jalisco), local agraristas refused to march out in support of an anticlerical show of strength organized by local authorities, stating that they wanted to defend and increase their landholdings, not attack the Church.60 Such was the religiosity of Zacatecas and the central north-west that even pro-government elements embraced religion, meaning that the sort of anticlerical motivations which may have worked in northern or southern Mexico backfired when Catholic local elites were supposed to side with the government and cooperate in land reform. Agrarismo was slow to develop in Zacatecas, but when it did, it also saw the development of defensas rurales, pro-government paramilitaries tasked with denying Cristeros possession of plazas and later forming a shock force of reconquest for Federal troops. Although the defensas were under military authority, they retained their own training and discipline and were effectively tools of pro-government caciques. The Vírgen de la Defensa was even elevated to patron-saint of the agraristas.61 The Virgin was thus mobilized to fight on both sides of the



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civil war. Even Jean Meyer conceded surprise at how ‘the agraristas were as Catholic as the Cristeros’.62 Early in 1927 the Federal government sent arms and ammunition to labour organizations in Jalisco, especially those led by the former state governor, José G. Zuno, but expressly denied them to local agraristas because, the British vice-consul reported, ‘these people belong to the rural population, and, so far, the rural population remains intensely Catholic’.63 The Catholicism of the government forces was most marked in Zacatecas where the defensas were dominated by conservative and propertied local elites, hostile to agrarian reform.64 Indeed, one contemporary observer would not have been puzzled by such agrarista cultural Catholicism. For the American land reform expert Eyler Simpson, the agraristas were the voice of popular discontent without any ‘positive, clear-cut program’ who ‘engaged in a kind of guerrilla warfare with each man taking pot shots whenever opportunity offered’.65 The preponderance of conservatism was evident in a local crisis concerning land to the south-east of Zacatecas city in 1928. Trancoso, the largest hacienda in the state of Zacatecas, stretched from near the town of Guadalupe to Ojocaliente and the borders of San Luis. Even though its eastern location spared it the Cristero violence plaguing the south and west of Zacatecas, in May 1928 eighteen agraristas were massacred by individuals whom the local press claimed were Cristero hitmen lured from José Velasco’s force in Aguascalientes, all at the behest of Trancoso’s hacendado, José Leon García. Velasco, a foreman of an hacienda in Calvillo and instigator of the first Cristero rising in Aguascalientes in November 1926, had certainly developed a pattern of targeting agraristas often in connivance with haciendas. During 1927 Velasco turned the canyon of Juchipila bordering Aguascalientes and Zacatecas states into a Cristero safe zone from which to launch raids into both states.66 The murdered men had certainly aggravated the hacendado. Ever since 1921 they had pressured the authorities to create an ejido in the west of Trancoso at La Blanquita, citing their service mobilization against delahuertistas in 1924 and against Cristeros early in 1927, to press their case. A  precipitous decision by Guadalupe council to award an ejido at La Blanquita, combined with the agraristas’ celebratory rifle-fire, provoked the massacre the next day. Leon García’s ‘guilt’ expedited the redistribution of Trancoso, starting with La Blanquita. Neither the civil authorities nor the press dared to implicate the

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Federal soldiers of General Anacleto López in the massacre, even though López, like zone commanders elsewhere in Mexico, had form suppressing agrarian radicalism and even though the night before the massacre López had disarmed the agraristas in response to Leon García’s complaint about their ‘trespassing’.67 Whether the hacendado, the General or wayward Cristeros were to blame, caciques in Zacatecas certainly remained cool towards agrarian reform. By 1940 barely six hundred ejidos would be established, employing sixty-five thousand land workers, and these were disproportionately to be found on marginal soils.68 As the press in 1934 lamented, ‘in Zacatecas … and in other states … the peasants who took up those lands could not consolidate their situation and have abandoned them, or have solicited ejidos on the same lands where they worked as colonists’. The report concluded that ‘the most serious agrarian conflict is between these dispossessed poor peasants who want ejidos and the bourgeois peasants who wish to maintain their superior position’.69 Twentieth-century Marxists shared Eyler Simpson’s focus on class conflict, viewing local resistance to the ejidos as the result of caciques wishing to continue their timeworn exploitation of villagers.70 But the irruption of ejidos in the centre-west in fact created a more complex dynamic. Land workers who might have secured employment as labourers (peons) on haciendas found themselves excluded from the communal landholding of the ejido. The ejido mirrored the hierarchical structure of the hacienda, replacing the hacendado with the ejido president, administrator with the secretary, foreman (caporal) with the vigilance committee and the peon with the ‘ejidatario’. But there was no space at the bottom of the ejido pyramid for the exploited landless labourers of yore, who accordingly became a reserve army for migration and militancy.71 For these reasons even anti-Cristero agraristas represented by the CROM in Zacatecas desired private rather than collective landownership, slowing down the process of creating ejidos even further.72 Given the upheaval of land reform those at the bottom of the social ladder sometimes had cause to miss the certainties of the hacienda system. Long days were compensated, as one old man looking back on his experiences at Trancoso, Jalisco, recalled, by charity, as during the hunger caused by the cold drought of 1928–9.73 Untimely cold fronts, the Guadalajara press reported, were causing havoc in the maize and bean harvest, necessitating imports.74



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Even though Zacatecas zone commander General Oritz was known for his theatrical gestures of charity towards the working classes, his orders were to suppress the Cristero revolt that he suspected was connived at by conservative interests. He grew intolerant of the revolt’s support network, and showed brutality towards civilians behind the lines in Zacatecas city that also extended to civilians in front-line areas. The great extent to which both fronts were intertwined can be accounted for not just by the classically asymmetrical nature of guerrilla warfare but also by the great extent to which the Federation relied upon militarized policing for public order. The Sonoran state could not extinguish the autonomy of officers, not least because Mexico’s huge and (in Zacatecas) underpopulated territory was divided into military zones which effectively gave almost dictatorial powers to local commanders. Each military zone was divided into two or three military sectors, usually divided between cavalry and infantry units, the infantry being detached to defend small towns and such strategic point as railways.75 By November 1926 Ortiz managed to regroup the forces of his military zone to turn the tide against the Cristero insurgency. In early January 1927 he scattered a Cristero force in the canyon Juchipila, the key to southern Zacatecas. He then moved against northern Jalisco, lifting the Cristero siege of Huejuquilla in September 1927. Yet Ortiz could do less against dispersed Cristero guerrillas, as to do so would have required command of soft power (intelligence) rather than the hard power Ortiz exercised (reconcentration, brutalization of hostages, and the use of pro-Cristero families as human shields on Durango trains). The resort to human shields came in the wake of repeated guerrilla attacks on trains in Durango. The first major such Cristero attack appeared to have been on 2 December 1926, when a small detachment of Federal troops aboard the train sustained losses beating off a Cristero ambush.76 The Cristeros initially targeted trains for money, but the strategy soon escalated to harassing the Federation’s logistics. In many instances, it would appear that human shields were unintentional victims caught in the crossfire as a consequence of the government’s general policy of increasing armed escorts. Foreign press reports reveal how civilians ended up being killed:  ‘the authorities announced that military trains with machine guns will proceed ahead of some of the most important passenger trains, while all other trains will have increased guards’.77 Even though it seems likely that ‘human shields’ were more often accidental

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than premeditated victims of crossfire, their association with the stronger side – the Federal government – casts fresh light on the findings of strategy experts who claim human shields as the weapon of the weaker, asymmetrical side.78 In any case, there were no internationally recognized obligations on combatants to protect civilians until the Hague convention of 1949. Civilians who dared travel by train knew they were taking huge risks. Sometimes senior Cristeros themselves took the calculated risk of travelling incognito on trains in order to reach the United States or the ironic safety of Mexico City, where the clandestine LNDLR and safe houses awaited them. Carlos Blanco’s family fled heavily policed Guadalajara in April 1927 for Mexico City, crossing the Irapuato junction at the same heart-stopping moment when War Minister General Amaro’s armoured train was passing in the opposite direction. In February 1928 Carlos Blanco himself took the risk of following them, disguised in the attire of a ‘nineteenth-century English banker’, managing to reach his family’s safe house in the capital and present a situation report to the nonplussed clandestine war council of the LNDLR.79 In Jalisco, Cristeros staged even more attacks on trains during the spring of 1927, forcing authorities to forbid night-time travel and eventually civilian traffic altogether. The violence of such attacks ended up alienating Catholic opinion, not only because of the government’s use of human shields but also because of the massacres sometimes committed by Cristero raiders in the name of the faith. A particular culprit was the ‘black-hearted assassin’ or ‘Villa of the Cristeros’, José Reyes Vega, author of the April 1927 train massacre.80 Cristero killings of civilians also hardened Federal resolve in counterinsurgency throughout Mexico. When in October 1927 an army column evacuated besieged Coalcomán (Michoacán), several refugee civilians accompanied the column, only to be cut down in a Cristero ambush at the Barranca de Pinolapa along with the troops.81 Meanwhile zone commander General Ortiz had to operate in a divided political Zacatecan political establishment. Governor Fernando Rodarte relied upon the CROM for support, but in so doing he alienated the larger group of agraristas whose state leaders unsuccessfully tried to oust him amidst the strikes early in 1927. Rodarte refused to intervene when CROM militants in Zacatecas violently disrupted the 1928 presidential elections which led to Obregón’s victory, and there were rumours that he connived with Cristero



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rebels in the south of the state in order to keep the agraristas in check. Despite facing the opposition of the Calles–Obregón executives and of General Ortiz, Rodarte’s militants returned him in gubernatorial elections, and the Federation had to implicate Rodarte in the 1929 escobarista rebellion as a pretext to replace him with an anti-CROM governor.82 Amidst divided civilian politics Ortiz organized Defensa leaders in towns so that they might organize agraristas (recipients of land grants). President Calles made a morale-boosting visit to Jérez (Zacatecas) on 5 April 1928, where his speech praised agraristas’ readiness to ‘defend their lands with rifle in hand’.83 Ortiz distrusted the governor’s CROM workers who in Zacatecas were well organized in some 242 urban and rural syndicates, Their confidence was boosted by their recent mobilization against the delahuertista revolt, and their ongoing paramilitary deployment against Cristeros. Ortiz instead preferred to work through Zacatecas’s more conservative obregonista possessing classes, and the upper ranks of the non-Cristero Catholic middle classes. Ortiz’s high-handed authoritarianism towards local civilian authorities was not unique. The neighbouring military zone covering the equally conservative state of Aguascalientes witnessed similar tensions throughout 1928. Zonal commander General Genovevo de la O. likewise sided with the CROM against the conservative state governor whom he accused of aiding the Cristeros. In repeated instances de la O. intervened in the affairs of local authorities and militarized the local Defensas, subjecting their arms and promotions to army control. The central government grew concerned that the militarized Defensas were being used not just against the Cristeros but also against the haciendas. From May 1928 de la O.  was accordingly undermined by the appointment of a rival but nominally subordinate brigadier-general to the command of Aguascalientes city itself, and then removed from his command altogether on 20 May 1929.84

Gender Ortiz required a sensitive command of civil–military relations for the sake of his intelligence network. He mounted ‘exploradores’ (mounted scouts) and ‘rondas’ (patrols of armed civilians). The role of the scouts was perilous

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indeed, and one particular case study of a female scout merits attention for its unusual gender dimension and how this was interpreted in the canon of Cristero miracle stories explored in the previous chapter. Captured at Arandas (Jalisco) en route to San Julián, the female scout was condemned to death by firing squad. Her atheistic refusal to accept any prayer or last rites anguished her executors, and after her death the legend spread that the ‘fantastic woman was really a man in disguise’.85 The martyrdom of an atheistic woman conflicts with the popular image of overwhelmingly passive and pious image of Mexican womanhood in the early twentieth century. Chauvinistic traditions, such as the groom’s ‘abduction’ of a bride before her wedding, were practised in earnest among civilians in Cristero zones seeking religious marriage. These were either undertaken clandestinely in the private houses of the wealthy or, more often, in parts of the countryside under the control of Cristero combatants. Yet as the scout example shows, women were also protagonists in their own right. The historian Agustín Vaca has argued that there were many more motivations for female militancy beyond religion. Even so, Cristero literature has tended to downplay women’s agency in the war. Instead Cristero women were presented as self-effacing and pious cooks and carers, and above all as martyrs celebrated more after their deaths than during their lives.86 Thus the association of gender and Cristiada remains shaped by such personalities as María del Carmen Robles, a lay Catholic guardian of illicit priests and sacraments who was executed by General Vargas’s troops near Mezquitic in September 1928.87 Only isolated exceptions break the martyr mould, such as Jovita Valdovinos, Cristero heroine from Jalpa (Zacatecas) who twice escaped abduction by General Anacleto López and after surrendering in the 1930s ‘Segunda’ had an audience with President Lázaro Cardenas. Even then, Cristero propaganda tried to project a gendered image of Jovita as a martyr. When the organisers behind the second Cristero revolt in 1935 falsely reported Jovita’s death at the hands of the government, they projected a gendered image of a martyr: ‘The National Guard accepted her as an officer for her bravery and because we lacked enough men … unfortunately Jovita, out of inexperience or her condition as a woman, let herself be seduced by the offers made to her by the enemy.’88 During the 1920s war the Cristero command proved equally reluctant to accept women as agents in their own right. As the rising spread, it was



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supported by a growing networks of volunteers, including the Cristeros’ ‘Feminine Brigades’ which were created in Jalisco in June 1927 and which organized war materials and supplies. When the Feminine Brigades appealed directly to the supreme commander to subordinate themselves directly to him rather than the ineffectual LNDLR, Gorostieta’s staff replied:  ‘the Feminine Brigades cannot be considered an independent military organisation as this would harm the prestige of the armed forces’.89 As for violence against women, to some extent this was a common symptom of patriarchal cultures gone wrong. The elite Mexican Ladies’ Union (Unión de Damas Mexicanas) campaigned against the evils of industrial labour for women but overlooked the widespread problem of maids being sexually assaulted in what Social Catholicism taught was the more ‘appropriate’ workplace of the home.90 The fact that feminists in Hispanic cultures were also usually Catholics meant that male chauvinism was tolerated as a masculine frailty which placed the feminine virtues of patience and self-abnegation in sharp relief. Chauvinism was also explained on an anthropological basis by David Gilmore who has shown that ‘masculinity’ in human history tends to be validated by male peers on the basis of an individual’s ‘test’ or ‘performance’, either of which can include such crimes as sexual assault just as they can include such positive qualities as bravery and solidarity.91 In the Hispanic world a whole subculture flourished celebrating through ballads the ‘valentía’ (being a braggart) of rough men who could come from any class of society, indeed they were usually from modest origins, yet whose exploits gave them claim to fame. Given this patriarchal culture, officers dealing with cases of sexual violence against women often explained them away as a mere disciplinary problem, and the chauvinistic blurring of violence and seduction suited commanders who implicitly sympathized with what they saw as the physical needs of their men. General Jesús Degollado Guizar, Cristero commander-in-chief of the main western zone of operations from 1927, issued a circular imposing the death penalty against Cristero soldiers found guilty of committing rape. But commanding officers often overlooked their men’s crimes out of chauvinism and concerns for primary group cohesion.92 In November 1928, General López’s troops violently stormed Cristero-held San Martín de Bolaños (Jalisco). They killed several men, and reconcentrated the remaining population apart from five society maidens whom they carried off and who never returned

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home (out of ‘shame’, according to one eyewitness).93 Yet unwilling or seduced companions of braggarts could also find their own agency. The story of the Cristero leader, Manuel Campos, is typical. Campos was wounded in an action on 20 November 1928 at el Palo Alto (Jalisco) and was later evacuated to a safe house in a suburb of Colima. Campos was betrayed by a woman and executed by the authorities forthwith.94 Women generally were treated with disdain by passing armies, as servants to cook and clean for the soldiers, either as an expectation or as a form of collective punishment imposed on hostile populations. Other women on the margins of society followed armies as they had in times immemorial. There were an unknown number of camp-following prostitutes, so many that in late 1927 Cristero army units began banishing women found guilty of infecting troops.95 Even though the role played by gender has been less explored in respect of the government side than that of the Cristeros (and less also than in respect of the Mexican Revolution), suffering and martyrdom also dominate our impressions. Soldaderas (camp followers) featured as strongly in government campaigns during the Cristero War as they had during the armed phase of the revolution. During the revolution, as one Hispanist has explained, having been displaced by war, the soldaderas eked out an itinerant lifestyle within a patriarchal army culture which viewed them as little more the property of soldiers, or even as an inheritance in the case of dead servicemen.96 Other women, such as one Mariquita Ramona, a beata who had been arrested in the Carmen Robles circle, submitted to their captors under duress.97 Ramona had caught the eye of the colonel who had ordered the execution of Carmen Robles and who vowed to have Ramona with or without her consent. As the Federal soldiers escorted the holy women from Mezquitic, Ramona was separated from her family and transported ahead of the column to Colotlán (Jalisco) where she was locked in a hotel room and given a day to ‘consent’ to marriage. After an escape in a car organized by her mother backfired, Ramona had no other option than to submit to the colonel and to live as his concubine.98 Women who volunteered to follow soldiers fared little better. The soldaderas had supposedly been barred from the army in 1925, as War Minister Amaro charged them with being the source of ‘vice, illness, crime and disorder’. Camp followers never organized themselves into a union in order to assert their rights



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in post-revolutionary Mexico’s corporate state. Even so, administrative inertia meant that soldaderas they were still to be found in government campaigns against the Cristero centre-west.99 During a July 1928 operation in the Cerro de San Miguel near Nochistlán (Zacatecas) Cristeros encountered some thirty soldaderas from whom they seized blankets, uniforms and money.100 But amidst the intensified campaigns of 1929 there were unmistakeable signs of professionalization on the Federal side. Whereas the escobarista rebels abandoned some 350 soldaderas and their children in order to achieve greater mobility, the Federal Army campaign against the northern rebellion proceeded without any camp followers in tow at President Calles’s express orders. Instead both soldiers and supplies were promptly dispatched using the railway network in a campaign which heralded the advent of twentiethcentury logistics in Mexican warfare.101 Exceptional cases aside, most fighting was carried out by soldiers and paramilitaries. Zacatecas agraristas from Fresnillo, Valparaíso, Enmedio and Arroyo fought under Ortiz in numerous skirmishes and in the battle for Huejuquilla in neighbouring Jalisco.102 Ortiz, like other army commanders, subordinated the Defensas fully to military control, demanding their apolitical obedience and reserving the right to dissolve insubordinate units.103 Confiscating Defensa weapons was a common measure against real or imagined insubordination, not least because many army officers mistrusted these agrarian irregulars whose social power had sprung up out of all proportion thanks to their role in defeating the 1923 delahuertista revolt.104

Religion The famous boycott of non-essential products launched by the LNDLR across Mexico in July 1926 in protest against the Calles Law triggered the most extreme official anticlericalism in Mexico history. All three types of revolutionary anticlericalism identified by Alan Knight:  radical iconoclasm, moderate reformism and popular forms of anticlericalism, were displayed during the Cristero War.105 In Durango the LNDLR circulated the following pamphlet:  ‘Catholics! Repeat daily this prayer:  Queen of Martyrs, pray for us and for the union of the people, and pass this message on to Catholics

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who have not reneged on the faith of our fathers.’106 Guadalajara and Mexico City saw the most extensive observance of the boycott, and this led to claims by the pro-government CROM that rich Catholics were targeting poor, patriotic tradesmen. By spring 1927 Jalisco’s state budget reported a 25 per cent fall in its income, due to the moral pressure of the Catholic boycott.107 Municipal authorities in Guadalajara were kept busy issuing fines of 100 pesos of boycotters, many of whom were women. In March 1927 the municipal presidency sentenced several boycotter women to 15  days’ imprisonment for ‘harassing people trying to buy goods at various establishments’.108 Police reports charged the women, whose leader appeared to be one María Gollaz, with sedition and with ‘purchasing munitions from the army with the aim of delivering them to the rebels’.109 The authorities had acted rationally. Even though historians remain ignorant of most of her life, it is clear that María Gollaz was the founder and director of the Feminine Brigades and was dubbed the ‘lady general’ (La Generala) by her followers.110 Eventually the women were released on bail, on the grounds that their constitutional rights had been violated. Her Brigade colleagues later spirited Gollaz away to Mexico City in disguise, where she directed the Cristero women’s struggle clandestinely, adopting the assumed name of Celia Gómez.111 At the early stages of the Cristero revolt, even before policing was militarized, Federal forces involved themselves in controversies about the correct enforcement of anticlerical laws. On 5 August 1926 the Zacatecas zone commander General Ortiz complained to civil authorities of bellringing coming from Zacatecas cathedral which ‘must reflect some toleration by authorities charged with enforcing the law’. Ortiz demanded that the practice desist in order to prevent his command ‘from taking the awkward step of intervening’.112 The civil authorities hastily reassured the military that the sounds related to local time-keeping by a municipal employee, bereft of all religious significance. The General was satisfied:  ‘the practice may be considered archaic but I abstain from interfering in the matter’.113 Incidents like these revealed how local circumstances complicated the strict implementation of Federal anticlericalism, often setting local authorities against those of the state and the Federation. At the sharp end of this conflict were the residents’ committees (known as ‘comités vecindarios’ or ‘juntas vecinales’) which were tasked by the Interior Ministry with implementing



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the strict anticlericalism of the 1926 Calles Law.114 Residents assumed that these committees were ideologically anticlerical, as indeed they often were in the larger towns and cities where the authorities were more watchful than in remote areas, and thus more prepared to filter out or suspend altogether any committees suspected of harbouring sympathies for the very clericalism they were charged with suppressing. In larger urban centres where the Federation tried to keep control, a hard line was the norm. Valparaíso’s committee, from the outset, refused to inventorize the church and seal its doors as commanded by the Federation. It nominated ten other residents to perform this task, but all refused, as did the parish sacristan, Ildefonso de la Torre. In the end local ACJM members and Catholic workers performed the task, which made a mockery of the Federal law to such a degree that state deputy Leobardo Reséndez Dávila led a task force to close the parish church and the church of San Francisco.115 But in several remoter areas Catholics certainly did manage to infiltrate the committees over the long term. Even though priests were usually unable or unwilling to re-sacralize the premises, lay members of the committees sometimes illicitly helped worshippers nonetheless. Authorities sometimes turned a blind eye and sometimes brought matters to a head. Catholic infiltration of the committees was in many ways analogous to Catholic infiltration of Federal education, when teachers working in schools located in areas where clericalism was popular would often drop offensive parts of the curriculum and focus instead on the ‘three R’s’.116 But even when sympathetic Catholics infiltrated committees managing licensed churches, research in Michoacán has suggested that the ultimate burden of severely restricted priest numbers reduced the likelihood of proper church services to the outright negligible.117 Infiltration was harder in state capitals, where committee members charged with securing and inventorizing the deserted churches did so under the watchful eye of both local and Federal authorities. Many churches in Zacatecas as elsewhere were taken over by the authorities, but many more, especially larger ones, remained nominally open, albeit under the desacralized control of the residents’ committees. The committees’ task was all the harder in a city as clericalized as Zacatecas, not just for cultural but also for practical reasons. Public time-keeping, for example, had always relied on the clocks adorning churches. At the height of summer 1926 citizens suffering from stopped clocks

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relied all the more on the hourly peels from the cathedral that had attracted the ire of the Federal Army. A plea from the municipal authorities to allow a residents’ committee to maintain the clockwork at an annex of the Sagrado Corazón church was initially rejected on the grounds of violating Federal law. Eventually the state governor intervened authorizing the committee to access the annex using ‘the utmost discretion’.118 The hard line existed because of a long summer of confrontation between anticlerical authorities and the religious populace. In mid-August the municipality expressed its anger at the defiant posting of religious iconography from several shops and private homes in the city. Monies being collected from citizens apparently to aid the religious were confiscated by the police at the express command of the mayor’s office.119 Valparaíso likewise experienced government efforts to strip the town of religious iconography.120 Authorities flatly rejected a plea from ‘respectable’ residents to enter the Guadalupe church near the central railway station in order to clean the premises and prevent dilapidation:  ‘the church remains closed in accordance with the law’.121 Authorities were equally unmoved when the residents’ committee who had been guarding the Capilla de Bracho for a year warned of the building’s dilapidation and the imminent collapse of its roof.122 Given this climate of defiant clericalism, the lot of residents’ committees was often grim indeed. Two months into his role as head of the committee in charge of the church at ‘La Bufa’ (a flat mountain peak overlooking Zacatecas city) was enough to persuade Telésforo Carrillo to quit. Carrillo had found no other work except ‘attending the locked church daily’, as employers appear to have shunned him for his role, and his working poverty thus drove him to resign his post.123 It is unclear who replaced Carrillo, but by the following September the remoteness of La Bufa had persuaded Federal authorities to insist on its outright closure. The Federal delegation to Zacatecas complained:  ‘police vigilance cannot be reliably extended to the remote location of La Bufa … as such my office deems it appropriate to insist on its closure, especially as Catholics have a great number of other options for prayer under proper vigilance’.124 By November 1927 reports of civic Cristero activity at La Bufa sealed the matter:  ‘The atrium at La Bufa has been the scene of outdoor religious processions in violation of Federal law against public worship,



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attended by large numbers of Catholics who have insulted the authorities and the government led by General Calles.’125 At the same time six other temples in Zacatecas, including the cathedral, were instructed to restrict their opening times out of similar fears of vigilance.126 If it was hard enough to prohibit illegal public worship on the doorstep of the state capital, it was even harder to do the same elsewhere in the vastness of the state, the result being that the authorities could end up being tolerant of, or even oblivious to, public worship as long as Cristeros did not disturb the modus vivendi. Pánuco, a sleepy township 17 kilometres east of Zacatecas city, had been declining in importance ever since its Spanish-run mining industry disappeared during the independence wars of the early nineteenth century.127 In having been neglected by the state authorities ever since, it also escaped the attention of the Federal military in 1926, given the absence of concerted Cristero militancy east of the state capital. The local priest soon reopened his church for Catholic worship after the initial boycott, advising his parishioners of times for Mass, sometimes even daring to ring the bells.128 Often nominally callista local authorities overlooked public worship, bells and preaching, either because they were themselves Catholics or because they resented the high-handed Federal decrees, and often saw the temporary transit of Federal troops as an occupation. In turn, ‘moderate’ refugee priests often resented the passionate Catholicism of their flocks, knowing that this could invite Federal reprisals or lead to unwelcome theological innovations.129 Sometimes it was the overstretched army, mindful of provoking trouble, which tempered the anticlericalism of the civil authorities. When floods during the September 1928 rainy season ruined Rio Grande’s telegraph office, the town hall placed its telegraphist in the church, in the teeth of objections from the largely female residents’ committee. Escalating tensions led to the mayor arresting the committee but in the end the military authorities, after an altercation with the mayor, reinstated the committee.130 By contrast, no such toleration was extended to Catholic propagandists at the ranch of San Lorenzo in the conflict zone along the Jalisco border who were arrested for organizing late-night processions and pilgrimages to a fugitive priest.131 Equally, Catholics in Tlaltenango were deprived of their priests. Their only consolation was that the entrance to the abandoned church was left open on afternoons so that locals could enter to weep, pray and do rosaries.132

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Even in Cristero areas of control priests could be exposed to sudden Federal incursions. The priest, Norberto Reyes, operated in Mezquitic and surrounding ranches, but grew accustomed to spending the night in nearby caves at Arroyo Verde whenever scouts warned him of the approach of Federal patrols. On 14 December 1928 his luck ran out when enemy soldiers spotted him on the brow of a hill and took him prisoner.133 The activities of priests could expose parishioners to danger, as clandestine Catholic services often involved sudden mass gatherings of the faithful, provoking trigger-happy Federal troops who were in no mood to ascertain whether the Catholics presented a military threat. María Guadalupe Romero, 7-year-old resident of Monte Escobedo, recalled nearly seventy years later how Federal troops massacred an illicit congregation near her town: Rumour spread that our beloved priest Montoya would give Mass at a shrine on a nearby hillside. The signal for the Mass was three sharp knocks on the front door, after which the faithful left their homes and processed swiftly to the shrine … But during the Mass rumours spread of dust being kicked up by an approaching army column. The priest hurried the Mass and then we all split in various directions. We all wanted to reach the safety of our homes, the soldiers behind us firing at us … Two men were shot dead at the cornfield at the foot of the hill bearing the shrine … We made it home and prayed to the Virgin for protection, as the troops sallied out through the town. But grandfather was missing. We were worried that the troops would find him at his forge and shoot him. He always faced trouble from the other side for shodding the horses of both Federals and Cristeros. But now he was in real trouble, because apart from horseshoes he also made horseshoe nails, and that was prohibited outside of Zacatecas city … Later we found out that grandfather was safe, even though the troops had burnt his forge to the ground … Seven men had been killed by the troops. Relatives dared not retrieve the bodies because the Federales were watching who dared approach them … Eventually the troops sallied out of the town, the residents looking on stiff-backed against the walls. After the troops briefly halted by the corpses, an officer cried out ‘Bury them! Cristero scum! (‘Cristeros de mierda’).134

Both sides often left the dead bodies of enemies in place in order to display supposedly deserving victims and humiliate the communities which had harboured them. Away from front-line areas authorities asserted their



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supremacy over places symbolic for their enemies. ‘Socialist’ schools were ransacked by Cristeros and churches were either profaned or tightly administered by callista authorities. Zacatecas cathedral provided an example of the latter humiliation for clericalism. In terms of public access, the cathedral appeared to have had the greatest footfall under the draconian Calles legislation. By May 1927 José Rosales, president of the cathedral committee, reported that135 Since I  took over this committee the cathedral has received no donation from the so-called first fruits (primicias), and I believe that the suspension of public worship has also suspended these donations by virtue of there being nothing to spend them on. But we have collected money from the alms boxes inside the cathedral totalling 736 pesos and 14 centavos, which has paid for the lighting and daily wages of our assistant (mozo) and his manager, these being one peso and one peso fifty centavos respectively. I certify that none of these monies has been collected in the traditional way, rather they are the result of the voluntary and spontaneous small donations of those present in the cathedral.

The peculiar status of the cathedral probably made its committee the object of suspicion of the authorities and the populace alike. The month before this report the mayor’s office notified the Federal authorities of ‘the south end of cathedral being accessible from an adjacent building’.136 Religious relations remained fraught until late November 1928 when the détente implied in church–state relations during the provisional Portes Gil presidency led to La Bufa being reopened at the express orders of the Interior Ministry. Even then, given the ostracism facing anticlericals, several people refused offers to join La Bufa’s residents’ committee.137 By the end of the year the Federal government reported that its inventory of church property across the Republic was mostly complete. The government implied that part of its motivation for the inventory was to stop unauthorized confiscations being carried out by the residents’ committees: ‘some religious objects have disappeared into unknown hands, and as the various institutions and committees charged with guarding churches since the August 1926 closure have been ad hoc in nature, it is hard to make them account for the losses’.138 Accompanying anticlericalism was the other assault on conservative culture, the Federal education programme. This programme was bound to

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meet with opposition, given that the Catholic hierarchy, especially in the centre-west, had used religious rites and education as a focus for resisting the anticlericalism underway since the revolution. Pope Pius X’s (1903–14) instructions to the Catholic faithful to receive communion ‘frequently and even daily’ was coterminous with the Mexican Revolution and became a weapon for resisting its anticlericalism. Catholic education showed particular interest in girls. Girls educated at elite convent schools were expected to teach by example, providing a model of class and religious femininity for dealing with inferiors. Girls were considered more challenging than boys: the fairer sex was more delicate and less resistant to the persuasions of the devil. This process of re-evangelization had an important effect. Faithful Mexicans could now see the Church’s central sacrament as a way of achieving rather than rewarding virtue. A boy attending Carmelita Robles’s religious classes in wartime Huejuquilla told his mother: ‘You know heaven, mummy? It’s really easy to get there. All you need to do is shout ‘Viva Cristo Rey!’, and then they kill you.’139 Hence the psychological and religious context for civil war ranged from before 1926 into the war and beyond: not least because the imposition of Federal education proved a ‘hegemonic project’ as part of an increasingly innovative and coercive revolutionary state apparatus.140 Before school-building became truly ‘socialist’ (and truly extensive) in the 1930s, there were already examples of the education issue being turned as a focus for mobilization during the Cristero War itself. Our region also reveals how religious versus Federal education polarized communities. The Zacatecas municipality fought a running battle to impose Federal education on the unwilling inhabitants of La Escondida near the city. La Escondida had attracted official attention for two reasons, the operation of an unlicensed tavern and a boycott of the local school.141 By May 1927 the authorities ordered heads of family on the ranch to send their children to the new school, and the sheriff (comisario) to report all who refused. The city authorities, ‘having exhausted the education department’s sanctions’, dispatched a mounted police officer to the ranch in order to enforce compliance.142 La Escondida remained a sore point for the authorities, not least when a highwayman who robbed a cyclist travelling from Fresnillo turned out to be a member of La Escondida’s Defensa Social.143 Given the difficulties of imposing Federal law on ranches so close to the state capital, it is difficult to imagine that the decision, for example, to



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dispatch a teacher to attend the ‘extreme needs’ of the remote ranch at Calerilla de Tula (Zacatecas), met with much success.144 Federal troops operating against rebels near Nochistlán during the ‘Segunda’ of 1935 made government schools a proxy for identity. Clerical correspondence alleged that ‘Federal troops are using the pretext of hunting rebels to goad the ranches to send their children to school. Their tactics, designed to spread fear and commit atrocities, is to consider communities who reject the schools to be rebels’.145 Resistance to Federal (often scandalized as ‘socialist’) education distinguished other rural communities in the centre-west. Certainly, government teachers sometimes made enemies of their communities. Whereas teachers sometimes championed applications for new or usurped lands, on other occasions they did so without their permission in order to steal land from communities they were meant to be helping, embittering the perception of land reform and spurring on factional strife.146 This mistrust was particularly acute in indigenous communities, for whom mestizo ideas were usually suspect, much to the chagrin of the government which in 1926 proclaimed:  ‘President Calles desires to improve the condition of the indigenous, for he is generously promoting the creation of schools throughout the country. Unfortunately the indigenous race resists all progress, and is stuck with its ignorance and ancestral vices.’147 But most of these problems would peak in the more concerted education and land reform drives of the 1930s, and would affect majority mestizo communities. During the 1926–9 Cristero War, however, it was religion which tended to alienate communities from Federal education. Although Guadalajara authorities dared in November 1927 to close a secret Catholic school being held at a private address in the city,148 in rural areas beset by conflict the authorities were much more circumspect and government teachers much more exposed. In December 1926 the state governor of Durango pleaded illness for excusing himself from attending a public ceremony opening the ‘Escuela Granja’ in Santa Lucía (Canatlán municipality).149 An instruction issued at the end of December 1927 to the ranch of San Miguel (Zacatecas) to turn the disused church into a government schoolroom must have exposed its teacher to alienation at best and reprisals at worst.150 Huejúcar municipality which bordered with Zacatecas was witness in autumn 1928 to assassinations of teachers and the burning of schools.151 As the Catholic Church lost its ostentatious presence in local community fiestas, the

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vacuum was increasingly filled by the sullen person of the teacher, alienating villagers and increasing the appeal of Cristero propaganda.152 On a daily level the presence of troops disturbed local ways of life in ways which felt like an occupation. The existence of police forces with paramilitary roles alongside those of the Federal Army often led to tensions between these two supposedly allied forces. During the quieter first months of the Cristero revolt the Federal Army and gendarmes generally managed public order separately. In early March 1927, for example, the gendarmes of Zacatecas city received 500 rounds of ammunition from army stores.153 But Cristero ‘El Catorce’s’ defensive victory of 15 March 1927 at San Julián in Los Altos handed the initiative not just to Cristeros in the region,154 but also to the Federal Army in terms of the militarization of public order. The greatest military demands were in all of Mexico were now being made of the 18th zone covering Cristero Jalisco. Under obvious pressure, the week following the San Julián defeat the municipality of Guadalajara unanimously agreed to army requests to hand over the weapons of its gendarmerie and all its mounted police for service under army orders at municipal expense. Only police units stationed at the ravines on the approaches to Guadalajara were verbally exempted from militarization.155 The civil authorities’ trust seemed to pay off when a Cristero attack on Zapotlán del Rey, nearly sixty kilometres southeast of the city, was beaten back with heavy losses.156 Gendarmes assigned to army command continued to draw on the municipalities for their pay and costs, impoverishing the latter’s already devastated budgets and placing money at the heart of tensions between local government and the military. For example, in spring 1929 relations chilled between the Aguascalientes municipality and a local army unit over whether central or local government should be invoiced for the costs of fixing barracks plumbing (the town hall contending that barracks were a Federal responsibility).157 By October 1927 the state sanatorium in Zacatecas had to close its doors to new patients in view of the ‘great number of wounded and diseased’ in its care.158 Even healthy troops created challenges. The strain placed on troops by lengthy deployments in the conflictive centre-west led to all manner of civil– military crises and ill discipline. Cases of desertion, like that of Juan Velasco, a twenty-year-old mounted infantryman who secured leave to visit his ‘dying father’ in Tlaltenango (Zacatecas) but never returned to the ranks, were



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frequent.159 The natural springs at Ojocaliente (Zacatecas), pointing south towards Aguascalientes, offered the only public bathing in the region, and was also the scene throughout 1927 of escalating confrontations between Defensas and Cristeros.160 By the following year substantial numbers of Federal troops had been deployed to Ojocaliente. But the delicate balance practised by local communities between bathing, washing and drinking was interrupted by the presence of large number of Federal troops. In June 1928 civil authorities complained to the military of ‘soldiers constantly trying to bathe in the springs where the local people draw their drinking water’. Their numbers were very great, and the municipality feared that the soldiers’ bad attitude would reach the point where the municipality could no longer prevent their pollution of the drinking water ‘which would constitute a crime against the community’.161 Away from small communities on the front line, the garrisoning of cities exacerbated the assorted moral problems of alcohol, prostitution and gatherings of off-duty troops. During his presidential electioneering visit to Zacatecas in March 1928, Álvaro Obregón made a public speech on the vices of alcohol and gambling.162 The proximity to civilians demanded by asymmetrical warfare in some ways undermined the military reforms starting in 1925. These reforms, amongst other things, had led to the provision of hygienic barracks and the dismissal of the ‘unhygienic’ soldaderas, women camp-followers.163 In early 1927 the mayor’s office complained to the state governor of gangs of individuals lurking near municipal premises impersonating policemen and extorting citizens.164 Around the same time, residents of the Avenida Morelos in Zacatecas petitioned the mayor’s office against the behaviour of a neighbour pursuing immoral conduct: ‘Mrs Lidia N. allows the comings and goings of absurdities and nonsense … a huge concern for us mothers trying to educate our sons.’165 By April, after several weeks of temporizing, the local authorities took measures against prostitution,166 but the problem evidently remained, informing among other things army complaints to local authorities about cantina owners serving off-duty soldiers with alcohol. By October 1927 the consumption of alcoholic drinks was expressly forbidden in Zacatecas brothels.167 But street prostitution was harder to control. A complaint lodged by the Zacatecas Millers and Machinists Union about a brothel opposite its works appeared merely to have driven the problem out of the house and onto the streets.168 Indeed, in April 1933, nearly four years after the end of the first

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Cristiada, the Zacatecas zonal commander complained of elevated levels of venereal disease among his troops, especially of syphilis, ‘a matter of urgency not just for the army but also for civilians’.169 The ‘moralizing mission’ of the cardenista army identified by Thomas Rath was much more than an abstract exercise in apolitical civisme; it also tackled very visceral problems made worse by the recent civil war. The economic crisis caused by violence and reconcentration caused a crisis in civilian law enforcement both in terms of reduced municipal income and the mobilization of mounted gendarmes for counter-insurgency duties. By July 1927 the Zacatecas gendarmerie was no longer able to guard the city prison adequately, owing to the militarization of a number of their effectives for counter-insurgency duties. An appeal to zone commander Ortiz for soldiers to guard the prisons was rejected on similar grounds of insufficient manpower.170 In May 1928 financial penury forced Aguascalientes to redeploy twenty gendarmes who had been on prison guard duty to other roles ‘with serious consequences for public safety’, and to plead for greater military deployment in their stead. By then Ortiz relented and sent soldiers to guard the prison, solving one problem while creating another.171 By the following spring, as the government military effort in the centre-west reached a crescendo, complaints mounted of the behaviour of soldiers assigned to prison guard duties. Indiscipline grew among Federal troops by 1929, for example, the moral and physical abuse of prisoners by soldiers detached to guard prisoners at Aguascalientes male prison.172 Two weeks later, at the start of June, the governor complained about drunken soldiers on guard duty assaulting a female prisoner sent to organize family visits at the male prison.173 The Cristero War reverberated not just across the front lines of the centrewest but also across the government-held towns, cities and villages far from the scene of fighting. The civilian experience in Zacatecas supports the recent trend finding Mexico’s post-revolutionary demilitarization process to have been longer and more partial than was claimed by historians writing at the peak of the PRIista ascendancy.174 The Cristero War in Zacatecas and the surrounding centre-west revealed the structural inadequacies of civilian law enforcement, which was hampered by an underpopulated topography on the one hand and the persistence of civic Cristero values on the other. Alan Knight’s observation



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that the highlanders (serranos) of the centre-west were inherently anti-state holds true not just for the revolution but also for the Cristiada of 1926–9. The legacy of an ingrained conservatism in the centre-west, intrinsically hostile both to state power and state reforms, is thus to a considerable degree the product of the civil-military tensions of the Cristero War.

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The Cristero revolt had happened at a time of acute crisis in the Catholic Church. The 1920s–1930s era found the Latin American Catholic Church in a greater degree of crisis than at the time of the Canudos. On the one hand, liberalism’s loss of hegemony in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s appears partially to have vindicated the great nineteenth-century Mexican conservative, Lucas Alamán, who had argued that Catholicism alone united white with Indian and black. But, on the other hand, by the 1930s the Church saw itself threatened in two directions. First, the disruption caused by liberal capitalism itself had undermined the paternalistic ethos that the Church had battled to preserve in the New World. Second, secular nationalism, whether allied to socialism or to fascism, was advancing in the growing cities and displacing the grip of the Church there. Just as the 1930s were thus a turning point in modern Latin American history, in Mexico, in particular, they produced a unique spectacle:  a united political elite. Whereas Colombia continued to produce violent divisions, as witnessed during the bloody events of the Bogotazo of 1948, Mexico spawned what the intellectual Vargas Llosa called the ‘perfect dictatorship’, the unbroken rule of the official political party until 2000.1 This political achievement is remarkable considering the contradictions of the 1910–40 period. Whereas the Mexican Revolution was, according to Alan Knight, a transformative agrarian revolution, the Cristiada, according to Jean Meyer, was the real popular revolution.2 The fact that these revolts, nominally ideologically opposed, could be mastered by a strong state revealed much about the ability of the revolutionary party PNR (later PRI) to integrate and accommodate conflicting demands as well as to repress them.

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The PRIista state, through its corporatist structure, penetrated virtually all sectors of society. The Catholic Church’s militancy during 1926–9 led to the postwar sidelining of the Social Catholic lay and union organizations which had been gathering strength between 1891 and 1926.3 Even counterhegemonies were integrated because the state could thus ‘negate and trivialise them’, reproducing forms as an antidote to rebellion.4 Enrique Krauze’s thesis that Mexico’s post-revolutionary consensual politics were not necessarily totalizing has been disputed by other scholars.5 Certainly, memory of the Cristero revolt in rural Zacatecas and Los Altos has remained defiantly rejectionist of the revolutionary state, as evidenced in local memory (oral history) and the flourishing of streets and statues dedicated to such Catholic counter-symbols as Iturbide and the absence of the same for the revolutionary symbol of Benito Juárez. Cristero veterans interviewed in the 1990s reaffirmed their belief that their cause had been just and superior to the corruption of the revolution.6 The Cristero heartland, in short, has proved the exception of the rule of Mexico’s totalitarian political control over culture and memory. Recent research by Julia Young takes this religious defiance in new directions by showing how the significant Mexican Cristero diaspora in the United States was given a more religious identity than would otherwise have been the case.7 Yet the conflict zones in the centre-west spawned their own memories of the Cristiada whose very regional diversity highlighted the ability of the Federation to maintain control. The indigenous Gran Nayar and southern Durango recalled the Cristero War as the culmination of upheaval that had begun with the downfall of Porfirio Díaz in 1911. Strange alliances of convenience ensued between state governments and amnestied Cristeros. Whereas amnestied Cristeros in some indigenous communities ended up forming their own progovernment Defensas and even running ‘socialist’ schools, former indigenous callistas elsewhere turned against the government. All the while the Mexican government continued its relentless drive to turn the costumbre that defined Indian lives into meaningless ‘folklore’ and to encroach upon indigenous lands.8 For the mestizo communities of Jalisco, by contrast, the memory of the Cristiada showed contradictions of a different nature. Whereas Cristero sympathisers thought that their side had ‘won’ because the churches reopened for worship, Cristero veterans were pessimistic. They tended to believe that ‘nobody won’, that their side had ‘surrendered’, and that the people ‘lost’.9



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La Segunda Memory, whether collective or personal, was forged over time. But the bitterness surrounding the armistice of 1929 persisted through generations of local Catholic opinion. One elderly priest whose family members were victims of the war thought that the ‘Arreglos’ were the product of the betrayal of Mexican bishops who connived at Mexico’s near-colonial dependence on the United States.10 But early-1930s Federal and state governments made plain their refusal to abide by the peace agreement. Episodes abounded of Church property not being returned to the Church and general bad faith.11 In 1932, the third anniversary of the Arreglos was mourned by Guardia Nacional veterans with a manifesto calling for a return to arms, given that the ‘treacherous peace’ had led to ‘thieving agraristas’ taking over the land.12 Federal authorities, including the reinvigorated education ministry (SEP), drafted plans to ‘improve’ the Cristero heartlands with modern roads, schools, hospitals and veterinary care, betraying a belief in the sinews of modernity as a cure for traditionalism.13 But the wounds of war could not be healed by infrastructure. Detachments of Federal troops that garrisoned towns and villages in Los Altos got embroiled in vendettas with Cristero veterans returned to civilian life. In neighbouring Aguascalientes the wives of Cristero veterans immiserated on the haciendas complained of the vindictive attitude of the victorious agraristas who blacklisted recent enemies from the expanding ejidos.14 The Cristero leaders underwent their own turmoil. General Jesús Degollado, who had signed the Arreglos of 1929, lived in obscurity until his natural death in 1957. One of Degollado’s regimental commanders in Jalisco, Carlos Bouquet Carranza, was implicated in Vasconcelos’s failed attempt on the presidency in 1929 and shot in Nogales, Sonora, for being treacherous twice over.15 Cristero networks such as the Feminine Brigades disbanded, although the mysterious ‘U’ organization continued as a minor underground movement.16 In June 1931 General Máximo Ávila Camacho, commander of the thirteenth military zone, warned his subordinates of ‘reactionary types impersonating officers’ in order to obtain false credits and generally demean the image of the army.17 The ‘respectable’ international Catholic solidarity of the Knights of Columbus continued. There was a widely shared Cristero allegation that more

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of their leaders died after the amnesty than in actual battle.18 This bitterness hardened during 1932–5, the nadir in the Church’s treatment at the hands of the government. It was no coincidence that the anticlerical Spanish Second Republic sent a socialist, Álvarez del Vayo, as ambassador to Mexico during 1931–3, and that he was recalled once anticlerical measures were scaled back in Spain from November 1933.19 The Cárdenas regime (1934–40) in some ways rebranded the Federal Army as the very revolutionary force that had been excoriated in Cristero black propaganda. Cardenista efforts to ‘depoliticize’ the army were in many ways political because of their ‘moralizing’ mission. Conscription was imposed in order to ‘integrate the nation’ and soldiers were taught class consciousness and their children given places at military schools often staffed by socialist teachers, much though several of the upper echelons of the officer corps resented such ‘bolshevization’.20 In 1932 an anti-alcohol drive was launched in the army, broadcast via the PNR’s radio station.21 Meanwhile, a renewed Cristero rising, often called La Segunda (or ‘El Rescoldo’), took place between 1934 and 1936 (or even later than 1936 in the sierras of southern Durango). The LNDL’s (formerly LNDLR) manifesto launched in 1934, the Plan of Cerro Gordo, garnered little support, even though the plan called for the reinstatement of the Constitution of 1857 minus its Reform Laws, votes for women and a number of other demands in a nationalistic vein. Yet the Church hierarchy disowned the Segunda rising in the hope that the regime’s Jacobinism, which by 1935 had led to only 305 priests being licensed in the whole republic, would burn itself out.22 Jean Meyer called this revolt a war of the ‘wretched’, not just because the Catholic Church (the source of Cristero legitimacy according to Meyer) excommunicated the rebels but also because La Segunda was in many ways the revolt of individual ex-Cristero commanders lacking the general support of the population.23 But recent research has revised the bifurcated Church–state relations of the 1930s, showing that Catholic elements moulded post-revolutionary politics even amidst official anticlericalism.24 As Federal education and land reforms were more advanced than during 1926–9, terrorism against schoolteachers and agrarian authorities was disproportionately greater. This low-level violence happened in states which hitherto had not supported significant Cristero insurgencies: Puebla, Veracruz, Sonora and Morelos, turning the centre-west into just another front rather



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than the cradle of insurgency. Aurelio Acevedo in 1933 reported from rural Zacatecas how communications had broken down between Cristero organizers in the towns, ignorant thanks to almost three years of peace, and poorly organized rural insurgents. In Fresnillo, for example, Cristero commanders, Corona and Anguiano, mobilized elements of the veteran ‘Castañón’ regiment. But having led them fully armed out to the countryside, their plans came undone thanks to the ‘Corona’s credulity and Anguiano’s tactlessness’. Several insurgents refused to leave Fresnillo, realizing the poor preparation behind the rising, and the ringleaders failed to impress their colleague Santos Martínez into the rising. Santos Martínez instead escaped their clutches and rallied the Defensa he commanded which later defeated the Cristero force, pillaging its baggage train and forcing Corona and Anguiano into flight. Clandestine Cristero letters warned militants to commit orders to memory rather than risk incriminating themselves with written instructions and to observe good discipline even while circumstances obliged them to conduct guerrilla operations.25 Only in the Sierra Fría, points south towards Aguascalientes, was a small group of Cristeros able to sustain itself for a few months. Events like these convinced Acevedo that the rising in Zacatecas state was doomed to fail, given ‘the complete absence of commanders, poor timing, lack of pasture, dire conditions of the cavalry, and lack of provisions’. Acevedo was particularly perturbed by the lack of Cristero propaganda, both in the countryside and in the towns, especially in such previously conflictprone regions as that stretching between Bolaños and Río Grande.26 A  few Zacatecas priests defied the Church hierarchy’s excommunication of the rising by arming the rebels, but such help was far less systematic than during 1926–9.27 The authorities suppressed pro-Cristero sentiments with apparent ease. The Defensas of Mezquitic, for example, imprisoned a woman overheard bad-mouthing authorities who had arrested a local priest.28 In particular, an ‘involuntary betrayal’ of the pro-Cristero Defensa of Huejuquilla, Cristero capital of the first war, led to the imprisonment of some thirty men and the denial of their arms to regional plotters in Zacatecas. This setback, according to Acevedo, was decisive for Zacatecas, as the rebels could now rely only on 150-odd armed men supplied by Juan Capistrano for the whole region.29 As a consequence the 1930s Cristeros were forced to maintain themselves much more by raiding than had been the case even in the 1920s. Weapons

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remained plentiful but there was a chronic shortage of ammunition. Thus ‘segundero’ Cristeros were more prone to attack softer civilian targets, compounding their image as outlaws. In the chaos local communities carried out expropriations justified by their allegiance in the recent conflict to either the Federation or the Cristeros. The huge and indigenous Mezquital municipality in southern Durango, which during the 1920s war had been almost entirely in Cristero hands, unsurprisingly hosted large numbers of disgruntled Cristero veterans. A  war of subsistence ensued in which pro-Federation and proCristero elements targeted each other’s food supplies. State authorities were often powerless to intervene, not least because anti-Cristero communities also appeared to be involved in cattle-rustling. Thus in 1933 women in Huazamota (southern Durango) petitioned for the banning of ex-Cristero leader, Florencio Estrada, from their community, citing his former actions killing people and rustling cattle. Paula Sala’s petition was rejected by the state government on the grounds that ‘Estrada, having adopted an entirely pacific attitude, is entitled to the same guarantees granted by law as those enjoyed by any citizen’.30 The women’s concerns were doubtless driven by the continued lawlessness that ravaged remote parts of southern Durango even after the Arreglos had been agreed. In February 1930, the small indigenous community of Santa María de Ocotán complained of the ongoing presence of armed Cristeros in their neighbourhood.31 One indigenous woman starved to death and other starving women were left only with maguey sap (aguamiel) on which to subsist. But a plea for aid on their behalf was met by state authorities with surly advice to ‘identify the culprits’ and ‘use conciliatory means to get them to stop their threatening attitude’.32 State authorities washed their hands of southern Durango. The practice in most of Mexico after the Arreglos was to disarm Cristero veterans and to relocate their leaders away from zones where their presence might provoke rancour and tit-for-tat killings. But in southern Durango neither state nor Federal authorities believed they had the ability to keep the peace, and they therefore refused to disarm veterans from both sides. The persistence of state-sponsored deforestation on Tepehuano lands into the 1930s explained why the second Cristero War would be so protracted in southern Durango, as armed Cristeros and Tepehuano civilization had a common enemy in the government.33 In 1935 Federal troops in the same region banned all



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movement of lumbermen and other wood workers in their bid to thwart the Cristero rebels invading this area.34 But by 1940 the last embers of the Segunda were dying out. Federico Vázquez, the last Cristero strongman with a strong Tepehuano following, was amnestied in 1941 in return for a lucrative forestry management position. Once rivals gunned Vázquez down in 1945, the Cristero rebellion really was over in southern Durango.35 All local war leaders were killed, both Cristero and Federal, and local indigenous attitudes towards any authority figures, whether priests, government officials or caciques, were poisoned for generations.

The Cristiada and its legacy From 1932 the Federal government and state authorities revived many of their anticlerical measures which five years earlier had provoked the revolt. The state government of Coahuila, for example, which in 1918 had licensed only twentyfive Catholic priests for its entire state, all of whom were to be Mexicans, now enforced its anticlericalism even more. A  decree of 12 December 1933 was even more drastic: Coahuila would now permit only ‘nine ministers of each religion or sect’ throughout the entire state.36 But even while La Segunda was underway, there were unmistakeable signs of détente in government attitudes towards the Catholic Church, starting with the otherwise very left-leaning Cárdenas presidency (1934–40). Public worship returned in previously hardline anticlerical states like Veracruz from 1937, and the Church patriotically rallied to government’s nationalization of oil in 1938. By 1937 local examples abounded of détente in Church–state relations. General Quintero of the Zacatecas zonal command gave guarantees to priests to return to war-torn Bolaños and offered to intercede against anyone placing obstacles in their path.37 During the 1940 presidential election, Ávila Camacho’s victory was accompanied by his opening address: ‘I am a believer!’, which signalled end of government persecution and spiritual recovery of Catholicism. The hard-line ‘Calles law’ was allowed to fall into abeyance from 1940. But now religion was ‘compartmentalized’ as just one of several issues of state, taking its place alongside housing, jobs and the family, all of which had been reshaped by the revolutionary legacy. The consolidation of

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the PRIista state by 1940 forced many Mexican officers into ‘pluriempleo’ as Mexican officers suffered the worst army salaries in Latin America.38 Some Cristero leaders used their faith to develop their own political agenda with sinarquismo, a late 1930s hybrid of social Catholicism and pseudo-fascism (a mystical Hispanic totalitarianism). In terms of its hostility to government anticlericalism and ‘socialist’ education sinarquismo shared common ground with the conservative party (PAN), founded in 1939. (The May 1942 Mexican declaration of war against the Axis, however, did see some armed bands appear in parts of Zacatecas, and the UNS – Unión Nacional Sinarquista – was blamed.)39 But sinarquismo was a choice made by just some Cristero leaders; most of their embittered rank and file simply returned to their farms.40 In fact Aurelio Acevedo was strongly opposed to the fascistic Unión Nacional Sinarquista (and its later version, the Partido Democrático Mexicano) and its urban, middle-class leaders. Acevedo accused it of intending to ‘crush the Cristero spirit’, and indeed the Altos region proved indifferent to sinarquismo, unlike western areas of Guanajuato, for example.41 In fact a form of cultural Cristiada persisted after 1940. Residents in notoriously Catholic Totatiche (Jalisco) in 1933 tearfully congregated at a ceremony reburying in local consecrated ground the bodies of the martyred priests, Cristóbal Magallanes and Agustín Caloca, which had been interred in Colotlán. Local tensions persisted into 1935 when teachers denounced the machinations of seminarians, leading to the arrest of four of the latter.42 To this day counter-revolutionary symbols are flaunted as their own mnemonics (Viva Cristo Rey letters populate the hillsides of several locations in Alto Jalisco). The PAN’s co-founder, Efraín González Luna, was a civic Cristero from Jalisco. From the 1940s a shift in Mexico’s political landscape pushed the PAN in a clerical direction. The governing PRI made clear that capitalism would survive, and the clerical-fascist Synarchism, which had particularly gripped former Cristero zones of Guanajuato, went into decline. Thus the PAN embraced popular clericalism, and to this day in former Cristero areas of Jalisco where it routinely wins elections, the PAN has used funds from the laic state in order to support religious commemoration of the Cristiada.43 The persistence of the cultural Cristiada in rural Zacatecas and Los Altos is significant in the way that for decades it has resisted integration into Mexico’s notoriously penetrative post-revolutionary corporatism. Only the easing of



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Church–state tensions produced by the Cárdenas government from the mid1930s and, especially, the Second World War, produced a durable peace in Zacatecas. Even then, the mutiny of radical Catholic conscripts in 1942 in this state was a reminder of how disgruntled militants could even turn to pro-Axis sentiment as a proxy for the Cristero cause.44 Mexico’s Cristero revolt also occupies a special role in Mexican-Vatican relations. The Church did not welcome research into a revolt which in the 1920s it helped to provoke and later disowned with the ‘Agreements’ of 1929.45 Also, the Church did not like being reminded of how its hierarchy had been split two ways by the ‘dictator’ Calles:  a western belligerent wing centred on Orozco, Bishop of Guadalajara (who spent the three years of conflict in clandestinity) and a non-violent, peaceful protest wing. More recently, the Church has rehabilitated the Cristeros, just as it eventually did with Miguel Hidalgo.46 Eventually, 25 Cristero martyrs were sanctified by the Church, and of these 14 were from Jalisco. Just these fourteen saints outnumber all the other saints of Latin America put together.47 Even so, Cristero veterans were shunned by both Church and state for decades after the end of the war.48 The Catholic Church also cold-shouldered the legacy and celebration of the Mexican Revolution, finally embracing it only in 1968, after which ChurchState relations continued to warm. In January 1992, PRIista President Carlos Salinas reopened official relations with the Catholic Church (following the passing of a law known as the Ley de Asociaciones Religiosas y Culto Público), and formal relations were reopened with the Vatican soon afterwards. Mexico’s first ambassador to the Vatican was Professor Enrique Olivares Santara who delayed his departure to Rome by one day. The reason for this delay was to avoid a demarche which threatened to open the wounds of Mexico’s Cristero War. For on the day of the ambassador’s projected arrival, Pope John Paul II presided over the beatification of some twenty Cristero-era Catholic martyrs of the armed resistance to the Federal government’s anticlericalism. All ambassadors were expected to be present at the ceremony, so Professor Olivares’s opportune delay avoided a diplomatic crisis.49 In 2000, the Catholicleaning Party of National Action (PAN) won the Presidency under Vicente Fox, thereby breaking with 60 years of uninterrupted rule by the PRI which had always claimed to embody the heritage of the Mexican Revolution. Fox’s electioneering had included the flamboyant use of the image of the Virgin

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of Guadalupe, an unassailably Mexican Catholic symbol, and the only truly national symbol of the nineteenth-century Independence wars against Spanish control. The sixteenth-century Indian peasant woman had also emblazoned the otherwise national flag which rallied the Cristero armies of the 1920s and 1930s. Even very modern politicians could not quite resist the allure of Catholicism and the Virgin, despite the outrage Salinas’s and, especially, Fox’s supposed obsequiousness towards the Vatican, and the admiration he expressed towards the Cristero rebels, provoked in the minds of decidedly laic defenders of the revolutionary heritage.50 The Cristero religious and political legacy was profound, and yet has retreated over time. Yet its military legacy, if anything, is increasing. The irregular nature of fighting, and the ‘grey areas’ revealed between wrongdoing, reprisals, and heavy-handed policing retain real contemporary relevance. The Mexican government’s decision in 2006 to impose Federal and military control over what was previously a local law and order issue, namely, the drug trade, fed a spiral of violence which at times turned some parts of the centrewest into a civil war zone. The irregular nature of violence in civil wars like the Cristiada continues to produce very recognizable ‘logical’ responses from individuals, communities and law enforcement, even when everything else about twenty-first-century Mexico is completely unrecognizable.

Notes 1  Origins, context, historiography 1 Lourdes Celina Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera: narrativa, testimonios y propaganda (Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 2012), pp. 110–11. 2 Agustín Vaca, Los silencios de la historia: las cristeras (Zapopan: Colegio de Jalisco, 2009), p. 162. 3 Moisés González Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. I (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2000), 5 vols, p. 63. 4 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. I, pp. 29–30; Nathaniel Morris, Manuel Lozada: la ‘leyenda negra’ y el nacimiento del agrarismo en la conformación de Nayarit (Enciclopedia Centenario de Nayarit: Colegio de México, 2017). 5 For recent insights on this, see Melissa E. Boyd, ‘The Career and Ideology of Mariano Otero, Mexican politician (1817–1850)’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, St. Andrews, 2012). 6 Luis Rubio Hernansáez, Contrarrevoluciones católicas, de los chuanes a los cristeros (1792–1942) (Zacatecas: Texere editores, 2017), p. 313. 7 Guy Thomson and David La France, Patriotism, Politics and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-century Mexico: Juan Francisco Lucas and the Puebla Sierra (Latin American Silhouettes) (Scholarly Resources, U.S.; New edition, 2001). 8 Jeremy Black, War in the Modern World since 1815 (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 14. 9 Edwin Lieuwen, Arms and Politics in Latin America (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960), p. 124. 10 Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion: The Mexican People between Church and State, 1926–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 142–3. 11 Jean Meyer, La Cristiada: la guerra de los cristeros (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1973), Vol. III, p. 260. 12 Joanna Burke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in TwentiethCentury Warfare (New York: Granta Books, 1999), pp. xvii–xviii. 13 Marcos Aguila and Jeffrey Bortz, ‘The Rise of Gangsterism and Charrismo: Labor Violence and the Postrevolutionary Mexican State’, in Wil Pansters (ed.),

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Violence, Coercion and State-Making (Stanford, Stanford University Press), pp. 186–7. 14 Terry Rugeley and Ben Fallaw, ‘Redrafting History: The Challenges of Scholarship on the Mexican Military Experience’, in Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley (eds), Forced Marches (Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2012), p. 16. 15 Edwin Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism (Alburquerque: New Mexico Press, 1968), pp. 45–7. 16 Rugeley and Fallaw, ‘Redrafting History’, p. 18. 17 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 296, Vol. IV, p. 224. 18 José Luis Piñeyro, Ejército y sociedad en México (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1985), p. 45. 19 Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, p. 57. 20 Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants (Oxford: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), Vol. I, II vols, pp. 373–87. 21 Thomas Rath, Myths of Demilitarization in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920–1960 (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), p. 25. 22 Martin van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 71. 23 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 264–74. 24 John J. Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), pp. 109–10. 25 Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America, p. 77; Roderick Camp, Generals in the Palacio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 26 Guillermo Boils, Los militares en la política en México (Mexico City, 1975), p. 40; Gonzalo N. Santos, Memorias (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1986), p. 275. 27 Rugeley and Fallaw, ‘Redrafting History’, pp. 8–9. 28 Meyer, La Cristiada, Vol. III, p. 203. 29 Martha Beatriz Loyo Camacho, Joaquín Amaro y el proceso de institucionalización del Ejército Mexicano, 1917–1931 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003), pp. 93–6, 183. 30 Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America, p. 123; Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 17–18. 31 Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America, pp. 69–74. 32 Paul Vanderwood, Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 45–9. 33 John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 134. 34 Julia O’Hara, ‘The Slayer of Victorio Bears his Honors Quietly’, in Nicola Foote and René D. Harder Horst (eds), Military Struggle and Identity Formation in Latin America: Race, Nation and Community During the Liberal Period (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010), pp. 224–42.

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3 5 E.g., Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, p. 84. 36 Nathaniel Morris, ‘ “The World Created Anew”: Land, Religion and Revolution in the Grand Nayar Region of Mexico’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, October 2015), pp. 52–4. 37 Nicola Foote and René D. Harder Horst (eds), ‘Introduction: Decentring War’, in Nicola Foote and René D. Harder Horst (eds), Military Struggle and Identity Formation in Latin America: Race, Nation and Community During the Liberal Period (University of Florida Press, 2010), p. 5. 38 Jesús Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero. Mis memorias. Sebastián Arroyo Cruz (Durango: AGLI Editorial, 2018), p. 204; Jim Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos (Arizona, 1982), p. 11. 39 Camp, Generals in the Palacio, pp. 1–5; Wil Pansters, ‘Zones of State-Making’, in Wil Pansters (ed.), Violence, Coercion and State-Making (Stanford, 2012), pp. 28–9. 40 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 470–80. 41 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 480–90. 42 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. II, pp. 1–2. 43 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 398–1. 44 Thomas Benjamin, La Revolución: Mexico’s Great Revolution as Memory, Myth and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), p. 60. 45 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 453–5. 46 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 456–60. 47 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 463–8. 48 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. II, p. 4. 49 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. II, p. 51. 50 Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, ‘Popular Culture and State Formation’, in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds.), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (London, 1994), p. 14. 51 Keith Brewster, ‘Redeeming the “Indian”: Sport and Ethnicity in Postrevolutionary Mexico’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2004), 218–23. 52 Thomas L. Benjamin, ‘From the Ruins of the Ancien Regime: Mexico’s Monument to the Revolution’, in William H. Beezley and Linda A. Curcio Nagy (eds.), Latin American Popular Culture since Independence: An Introduction (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2000), pp. 164–76. 53 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 40–71, 228–54. 54 Paul Garner, ‘Porfirio Díaz and Personalist Politics in Mexico’, in Will Fowler (ed.), Authoritarianism in Latin America Since Independence (London, 1996), pp. 33–4. 55 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 232–9, 251–4.

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5 6 Cited in Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, p. 334. 57 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. II, pp. 517–18. 58 Álvarez del Vayo, The Last Optimist (London, 1950), pp. 227–8. 59 Nikolai Larin, La rebelión de los cristeros (Mexico City, 1968), p. 208, cited in Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, pp. 13–14. 60 Benjamin, La Revolución, p. 55. 61 Richard A. Warren, Vagrants and Citizens: Politics and the Masses in Mexico City from Colony to Republic (Wilmington, 2001), p. 116. 62 Cited in Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, p. 259. 63 Enrique Guerra Manzo, ‘The Resistance of the Marginalised: Catholics in Eastern Michoacán and the Mexican State, 1920–40’, Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (February 2008), 109–33, pp. 109–10, 131–3. 64 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 254–7. 65 María Esther Padilla Hernández, ‘Breve reseña de la persecución de la iglesia en el México posrevolucionario’, in Juan Francisco Hernández Hurtado, Historia de Victoriano Ramírez y de la Revolución Cristera en los Altos de Jalisco (Mexico City, 2009), p. 17. 66 Carlos Blanco Ribera, Mi contribución a la epopeya cristera: una época terrible y tormentosa (Guadalajara: Asociación Pro-Cultra Occidental, 2002), pp. 40–51. 67 I.N.A.H., Cámara 1734 (Serie Conflictos Religiosos). (Diversos Archivos Fondos Bibliográficos), Rollo 8: details of 1923 Catholic press campaign. 68 Sandra Kuntz Ficker and Luis Juáregui, ‘Entre el pasado y el presente, 1867–1940’, in Jesús Flores Olague (director), La fragua de una leyenda: historia mínima de Zacatecas (Mexico City, 1995), pp. 171–2. 69 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Caja 49, Exps. 31 and 32: Acevedo’s summer 1926 correspondence. 70 I.N.A.H., 1927 manifesto by the Jalisco Association of Catholic Lawyers protesting state application of anti-clericalism. 71 Cristina Gutiérrez Zúñiga and Renée de la Torre Castellanos, ‘El campo religioso cristiano en Guadalajara una cronología del siglo XIX’, Jalisco: Independencia y Revolución (Vol. III): Discursos hegemónicos e identidades invisibles en el Jalisco posrevolucionario (Colegio de Jalisco, 2010), pp. 176–2; Vaca, Los silencios de la historia, p. 239. 72 La Reconquista, 25 May 1924. 73 Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion, Michoacán, 1927–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 80–8; As Alan Knight has observed, material allegiance dominated the 1930s Cárdenas presidency, which he describes as a ‘jalopy’ rather than a juggernaut of factional interests providing conditional support (i.e. no revolutionary unity)

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(Alan Knight, ‘Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?’, Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (February 1994), pp. 74–6. 74 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 108. 75 Benjamin, La Revolución, p. 70. 76 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 303–9. 77 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 175–83, 285. 78 Alicia Salmerón Castro, ‘Un general agrarista en la lucha contra los cristeros. El movimiento en Aguascalientes y la razón de Genovevo de la O.’, Historia Mexicana (1995), p. 551; Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, p. 401. 79 José Eduardo Jacobo Bernal, ‘Un hacendado contra la reforma agraria’, in Margil de Jesús Canizales Romo and Jose Eduardo Jacobo Bernal (eds.), Memorias de Trancoso (Oaxaca, 2010), pp. 89–90. 80 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, p. 393. 81 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 400–1. 82 Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, p. 91. 83 Nathaniel Morris, ‘Memory, Magic and Militias: Cora Indian Participation in Mexico’s wars, from the Reforma to the Revolution (1854–1920)’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Vol. 30, Nos 4–5 (2019), 841–71. 84 Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, pp. 5–8. 85 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Secretaría, 1933, Exp. FS: January 1933 report from Aurelio Acevedo, p. 29 (April 1974 bequest from Jean Meyer). 86 J. Guadalupe de Anda, Los cristeros: la guerra santa en Los Altos (Mexico City, 1941), p. 117. 87 Lina Rendón and Mario Alberto G. Magaña Manallas (eds.), Capítulos de historia de la ciudad de Guadalajara (Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara, 1992), Vol. II, p. 291. 88 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 114–15. 89 Jean Meyer, El sinarquismo: un fascismo mexicano? (Mexico City, 1979), p. 18. 90 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 402–4. 91 Rendón and Magaña Manallas (eds.), Capítulos de historia de la ciudad de Guadalajara, Vol. II, p. 290. 92 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 192–4. 93 Macfarland, Chaos in Mexico (New York, 1935), pp. 166–7. 94 Ernest Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage (London, 1928), p. x. 95 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 1–18. 96 Enrique Guerra Manzo, Del fuego sagrado a la acción cívica. Los católicos frente al Estado en Michoacán (1920–1940), México, El Colegio de Michoacán/ Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Editorial Itaca (2015), pp. 19–21. 97 Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, p. 183.

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98 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 426. 99 Alfonso Bullón de Mendoza, ‘La primera guerra carlista’ (thesis doctoral, 1991), p. 666. 100 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 233. 101 Edwin Williamson, Penguin History of Latin America (London, 1992), pp. 77, 244. 102 Frances Lannon, Privilege, Persecution and Prophecy: The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 103 José Fuentes Mares, Intravagario (Mexico City, 1986), p. 30. 104 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 455. 105 National Catholic Register, 11 March 2016. 106 E.g., Luis de la Torre, Manuel Caldera, and Xorge del Campo, Pueblos del viento norte: Revolución, Cristiada y Rescoldo (Zapopan: Amate, 2012), p. 170. 107 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 140–1. 108 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 154–8. 109 Mi Pueblo: Pueblos del Viento Norte. 110 Vaca, Los silencios de la historia, p. 52. 111 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Colección Padre José Adolfo Arroyo, Caja 50: 20 October 1958 letter from Aurelio Acevedo to Professor Juan N Carlos. 112 Benjamin, La Revolución, p. 160. 113 Guerra Manzo, Del fuego sagrado, p. 21; Keith Brewster, Militarism, Ethnicity, and Politics in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, 1917–1930 (Tucson, 2003), pp. 11–12. 114 Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, p. 14. 115 D. A. Brading (ed.), Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge, 1980). 116 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 263–4, 277–8. 117 Enrique Rajchenberg and Catherine Héau-Lambert, ‘History and Symbolism in the Zapatista Movement’, in John Holloway and Eloína Peláez, Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 24. 118 Jorge Alberto Lozoya, El ejército mexicano (1911–1965) (Mexico City, 1970), p. 40; Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 309–15. 119 Stephen Neufeld, Michael Matthews, and William H. Beezley (eds.), Mexico in Verse: A History of Music, Rhyme and Power (Tucson: University of Airzona Press, 2015), pp. 195–7. 120 T.N.A., FO 204/619: 13 January 1927 letter entitled ‘Political Situation’ from British Vice-Consul at Guadalajara to British legation, Mexico City. 121 Meyer, La Cristiada, Vol. III, pp. 134–5, 319–20. 122 Ramón Jrade, ‘Inquiries into the Cristero Insurrection’, Latin American Research Review (1985), p. 66.

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123 Matthew Butler, ‘The ‘Liberal’ Cristero: Ladislao Molina and the Cristero Rebellion in Michoacán, 1927–29’, Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3 (October 1999), 645–71, p. 648. 124 Butler, Popular Piety. 125 Andrés Fábregas, ‘Los Altos de Jalisco: características generales’, in José Díaz Román Rodríguez, El movimiento cristero: sociedad y conflicto en Los Altos de Jalisco (Mexico City, 1979), p. 62. 126 Ian F. W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-insurgencies: Guerrillas and their Opponents since 1750 (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 24–7. 127 Jeremy Black, Rethinking Military History (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 6. 128 Stephen Morillo with Michael F. Pavkovic, What is Military History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), p. 1. 129 Beckett, Modern Insurgencies, pp. 14–15. 130 E.g., Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, p. 9. 131 Walter Laquer, Guerrilla Warfare (New Brunswick, 2009), pp. 22–9. 132 E.g., A.M.Z. Docs. 14/15: 21 July 1932 instruction from Gral.-Brig., Jefe de la Operaciones Militares, to Zacatecas municipal presidency regarding tighter sale and registration of guns. 133 Laqueur, Guerrilla Warfare, pp. 53–62. 134 E.g., Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 372. 135 Flysheet: ‘Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa: resumen de la situación política y military de la república’, Agosto 1927. 136 John Lynn, ‘Toward an Army of Honor: The Moral Evolution of the French Army, 1789–1815’, French Historical Studies, Vol. 16 (No. 1), 1989. 137 Sibylle Scheipers, Unlawful Combatants: A Geneaology of the Irregular Fighter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), ch. 1. 138 David C. Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey! The Cristero Rebellion and Church-State Conflict in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), p. 61. 139 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 47–8, 65. 140 Enrique Krauze, Plutarco E. Calles (Mexico City, 1987), p. 81. 141 Anatol Shulgovski, México en la encrucijada de su historia (Mexico City, 1968), pp. 54–7. 142 T.N.A., FO 204/619: 13 January ‘unguarded’ letter entitled ‘Political Situation’ from British Consul at Guadalajara to British legation, Mexico City. 143 Casti Conubii (1930). 144 Luis Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco: Introducción al conflicto cristero en Zacatecas y norte de Jalisco, 1926–1942 (Zacatecas, 2008), pp. 35–9; Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, pp. 72–9. 145 Blanco Ribera, Mi contribución a la epopeya cristera, p. 151. 146 Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion, pp. 138–9.

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1 47 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, pp. 75–6. 148 Xorge del Campo, Diccionario Ilustrado de Narradores Cristeros (Zapopan: Amate, 2004), p. 107.

2  Cristero battlefronts Eduardo Correa, Pascual Díaz, SJ.: el arzobispo mártir (Minerva, 1945), p. 97. René de la Pedraja, Wars of Latin America, 1899–1941, pp. 288–90. de la Torre, Caldera, del Campo, Pueblos del viento norte, pp. 47–8, 55–6. Alan Knight and Wil Pansters, Caciquismo in Twentieth-century Mexico (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2005), pp. 28–9. 5 Luis de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada (Zapopan: Amate, 2011), p. 190. 6 de la Torre, Caldera, and del Campo, Pueblos del viento Norte, pp. 85–95; Antonio Saucedo Ovalle, Así fue y así es Valparaíso (Valparaíso, 1986), p. 83. 7 José de Jesús Torres Contreras, Relaciones de frontera entre los Huicholes y sus vecinos mestizos (Zapopan, 2009), pp. 299–300. 8 Brewster, Militarism, Ethnicity, and Politics in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, 1917– 1930, pp. 12–14, 54, 63–4. 9 Saucedo Ovalle, Así fue y así es Valparaíso (Valparaíso, 1986), p. 82. 10 Wil G. Pansters, ‘Theorizing Political Culture in Modern Mexico’, in Wil G. Pansters (ed.), Citizens of the Pyramid: Essays on Mexican Political Culture (Amsterdam, 1997), p. 18. 11 Various Catholic lay organizations supported the Cristero revolt by supplying money, arms and volunteers. Jalisco’s strong Unión Popular (led by Anacleto González Flores) joined the rebellion, but on its own terms (Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 101–10). 12 Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero, pp. 205–9. 13 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, p. 82. 14 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 267. 15 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, pp. 195–6; Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, p. 49. 16 Nearby indigenous communities do not consider Santiago Bayacora to be ‘indigenous’ and its ‘Indian’ characterization is likely to derive from its tradition of being the closest ‘frontier’ community to Durango city. 17 Meyer, La Cristiada, Vol. I, pp. 142–3. 18 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno del estado de Durango, Exp. 19: 1 October 1926 telegram from state governor to Mexico DF. 19 T.N.A., FO 204/619, ‘Apartado 58’: 11 January 1927 letter from British Consul at Durango to British legation, Mexico City.

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20 T.N.A., FO 204/619, ‘Apartado 58’: 11 January 1927 letter from British Consul at Durango to British legation, Mexico City. 21 A.H.E.D., Fondo Secretaría de Gobierno, Fojas 45: 12 December 1929 reports written by Colonel Everardo Gámiz (commissioned by governor of Durango) concerning the origins and course of the religious conflict, p. 82. 22 A.H.E.D., Secretaría de Gobierno, Sección 6, Serie 6 o 7: 6 November 1926 telegram from governor of Durango to Comandante Jefe de Cuartel at El Salto, Durango. 23 A.H.E.D., Secretaría de Gobierno, Sección 6, Serie 6 o 7: 6 November 1926 telegram from state governor to Jefe de Operaciones Militares; 8 November 1926 telegram from Francisco Martínez to state governor; 1 December 1926 telegram from state governor to Jefer de Operaciojnes Militares. 24 Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 80. 25 Bridget María Chesterton (ed.), The Chaco War: Environment, Ethnicity and Nationalism (London, 2016), pp. 3–8. 26 Hew Strachan (ed.), Clausewitz’s On War (London: Tantor Media, 2007), p. 480. 27 Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero, pp. 214–15. 28 A.H.E.D., Secretaría de Gobierno, Sección 6, Serie 6 o 7: 3 December 1926 telegram from state governor to Federal government. 29 A.H.E.D., Secretaría de Gobierno, Sección 6, Serie 6 o 7: 1 December 1926 telegram from state governor of Durango to General Marcelo Caraveo, jefe de la operaciones militares en el Estado; 3 December 1926 telegram from state governor to Secretario de Gobernación, Mexico City. 30 Blanco Ribera, Mi contribución a la epopeya cristera, p. 280. 31 Francis Patrick Dooley, Los Cristeros, Calles y el catolicismo mexicano (Mexico City: SEP Setentas, 1976), p. 93. 32 Alicia Olivera Sedano, Aspectos del conflicto religioso de 1926 a 1929, pp. 145–74. 33 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Rollo 12, Caja 12, exps. 48–53: documents 46 and 47 detailing complaints of Cristero propagandist in Zacatecas. 34 Blanco Ribera, Mi contribución a la epopeya cristera, pp. 262–3. 35 Jennie Purnell, Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The Agraristas and Cristeros of Michoacán (London: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 77–9. 36 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 18–27. 37 New York Herald Tribune, 28 April 1927. 38 Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, pp. 118–20.

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39 Purnell, Popular Movements, p. 80; Luis Rubio, ‘El conflicto cristero en Zacatecas según los expedientes judiciales federales (1926–1936)’, Estudios de historia y sociedad, vol. XXVII, núm. 107 (2006), 123–43, pp. 130–1. 40 Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, p. 52. 41 Salmerón Castro, ‘Un general agrarista en la lucha contra los cristeros’, p. 550. 42 Josefina Arellano Viuda de Huerta, Viva Cristo Rey! Narración histórica de la revolución cristera en el pueblo de San Julián Jalisco (Zapopan, 2003), pp. 45–7. 43 Flysheet: ‘Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa: resumen de la situación política y militar de la república’, Agosto 1927; David, No. 37, 22 August 1955, pp. 203–7; Tuck, Holy War, p. 83. 44 Héctor Aguilar Camín, Saldos de la Revolución: Historia y política de México, 1910– 1968 (Mexico City, 2012), pp. 213–14; Purnell, Popular Movements, pp. 86–7. 45 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, p. 74; Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 136–7. 46 Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero, p. 239. 47 New York Herald Tribune, 28 April 1927. 48 David, No. 14, 22 September 1953, pp. 218–19. 49 Meyer, Cristiada, I, pp. 186–7. 50 New York Herald Tribune, 28 April 1927. 51 Mi Pueblo: Pueblos del Viento Norte, Marzo-Abril-Mayo de 1996, p. 13: Guillermina Palacios Suárez, ‘El Regimiento de Valparaíso y la Segunda Cristiada’. 52 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 162, 186; Meyer, Cristiada, I, p. 247. 53 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 399. 54 A.M.Z., Oficios, Diversos, Traslado y funcionamiento de poderes municipales, 16 marzo 1927 (21 hojas): 13 April 1927 letter from Chalchihuites town hall to Zacatecas. 55 Cited in Purnell, Popular Movements, p. 85. 56 Charles Callwell, ‘Lessons to be Learnt from the Campaigns’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, Vol. 31 (1887), p. 367. 57 Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero, p. 228. 58 A.M.Z., Copias de Oficios, 1–30 junio 1927, 235 hojas: 22 June 1927 letter from Zacatecas presidente municipal to state governor. 59 Mi Pueblo: Pueblos del Viento Norte, Marzo-Abril-Mayo de 1996, p. 3. 60 de la Torre, Caldera, and del Campo, Pueblos del viento norte, pp. 139–40. 61 Meyer, La Cristiada, Vol. I, pp. 218–19. 62 de la Torre, Caldera, and del Campo, Pueblos del viento norte, pp. 103–6. 63 Mi Pueblo: Pueblos del Viento Norte, Marzo-Abril-Mayo de 1996, p. 3; Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, Ch. 8; Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, pp. 292–301. 64 Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero, pp. 244–5.

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6 5 de la Torre, Caldera, and del Campo, Pueblos del viento norte, pp. 125–30. 66 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Caja 49, Exp. 25: letter from Guardia Nacional, División del Centro Organización, to priest Adolfo Arroyo. 67 Flysheet: ‘Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa: resumen de la situación política y military de la república’, Agosto 1927. 68 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. V, p. 86. 69 Nicola Foote and René D. Harder Horst, ‘Introduction’, in Nicola Foote and René D. Harder Horst (eds.), Military Struggle and Identity Formation in Latin America: Race, Nation and Community During the Liberal Period (University of Florida Press, 2010), pp. 18–20. 70 Herfried Muenkler, ‘Clausewitz and the Privatisation of War’, in Hew Strachan and Andreas Hergerg-Rothe (eds.), Clausewitz in the twenty-first century (Oxford, 2007), pp. 226–7. 71 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 377. 72 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, p. 117. 73 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, pp. 170–1. 74 Meyer, La Cristiada, Vol. I, pp. 126–7. 75 A.M.Z., Copias de oficios gratis por el presidente municipal, 1–31 julio 1927, 204 hojas: 19 July 1927 letter from Zacatecas presidente municipal to state governor relating 1,000 Enfield rifle cartridges. 76 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, pp. 206–9. 77 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Secretaría General, 1928–1975, Exp.s 22, caja 2: pp. 37–8 of transcribed cassette recording of Jean Meyer’s interview with Cristero P. Magallanes. 78 El Informador, 13 February 1994, cited in Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 78–9. 79 David, VI, pp. 57–9, 72–5; Meyer, La Cristiada, Vol. I, pp. 213–14; Tuck, Holy Wars, pp. 109–10. 80 Meyer, La Cristiada, Vol. I, pp. 221–2; Morris, ‘The World Created Anew’, pp. 200–2. 81 Luis de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Torre (Amat Editorial, 2011), pp. 241–69. 82 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, p. 111. 83 Mi Pueblo: Pueblos del Viento Norte, Jul., Ago., Septiembre de 1995, p. 6. 84 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Coleccion Padre José Adolfo Arroyo, Caja 50, doc. 35, entry 89: report of Cristero defence of San Sebastián. 85 Juan Francisco Hernández Hurtado, ¡Tierra de Cristeros! Historia de Victoriano Ramírez y de la Revolución Cristera en los Altos de Jalisco (Mexico City, 2009), pp. 63–4. 86 de la Torre, Caldera, and del Campo, Pueblos del viento norte, p. 164. 87 T.N.A., FO 204/619: 5 August 1927 letter from hacendado Bertie Johnson to British Vice-Consulate at Guadalajara.

160

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88 T.N.A., FO 204/619: 13 December 1927 letter from hacendado Bertie Johnson to British Vice-Consulate at Guadalajara. 89 Manzo Guerra, Del fuego sagrado, pp. 91–3. 90 Cited in Manzo Guerra, Del fuego sagrado, pp. 91–2. 91 El Informador, 19 October 1928. 92 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 122–3, 354, 374–82. 93 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 392. 94 T.N.A., FO 204/620, ‘Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 87: 15 March 1928 memorandum from legate Esmond Ovey to British Foreign Office. 95 Hernández Hurtado, ¡Tierra de Cristeros!, pp. 69–70. 96 Domingo E. Cerrillo, Memorias Cristeras: San Diego de Alejandria, Jalisco (Mexico City, 2013), p. 99. 97 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 356–64. 98 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada pp. 217–18. 99 José Díaz Román Rodríguez, El movimiento cristero: sociedad y conflicto en los Altos de Jalisco (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1979), p. 188. 100 de la Torre, Caldera, and del Campo, Pueblos del viento norte, pp. 111–13. 101 Luis G. Cueva, Forsaken Harvest: Haciendas and Agrarian Reform in Jalisco, 1915–1940 (Xlibris, 2013), p. 207. 102 Salmerón Castro, ‘Un general agrarista en la lucha contra los cristeros’, pp. 559–60. 103 31 July 2018 interview with Aurora Zepeda of Fresnillo, Zacatecas, 102-year-old daughter of victim.

3  Government battlefronts 1 Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage, p. 300; Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, pp. 160–2. 2 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 140–1, 188. 3 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 111–12. 4 Cerrillo, Memorias Cristeras, p. 122. 5 Cerrillo, Memorias Cristeras, pp. 105–6. 6 Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, pp. 71–6. The concept of ‘neutrality’ in areas of Cristero conflict awaits comprehensive treatment. Some recent ideas of a ‘third way’ of pacifism between the agraristas and Cristeros of Colima have been offered by Julia Preciado Zamora, Por las faldas del volcán de Colima: cristeros, agraristas y pacíficos (Publicaciones de la Casa Chata, 2007). 7 Román Rodríguez, El movimiento cristero, p. 200. 8 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. V, p. 72; Julia Young, Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles and Refugees of the Cristero War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 33–6.

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9 Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, pp. 82–3. 10 Viuda de Huerta, Viva Cristo Rey! Narración histórica de la Revolución Cristera en el pueblo de San Julián Jalisco, pp. 80–95. 11 Viuda de Huerta, Viva Cristo Rey!, p. 98. 12 Christopher Daase, ‘Clausewitz and Small Wars’, in Hew Strachan and Andreas Hergerg-Rothe (eds.), Clausewitz in the Twenty-first Century (Oxford, 2007), pp. 192–4. 13 T.N.A., FO 204/619: ‘Enclosure in Mr. Ovey’s despatch No. 450 of December 9, 1927. 14 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 377. 15 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Rollo 12,Caja 12,Expedientes 48 to 53: 15 November 1927 letter from Trinidad Mora to Aurelio Acevedo relating destruction of La Soledad on same day. 16 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 394. 17 Cited in Fábregas, ‘Los Altos de Jalisco: características generales’, p. 59 (testimony of Don Severo Ortega). 18 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, p. 110. 19 T.N.A., FO 204/619: 11 August 1927 letter from British Vice-Consul at Guadalajara to British legation, Mexico City. 20 Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, p. 111. 21 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. IV, p. 70. 22 A.M.Z., Copias de oficios giradas por el presidente municipal, 28 septiembre 1927, doc. 167: 2 September letter from presidente municipal to state governor. 23 Román Rodríguez, El movimiento cristero, p. 198; Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 398–9. 24 Guadalupe de Anda, Los cristeros, p. 251. 25 ‘Pobre flor que mal naciste, Y que fatal fue tu suerte, El primer paso que diste, Te encontraste con la muerte, Dejarte es cosa triste, Cortarte cosa fuerte, Dejarte con la vida, Es dejarte con la muerte’ (cited in Hernández Hurtado, ¡Tierra de Cristeros!, p. 110. 26 Guadalupe de Anda, Los cristeros, pp. 251–2. 27 Hernández Hurtado, ¡Tierra de Cristeros!, p. 111. 28 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 395. 29 E.g., Pedraja, Wars of Latin America, 1899–1941, pp. 297–8. 30 El Universal, 24 December 1928. 31 Servando Ortoll, ‘El general cristero Jesús Degollado Guízar y la toma de Manzanillo en 1928’, Signos históricos, no, 14, July–December 2005, 8–41. 32 T.N.A., FO 204/620, ‘Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 189: 26 June 1928 letter from British legate, Esmond Ovey, to Britsh Foreign Secretary. 33 T.N.A., FO 204/620, ‘Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 292: 21 September 1928 letter from British legation at Mexico City to Foreign Secretary Lord Cushenden.

162

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3 4 El Informador, 1 September 1928. 35 T.N.A., FO 204/620, ‘Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 332: 5 November 1928 letter from British Consul of Colima to British Legation in Mexico City. 36 T.N.A., FO 204/620, ‘Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 332: 5 November 1928 letter from British Consulate at Colima to British legation in Mexico City; No. 396: 14 December 1928 letter from G. Ogilvie Forbes (British Legation) to Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain concerning Cristero activity and press reports of government reinforcements including aircraft being sent to the Jalisco-Colima region. 37 T.N.A., FO 204/623: 14 February 1929 letter from ambassador Esmond Ovey to Foreign-Secretary Austen Chamberlain (entitled ‘Political Situation’), plus doc. 56 11 February 1929 letter. 38 T.N.A., FO 204/620, ‘Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 347: 13 November 1928 letter from G. Ogilvie Forbes to Acting Foreign Secretary, Lord Cushenden. 39 Chris Pearson, Scarred Landscapes: War and Nature in Vichy France (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2008), p. 39. 40 A.M.Z., Copias de Oficio, 1–31 mayo 1927, 247 hojas: docs. 125, 126, 129, 130, 132 and 139 detailing Zacatecas municipal presidency’s measures. 41 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno, Sección 3a, Exp. 8: 16 February 1929 letter from Manuel de Urquidi, secretary of the Durango wood company, to Durango governor, requesting support for the timber industry. 42 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno, Sección 3a, Exp. 8: 21 February 1929 letter from Coronel Jefe del Estado Mayor de la Jefaturas de Operaciones Militares de Durango to governor of Durango. 43 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno, Sección 3a, Exp. 8: 28 February 1929 letter from Senator Luis Esther Estrada to state governor, General Amaya. 44 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno, Sección 3a, Exp. 8: 27 March 1929 telegram to Governor Alberto Terrones Benítez. 45 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno, Sección 3a, Guerra 113: 24 March 1929 letter from Governor Alberto Terrones Benítez to Comandante-General Manuel Madinavytia, jefe de las operaciones militares en el estado. 46 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 157–70, 217–20. 47 Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, 637/16: 19 April 1929 circular (no. 62) from state governor of Aguascalientes to municipal president of Aguascalientes. 48 Alejandro M. Rabinovich and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, ‘Regular and Irregular Forces in Conflict: Nineteenth Century Insurgencies in South America’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Vol. 30, Nos. 4–5 (2019), 775–96. 49 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. IV, p. 91.

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50 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Colección Padre José Adolfo Arroyo, Caja 47, 14 June 1950 letter from Juan N Carlos to Aurelio Acevedo recounting clashes near Jérez. 51 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, p. 237. 52 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 383. 53 Viuda de Huerta, Viva Cristo Rey! Narración histórica de la Revolución Cristera en el pueblo de San Julián de Jalisco, p. 78. 54 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp.401–3. 55 Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, p. 164. 56 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 429; Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, pp. 103–4. 57 Santos, Memorias, p. 310. 58 Thomas Rath, ‘Army, State and Nation in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920–1938’ (PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2009), p. 43. 59 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 429. 60 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 419–20, 438. 61 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 419. 62 J. Justin Castro, Radio in Revolution: Wireless Technology and State Power in Mexico, 1897–1938 (Nebraska, 2016), p. 11. 63 Loyo Camacho, Joaquín Amaro y el proceso de institucionalización del Ejército Mexicano, 1917–1931, pp. 145–6. 64 That said, Mexico is probably the first country ever to have suffered civilian casualties as a result of attack from the air. In May 1914 the port of Mazatlán was bombed by a Constitutionalist aircraft nicknamed the ‘yellow bird’, four civilians being killed and ‘mortal fear’ being generated in the city (Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. II, p. 148). 65 El Informador, 13 August 1928. 66 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 389. 67 El Universal, 7 January 1928. 68 Viuda de Huerta, Viva Cristo Rey! Narración histórica de la Revolución Cristera en el pueblo de San Julián Jalisco, pp. 98–9. 69 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Rollo 12, Caja 12, Expedientes 48 to53: undated (autumn 1927) letter. 70 T.N.A. FO 204/620, ‘Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 59: 17 February 1928 memorandum from legate Esmond Ovey to British Foreign Office. 71 Hernández Hurtado, ¡Tierra de Cristeros!, pp. 121–2. 72 Hernández Hurtado, ¡Tierra de Cristeros!, p. 64. 73 Blanco Ribera, Mi contribución a la epopeya cristera, pp. 188, 298. 74 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 174–207.

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75 T.N.A., FO 204/619, No. 13: 13 January 1927 Confidential report from British legation to the Holy See to Sir Austen Chamberlain, British Foreign Secretary. 76 Macfarland, Chaos in Mexico, p. 30. 77 Not to be confused with Mexico’s nineteenth-century ‘National Guard’ beloved of the Liberals. 78 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 264–5. 79 Olivera Sedano, Aspectos del conflicto religioso, pp. 184–8. 80 Hilari Raguer, Gunpowder and Incense: The Catholic Church and the Spanish Civil War (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 50–5. 81 del Campo, Diccionario ilustrado de narradores cristeros, p. 9. 82 Blanco Ribera, Mi contribución a la epopeya cristera, pp. 214, 316–17; Meyer, La Cristiada, Vol. I, pp. 82–3, 213; Tuck, Holy War, p. 116. 83 Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, pp. 139–40. 84 Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, pp. 105–24. 85 Hew Strachan (ed.), Clausewitz’s On War (London: Tantor Media, 2007), p. 190. 86 Viuda de Huerta, Viva Cristo Rey! Narración histórica de la Revolución Cristera en el pueblo de San Julián Jalisco, p. 98. 87 Blanco Ribera, Mi contribución a la epopeya cristera, pp. 290–3. 88 T.N.A., FO 204/623: 22 March 1929 memorandum from ambassador Esmond Ovey to Foreign-Secretary Austen Chamberlain (folder ‘Political Situation, Part II’). 89 Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, pp. 148–60. 90 Camp, Generals in the Palacio, pp. 19–20. 91 Morris, ‘The World Created Anew’, p. 215. 92 Keith Brewster, Militarism, Ethnicity and Politics, and Politics in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, 1917–1930 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003), p. 107. 93 Santos, Memorias, p. 380; Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, 162–9. 94 Santos, Memorias, pp. 380–1. 95 Ben Fallaw, ‘Eulogio Ortiz: The Army and the Antipolitics of Postrevolutionary State Formation, 1920–1935’, in Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley (eds.), Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico (Tucson: Arizona University Press, 2012), pp. 141–4. 96 Olivera Sedano, Aspectos del conflicto religioso, p. 232. 97 Dooley, Los Cristeros, p. 182. 98 Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, pp. 56–8, 106. 99 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 302–10. 100 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 263–4. 101 A.H.E.Z., Ayuntamiento Zacatecas, Conventos e Iglesias, 22 febrero 1926–20 julio 1929, fojas 355: 29 June 1929 letter form state governor’s instructions to the

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presidencia municipal; 17 July 1929 letter from presidencia municipal to interim state governor reaffirming November 1926 law limiting number of priests. 102 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 166–72. 103 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 467. 104 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. IV, p. 62. 105 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, pp. 91–5, 139–40. 106 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 447. 107 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Secretaría, 1929: Escritos y correspondencia del jefe cristero José Gutiérrez Gutiérrez, 5 July 1929 letter (April 1974 bequest from Jean Meyer). 108 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 474. 109 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Secretaría, 1929: Escritos y correspondencia del jefe cristero José Gutiérrez Gutiérrez (April 1974 bequest from Jean Meyer). 110 Recent research by Ben Fallaw argues that there was no mass execution of ex-Cristeros after 1929 (Ben Fallaw, Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico (2013). 111 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Secretaría, 1929: Escritos y correspondencia del jefe cristero José Gutiérrez Gutiérrez, 19 July 1929 letter from Cristero headquarters at San José de los Guajes to General Gutiérrez Gutiérrez ‘wherever he may be found’ (April 1974 bequest from Jean Meyer). 112 Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero, pp. 267–72. 113 Meyer, La Cristiada, Vol. I, p. 345.

4  Cristero home fronts 1 Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants, and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 2 David, V, núm. 97, 22 August 1960. 3 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 389. 4 Butler, Popular Piety, p. 55; Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). 5 Butler, Popular Piety, pp. 169–78. 6 Butler, Popular Piety, pp. 75–9; Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 166–72.

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7 T.N.A., FO 204/619: 29 March 1927 letter from estate of Richard Honey to Esmond Ovey, British legate, concerning Indian claims on ‘Santa Isabel’ forests near Encarnación ironworks, Zimapán, Hidalgo. 8 Preciado Zamora, Por las faldas del volcán de Colima, p. 12. 9 E.g., A.H.E.D., Fondo Secretaría de Gobierno, Fojas 45: 12 December 1929 reports written by Colonel Everardo Gámiz (commissioned by governor of Durango) concerning the origins and course of the religious conflict. 10 Diego Rivera, ‘Emiliano Zapata’, Ministry of Education (SEP) Building, Mexico City, 1923–28. 11 Morris, ‘The World Created Anew’, pp. 250–1. 12 Fábregas, ‘Los Altos de Jalisco: características generales’, p. 18. 13 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 339–42. 14 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 361–7. 15 Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage, p. 516. 16 Viuda de Huerta, Viva Cristo Rey!, p. 175; for a recent study of Los Altos regional identity, including religión and ethnicity, see Diana Lucía Álvarez Macías, ‘Los mitos vivos de México: identidad regional en los Altos de Jalisco’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2018). 17 Cited in Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 211–12. 18 Pedro Tomé, ‘Desvelando lo oculto bajo los pliegues de la historia de Jalisco’, in María Alicia Peredo Merlo (ed.), Jalisco: Independencia y Revolución: discursos hegemónicos e identidades invisibles en el Jalisco posrevolucionario, Vol. III (Colegio de Jalisco, 2010), pp. 20–1. 19 Cited in Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. I, pp. 12–13. 20 September 2013 interview with Father López de Larra (q.e.p.d.), Zacatecas. 21 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno del Estado de Durango, Asuntos Religiosos, Circulares: 11 January 1930 apéndice al estudio relacionado relacionado con el conflicto religioso en el estado de Durango: report of tax official. 22 Fallaw, Religion and State, pp. 6, 120–1. 23 Vaca, Los silencios de la historia, pp. 224–5. 24 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, pp. 309–13. 25 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 267–8. 26 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 234–5; Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 411. 27 Mi Pueblo: ‘Pueblos del Viento Norte’, núm. 100, Año XVII, Enero-Febrero, 1996, p. 3. 28 Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution; Butler, Popular Piety. 29 Mi Pueblo: ‘Pueblos del Viento Norte’, núm. 100, Año XVII, Marzo-Abril-Mayo de 1996, p. 13. 30 Cited in Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 229–31.

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Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, pp. 292–301. Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, pp. 119–21. Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero, p. 225. David, Vol. VII, no. 153, pp. 143–4, also cited in Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, p. 126. 35 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 428–9. 36 For a detailed study arguing how music in history could be either hegemonic or emancipatory depending on the context it was played, see Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 37 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. IV, p. 13. 38 Alicia Olivera de Bonfil and Víctor Manuel Ruiz Naufa, Peoresnada periódico cristero (Mexico City, 2005); Meyer, La Cristiada. 39 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, p. 117. 40 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 205–9. 41 T.N.A., FO 204/623: 14 February 1929 letter from ambassador Esmond Ovey to Foreign-Secretary Austen Chamberlain (entitled ‘Political Situation’). 42 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 97–8. 43 Marco Aurelio Iturralde Valdéz, Villanueva habla….su fundación, tradiciones, leyendas, costumbres (Zacatecas: Offset Azteca, 1991), pp. 52–3. 44 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 209–14; Blanco Ribera, Mi contribución a la epopeya cristera, pp. 200–2. 45 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 255. 46 Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, ‘Un espacio agrícola, hídrico y poblacional: los valles rioverdenses de San Luis Potosí en la primera mitad del siglo XX’, in José Alfredo Rangel Silva and Hortensia Camacho Altamirano (coordinadores), La propiedad rural de México en los siglos XIX y XX: enfoques económicos y politicos (San Luis Potosí, 2012), p. 223. 47 Archivo Histórico Estatal de Saltillo, Fondos decretos de gobierno, 1922–1972, AGEC.F.D.C143,F1,d1,336F, 28-04-1926, Saltillo, Coahuila (Expediente que contiene colección de decretos expedidos por el Congreso del Estado de Coahuila, comprende desde la presente fecha haste el mes de noviembre del presente. Dado en el Salón de sesiones del H. Congreso del Estado. Y lo comunico a usted para su conocimiento y demás fines. 48 Butler, Popular Piety, pp. 61–6; Guerra Manzo, Del fuego sagrado, pp. 58–60. 49 Butler, Popular Piety, p. 77; Mary Kay Vaughan links the presence of guardias blancas to pro-Cristero (or anti-Cristero) activity (Cultural Politics in the Revolution). 50 Cited in Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 212. 51 Blanco Ribera, Mi contribución a la epopeya cristera, pp. 152–3. 52 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 99–100. 3 1 32 33 34

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53 UNAM/CESU, Caja 49, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, exp. 36: copy of Aurelio Acevedo’s endorsement of Bishop of Michoacán’s appeal. 54 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 385–6. 55 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, pp. 75–6. 56 Butler, Popular Piety, pp. 107–8. 57 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 364. 58 Butler, Popular Piety, p. 115. 59 Butler, Popular Piety, p. 120. 60 Julia Young, ‘The Calles Government and Catholic Dissidents: Mexico’s Transnational Projects of Repression, 1926–29’, The Americas, Vol. 70, No. 1 (July 2013), 63–91. 61 This power resided in Article 33 of the Constitution, which led the writer, Graham Greene, to mention how ‘plenty of foreigners have been thirty-third in the past few years’ (Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads (London, 1939), p. 67). 62 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 323–31. 63 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 495–6. 64 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 239. 65 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 326. 66 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, p. 136. 67 Butler, Popular Piety, pp. 128–38. 68 Eyler N. Simpson, The Ejido: Mexico’s Way Out (University of North Carolina Press, 1937), pp. 91–2. 69 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, pp. 286–9. 70 Purnell, Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico. 71 Robert D. Shadow and María Rodríguez-Shadow, ‘Religión, Economía y Política en la Rebelión Cristera: el caso de los gobiernistas de Villa Guerrero, Jalisco’, Historia Mexicano, Vol. 43, No. 4 (1994), pp. 677–9. 72 T.N.A., FO 204/619: 17 August 1927 letter from British Vice-Consul of Guadalajara to British legation, Mexico City. 73 For a conceptual explanation of the Kalyvas thesis, see Stathis N. Kalyvas, Logic of Violence in Civil Wars (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2006); Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘Micro-Level Studies of Violence in Civil War: Refining and Extending the Control-Collaboration Model’, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 24, No. 4 (September/October 2012), pp. 658–68. 74 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 259–60. 75 Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, pp. 144–5. 76 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Caja 49, Exp. 99: 12 May 1929 typewritten anonymous letter to ‘Apreciable Jóven Don’ (name excised). 77 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 362. 78 Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, pp. 98–9.

Notes

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7 9 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, p. 162. 80 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Caja 50, Exps. 1–4: Letter from J. Trinidad Mora to Jefe Superior de este Moviemiento Nacional Libertador, Campo de Operaciones de Santiago Bayacora. 81 Hernández Hurtado, ¡Tierra de Cristeros!, p. 65. 82 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Caja 49, Exp. 60: 11 July 1927 reply from Cristero exile in San José, Texas to complaints of Don Melquiades Sánchez, ranchero of Tepehuey. 83 Meyer, La Cristiada, Vol. I, p. 49. 84 T.N.A., FO 204/620,’Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 87: 15 March 1928 memorandum from legate Esmond Ovey to British Foreign Office. 85 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Secretaría General, M. Cristero, 1923, 6 exps., Caja 3: 2 December 1952 letter from Manuel Jesús Rodríguez at Chapala (Jalisco) relating events surrounding the 25 May 1927 execution of priest Cristóbal Magallanes and prbto. Agustín Colca. 86 Mi Pueblo: ‘Pueblos del Viento Norte’, núm. 100, Año XVII, enero-febrero de 1996, p. 17; Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero, pp. 209–10. 87 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Caja 49, Exps. 40 and 41: 15 February 1927 and 16 February 1927 letters from María de Jesus Correa to Aurelio Acevedo. 88 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, p. 40; Butler, Popular Piety, p. 164. 89 David, IV, December 1959, p, 278. 90 Butler, Popular Piety, pp. 211–12; Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 438. 91 David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Mariner Books, 2007), pp. 141–2. 92 Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones, La guerra persistente: memoria, violencia y utopía: representaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil española (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2006), p. 112; Terry Eagleton, Radical Sacrifice (Yale University Press, 2018), pp. 59–106. 93 David, no. 50, 22 September 1956, pp. 23–4. 94 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, pp. 86, 150–1. 95 Blanco Ribera, Mi contribución a la epopeya cristera, p. 272. 96 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 352–4. 97 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Secretaría General, ‘Datos exactos acerca de la División del Sur de Jalisco, de Colima, Nayarit, Michoacán y otras regions – General Don Jesús Degollado Guízar, point 4. 98 Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, pp. 143–5, 179.

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99 For a conceptual analysis of the short-term versus long-term ‘investment’ made by insurgents, see Megan A. Stewart and Yu-Ming Liou, ‘Do Good Borders Make Good Rebels? Territorial Control and Civilian Casualties’, Journal of Politics, Vol. 79, No. 1 (January 2017), pp. 284–301. 100 Gustavo Villanueva Bazán, José Adolfo Arroyo: Memorias de un sacerdote cristero (Metepec: Cuadernos del Archivo Histórico de la UNAM 26, 2016), pp. 54–5. 101 Juan Hernández, ¡Tierra de Cristeros!, p. 101. 102 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Rollo 12, Caja 12, expedientes 48 to 53: 11 August 1927 letter from Trinidad Mora, Campo de Operaciones de Santiago Bayacora, to Aurelio Acevedo. 103 A.H.E.D., Secretaria del Gobierno del Estado de Durango, 1930, 772: 14 December 1929 letter from Leonardo Rodriguez to state governor. 104 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno del Estado de Durango, Asuntos Religiosos, Circulares: 11 January 1930 apéndice al estudio relacionado relacionado con el conflicto religioso en el estado de Durango: report of tax official, pp. 73–5. According to this report, although the body had dangled for fifteen days, it showed little sign of decomposition or stiffening and was subjected to medical study for these reasons. It is unclear whether this curiosity belongs to the category of improbable miracle stories, or more likely, whether the unfortunate Santillana had actually been killed shortly before federal forces arrived at the ironworks of Flores. 105 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 355. 106 Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero, p. 234. 107 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 389. 108 Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero, p. 230. 109 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, p. 208. 110 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno del Estado de Durango, Exp. 19: 5 October 1926 telegram from Subsecretario de relaciones exteriores to state governor of Durango detailing robbery committed against Luis Wong and associates in Chinacates, Durango. 111 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno del Estado de Durango, Exp. 19: 28 December 1926 telegram from state governor to President of the Republic. 112 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, p. 351. 113 A.H.E.D., 25 March letter from Governor Alberto Terrones Benítez to President Plutarco Elías Calles concerning arrest of Spaniards Juan Castillo and Ignacio Castillo. 114 T.N.A., FO 204/620, ‘Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 332: 5 November 1928 letter from British Consulate at Colima to British legation in Mexico City.

Notes

171

115 T.N.A., FO 204/620: 10 July 1927 letter from Joan Ryan to British Vice-Consult at Guadalajara. 116 T.N.A., FO 204/619: 6 August 1927 letter from hacendado Bertie Johnson to British Vice-Consul at Guadalajara. 117 T.N.A., FO 204/620, ‘Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 416: 26 December 1928 letter from G. Ogilvie Forbes to Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain; Meyer, La Cristiada, Vol. I, p. 256. 118 T.N.A., FO 204/619:3 August 1927 letter from British Vice-Consulate at Guadalajara to British legation, Mexico City. 119 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno del Estado de Durango: 4 March 1929 letter from Esmond Ovey of British legation (Mexico City) to state governor of Durango requesting efforts to liberate two men. 120 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 503–17. 121 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 430. 122 I.N.A.H., Rollo 22, Hoja 4: Directory Committee of the Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa, Propaganda section, Central office, Mexico City: 31 October 1929 account of recent propaganda efforts. 123 I.N.A.H., Rollo 22, Hoja 3: Directory Committee of the Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa, Propaganda section, Central office, Mexico City: October 1929 figures for distribution of propaganda. 124 I.N.A.H., Rollo 22, Hoja 3: Directory Committee of the Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa, Propaganda section, Central office, Mexico City: 4 November 1929 letter from Josefina E. Macías to Luis Irirgoyen of LNDLR in Mexico City. 125 La Prensa, 6 November 1929. 126 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. II, p. 90.

5  Government home fronts 1 A.M.Z., Presidencia Municipal de Zacatecas: Oficios, Diversos, Febrero de 1927 (44): 2 February 1927 jointly signed petition from workers and 22 February letter from Franquilino Hernández to presidencia municipal. 2 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 268. 3 T.N.A., FO 204/619: 13 January 1927 letter entitled ‘Political Situation’ from British Vice-Consul to Esmond Ovey, British legate, Mexico City. 4 T.N.A., FO 204/619: 15 January 1927 letter entitled ‘Distribution of arms’ from British Vice-Consul at Guadalajara to British legation, Mexico City.

172

Notes

5 A.M.Z., Presidencia Municipal de Zacatecas: Copias de correspondencia eviada por el Presidente Municipal, 31 marzo 1927, 192 hojas: 8 August 1927 letter from presidencia municipal of Mazapil, Zacatecas, to Presidencia Municipal de Zacatecas. 6 A.M.Z., Presidencia Municipal de Zacatecas: Copias de correspondencia eviada por el Presidente Municipal, 31 marzo 1927, 192 hojas: 25 March 1927 letter from presidencia municipality of Vetagrande to presidencia municipal de Zacatecas. 7 A.M.Z., Presidencia Municipal de Zacatecas: Copias de correspondencia eviada por el Presidente Municipal, 31 marzo 1927, 192 hojas: 30 March 1927 letter from presidencia municipal of Ciudad García, Zacatecas, to Presidencia Municipal de Zacatecas. 8 A.M.Z., Presidencia Municipal de Zacatecas: Copias de correspondencia eviada por el Presidente Municipal, 31 marzo 1927, 192 hojas: 19 April 1927 letter from presidencia municipal of municipio de Sánchez Román, Zacatecas, to Presidencia Municipal de Zacatecas. 9 A.M.Z., Presidencia Municipal de Zacatecas: Copias de correspondencia eviada por el Presidente Municipal, 31 marzo 1927, 192 hojas: 13 April 1927 letter from presidencia municipal of Monte Escobedo, Zacatecas, to Presidencia Municipal de Zacatecas. 10 Cerrillo, Memorias Cristeras, p. 121. 11 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Secretaría: 2 August 1933 letter from presbítero of Totatiche, José P. Quezada, to Archdioceses of Guadalajara. 12 A.M.Z., Copias de correspondencia enviada por el presidente municipal, 31 marzo 1927, 192 hojas: 19 August 1927 letter from presidencia municipal of Chalchihuites to Zacatecas presidente municipal. 13 Hernández Hurtado, ¡Tierra de Cristeros!, p. 113. 14 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, p. 135. 15 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars, pp. 8–9. 16 Mateo García Bazán, Valparaíso de mis recuerdos (Editorial la Puya, 2010), pp. 132–3. 17 T.N.A., FO 204/620, ‘Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 87: 15 March 1928 memorandum from legate Esmond Ovey to British Foreign Office. 18 El Informador, 13 September 1928. 19 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, pp. 112–13. 20 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno del Estado de Durango, Asuntos Religiosos, Circulares: 11 January 1930 apéndice al estudio relacionado relacionado con el conflicto religioso en el estado de Durango: report of tax official, pp. 79–80.

Notes

173

21 A.M.Z., Circulares giradas en el mes de febrero, 1–28 febrero 1927, 135 hojas: 11 February 1927 letter from municipal president of Zacatecas to Zacatecas sttaion-master. 22 A.M.Z., Traslado y funcionamiento de poderes municipales, 16 marzo 1927, 21 hojas: 8 April tetter from Zacatecas presidente muncipal to pólice inspectorate relating request from Valparaíso. 23 A.M.Z., Copias de oficios giradas por el presidente municipal, 1–30 noviembre, 167 hojas: 2 November 1927 letter from Zacatecas presidente municipal to pólice inspectorate relating request of Ciudad García municipality. 24 A.M.Z., Copias de oficios giradas por el presidente municipal, 1–30 noviembre, 167 hojas: 5 November 1927 letter from Zacatecas presidente municipal to pólice inspectorate detailing instructions from la Jefatura de Operaciones Militares en el Estado. 25 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, p. 144. 26 Enrique Guerra Manzo, ‘Guerra cristera y orden público en Coalcomán, Michoacán (1927–1932), Historia Mexicana (2001), p. 333. 27 Gilbert M. Nugent and Daniel Nugent, ‘Popular Culture and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico’, p. 9. 28 Mary Kay Vaughan, ‘Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics in the Mexican Revolution’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 2 (May 1999), p. 293. 29 Fallaw, ‘Eulogio Ortiz: The Army and the Antipolitics of postrevolutionary state formation, 1920–1935’, p. 139. 30 Fallaw, ‘Eulogio Ortiz: The Army and the Antipolitics of postrevolutionary state formation, 1920–1935’, p. 142. 31 Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero, p. 210. 32 A.M.Z., Copias de Oficios, 1–30 junio 1927, 235 hojas: 11 June 1927 letter from Zacatecas presidente municipal to Jefe de Operaciones Militares del Estado. 33 A.M.Z., Copias de la Presidenceia Municipal de certificados, 1–31 julio 1927, 204 hojas, doc. 147: 4 July 1927 letter from presidente municipal to state governor. 34 Archivo del Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara, Carpetón, Exp.s 389: 18 March 1927 letter from judge to muncipal president detailing Gama’s arrest and arrest of men working for El Heraldo; April 1927 details of writ (amparo) lodged by Luis Alvarez against commander of 18th military district, mayor and Inspector of Police. 35 Archivo del Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara, Carpetón, Exp.s 389: 15 March 1927 letter from judge to municipal presidency detailing lodging of writ. 36 A.M.Z., Copias del mes de agosto, 1–28 Agosto 1927: 19 August 1927 letter from Zacatecas presidencia municipal to police inspectorate banning the showing of the film Cristo de Oro; Copias de oficio giradas por el presidencia municipal, 28

174

37 38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

Notes septiembre 1927: 15 September 1927 letter from Zacatecas presidente municipal to police inspectorate. T.N.A., FO 204/619: 17 December 1927 letter from British Vice-Consul to British legation, Mexico City. Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, doc. 2384: 12 September 1928 letter from el Coronel Jefe del Estado Mayor to municipal president of Aguascalientes complaining of imprisonment of soldiers; Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, doc. 2384: 13 September 1928 letter from presidencia municipal to el Coronel Jefe del Estado Mayor. Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, doc. 2581: 4 October 1928 letter from Brigadier-General Cristobal Rodríguez to municipal president of Aguascalientes. Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, doc. 2837: 7 November 1928 letter from Inspector General de Policía to Presidente Municipal relating detention of superintendent Tereso de Santiago by General Laureano Pineda. Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, doc. 544: 23 February 1928 letter from Garrison Brigadier-General to municipal president of Aguascalientes. Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, 649/6: 7 January 1929 letter from Brigadier-General Cristobal Rodríguez to municipal president of Aguascalientes; Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, doc. 142: 9 January 1929 letter from municipality to Inspector General de Policía. Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico: 4 March 1929 report from Brigadier-General Cristobal Rodríguez to state governor of Aguascalientes regarding Mario Ortega, ‘jefe de segundo de una commission de seguridad’. Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico: 30 March 1929 letter from Brigadier-General Cristobal Rodríguez to presidente municipal de Aguascalientes. Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico: 7 March 1929 letter from presidencia municipal de Aguascalientes and 10 April 1929 letter from Inspector General de Policía. Archivo del Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara, 1926–27, Carpetón 4, Exp. 310: 17 January 1927 details of temporary release of 10 mounted gendarmes on special mission in Los Lagos de Moreno under Ricardo Anaya V; 25 January 1927 letter written o gendarmes’ behalf protesting their detention in Federal barracks; 31 January 1927 plea from Guadalajara mayor; 4 February 1927 rejection by 18/a Jefatura de Operaciones Militares. Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, doc. 147: 21 January 1929 letter from Brigadier-General Cristobal Rodríguez to state governor of Aguascalientes denouncing gendarmes Vicente Gómez and Julián Gómez.

Notes

175

48 Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico: 28 January 1929 letter from Inspector General de Policía to Brigadier-General Cristobal Rodríguez absolving Vicente Gómez and Julián Gómez. 49 T.N.A., FO 204/619: 28th November 1927 letter headed ‘Troops for Jalisco’ from British Vice-Consul at Guadalajara to British legation, Mexico City. 50 Archivo del Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara, 1927–1928, Carpeton 4, Exp. 106, 18 November 1927 letter from sergeant Luis García, on behalf of the General de División de las Operaciones Militares, requesting the withdrawal of corporal Otilio Medina and gendarme Salvador Ramirez. 51 T.N.A., FO 204/620, ‘Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 87: 15 March 1928 memorandum from legate Esmond Ovey to British Foreign Office. 52 T.N.A., FO 204/623: 14 February 1929 letter from ambassador Esmond Ovey to Foreign-Secretary Austen Chamberlain (entitled ‘Political Situation’). 53 E.g., Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, p. 146. 54 Fallaw, ‘Eulogio Ortiz: the Army and the Antipolitics of postrevolutionary state formation, 1920–1935’, p. 158. 55 A.M.Z., Copias de Oficio, 1–31 mayo 1927, Presidencia Municipal, 247 hojas: 20 April 1927 letter from presidencia municipal regarding demand for spare lands. 56 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 180–2. 57 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 416–41. 58 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 413. 59 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 273–4. 60 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 375. 61 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 132–4. 62 Meyer, La cristiada, Vol. III, p. 79. 63 T.N.A., FO 204/619: 17 February 1927 letter entitled ‘Political Situation’ from British Vice-Consul at Guadalajara to British legation, Mexico City. 64 Thomas Rath, Myths of Demilitarisation in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920–1960 (North Carolina, 2013), p. 36. 65 Simpson, The Ejido: Mexico’s Way Out, p. 444. 66 Salmerón Castro, ‘Un general agrarista en la lucha contra los cristeros’, pp. 557–60. 67 Margil de Jesús Canizales Romo, ‘La matanza de la Blanquita’, in José Enciso Contreras (ed.), Memorias de Trancoso (Oaxaca, 2010), pp. 62–85. 68 Kuntz Ficker and Juáregui, ‘Entre el pasado y el presente, 1867–1940’, p. 179. 69 El Nacional, 4 August 1934, cited in Simpson, The Ejido: Mexico’s Way Out, pp. 446–7. 70 Brewster, Militarism, Ethnicity and Politics, p. 122. 71 Francisco Javier Velázquez Fernández, ‘De peones a ejidatarios: cambio o continuidad?’, in Jose Alfredo Rangel Silva and Hortensia Camacho Altamirano

176

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(coordinators), La propiedad rural en México en los siglos XIX y XX (San Luis Potosí, 2012), pp. 288–90. 72 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 180–2. 73 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. III, p. 65. 74 El Informador, 22 October 1928. 75 Thomas Rath, ‘Cardenismo and the Mexican Army’, in Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley (eds.), Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico (Tucson: Arizona University Press, 2012), p. 188. 76 A.H.E.D., Fondo Secretaría de Gobierno, Fojas 45: 12 December 1929 reports written by Colonel Everardo Gámiz (commissioned by governor of Durango) concerning the origins and course of the religious conflict, p. 35. 77 New York Herald Tribune, 28 April 1927. 78 Scheipers, Unlawful Combatants, p. 20. 79 Carlos Blanco, Mi contribución a la epopeya cristera, pp. 277–8. 80 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 380–1; Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, pp. 52, 63–4. 81 Guerra Manzo, Del fuego sagrado, pp. 148–9. 82 Kuntz Ficker and Juáregui, ‘Entre el pasado y el presente, 1867–1940’, pp. 173–4. 83 Ben Fallaw review of Antonio Escobar Ohmstede and Matthew Butler (eds.), Mexico in Transition: New Perspectives on Mexican Agrarian History, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries/México y sus transiciones: reconsideraciones sobre la historia agraria mexicana, siglos XIX y XX (Mexico City, 2013), in Procesos Históricos. Revista de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, 30, julio-diciembre, 2016, 114–19. Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida (Venezuela), 114–19, pp. 115–16. 84 Salmerón Castro, ‘Un general agrarista en la lucha contra los cristeros’, pp. 56–70. 85 Hernández Hurtado, ¡Tierra de Cristeros!, pp. 126–7. 86 Vaca, Los silencios de la historia, pp. 22, 60–1. 87 Mi Pueblo: ‘Pueblos del Viento Norte’, núm. 100, Año XVII, Marzo-Abril-Mayo de 1996, p. 10; Meyer, La Cristiada, Vol. III, p. 24. 88 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Caja 12, Exp. 49, doc. 32: September 1935 report from Toluca from Special Committee’s ‘Excitativa a los jefes oficiales del movimiento popular libertador’; Jovita Valdovinos Medina, Jovita la cristera: una historia viviente (Jalpa, 1990). 89 Vaca, Los silencios de la historia, p. 250. 90 Patience Schell, ‘An Honorable Avocation for Ladies: The Work of the Mexico City Union de Damas Mexicanas, 1912–1926’, Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter 1999), pp. 78–103, 89–90. 91 David Gilmore, Misogyny: the Male Malady (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 158–64. 92 Agustín Vaca, Los cristeros de la historia: las cristeras, p. 270.

Notes

177

93 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, pp. 159–60; Meyer, Cristiada, Vol. I, p. 264. 94 T.N.A., FO 204/620, ‘Mexican Internal Affairs’, No. 332: 5 November 1928 letter from British Consulate at Colima to British legation in Mexico City. 95 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 395. 96 Tabea Alexa Linhard, Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and Spanish Civil War (Missouri, 2005), pp. 26–7, 35–6. 97 Cifuentes Guerrero, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero, p. 257. 98 de la Torre, Caldera, and del Campo, Pueblos del viento norte, pp. 175–81. 99 Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, p. 94; Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas (2010), pp. 49–50. 100 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, p. 133. 101 Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas, p. 50. 102 Fallaw, ‘Eulogio Ortiz: The Army and the Antipolitics of postrevolutionary state formation, 1920–1935’, p. 140. 103 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 426–7. 104 Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, p. 85. The haste with which Defensas had been recruited in 1923 suggested enthusiasm on the part of the volunteers. In Zacatecas General Matías Ramos recruited 600 men within days of the request from General Calles (Santos, Memorias, p. 267). 105 Alan Knight, ‘The Mentality and Modus Operandi of Revolutionary AntiClericalism’, in Matthew Butler (ed.), Faith and Impiety, p. 23. 106 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno del Estado de Durango, Asuntos Religiosos, Circulares: 11 January 1930 apéndice al estudio relacionado relacionado con el conflicto religioso en el estado de Durango. 107 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 385. 108 Archivo del Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara, Carpetón 4, Exp. 393: March 1927 municipal records in response to petition to federal authorities launched by imprisoned women. 109 Archivo del Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara, Carpetón 4, Exp. 393: 22 March 1927 letter from Atanasio Jarco, General Police Inspector, to municipal presidency. 110 Vaca, Los silencios de la historia, p. 63. 111 Archivo del Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara, Carpetón 4, Exp. 1263: 26 March 1927 letter from district judge to municipal presidency; Vaca, Los silencios de la historia, pp. 259–60. 112 A.H.E.Z., Ayuntamiento Zacatecas, Conventos e Iglesias, 22 febrero 1926–20 julio 1929, fojas 355: 5 August 1926 complaint from Ortiz, General de Brigada, jefatura de las Operaciones militares, to Presidente Municipal. 113 A.H.E.Z., Ayuntamiento Zacatecas, Conventos e Iglesias, 22 febrero 1926–20 julio 1929, fojas 355: 10 August 1926 letter from town hall to Ortiz, General

178

Notes

de Brigada, jefatura de las Operaciones militares, to Presidente Municipal and Ortiz’s attached reply. 114 Padilla Hernández, ‘Breve reseña de la persecución de la iglesia en el México posrevolucionario’, p. 21. 115 Mi Pueblo: ‘Pueblos del Viento Norte’, núm. 100, Año XVII, Marzo-Abril-Mayo de 1996, p. 12. 116 Butler, Popular Piety, pp. 80–8. 117 Guerra Manzo, Del fuego sagrado, pp. 295–6. 118 A.H.E.Z., Ayuntamiento Zacatecas, Conventos e Iglesias, 22 febrero 1926–20 julio 1929, fojas 355: 6 September 1926 and 9 September 1926 letter Exchange between presidencia municipal, Agente del Ministerio Público Federal and state governor. 119 A.H.E.Z., Ayuntamiento Zacatecas, Conventos e Iglesias, 22 febrero 1926–20 julio 1929, fojas 355: 13 August 1926 letter from presidencia municipal to state governor and 15 August 1926 letter from presidencia municipal to chief of police. 120 Mi Pueblo: ‘Pueblos del Viento Norte’, núm. 100, Año XVII, Marzo-Abril-Mayo de 1996, p. 12. 121 A.H.E.Z., Ayuntamiento Zacatecas, Conventos e Iglesias, 22 febrero 1926–20 julio 1929, fojas 355: 30 August 1926 jointly-signed petition from ‘respectable residents’ to presidencia municipal and 20 September 1926 letter from state governor to petitioners rejecting their plea. 122 A.M.Z., Copias de Oficios, 1–30 junio 1927, 235 hojas, doc. 146: 2 July 1927 letter from presidente municipal to Agente Federal. 123 A.H.E.Z., Ayuntamiento Zacatecas, Conventos e Iglesias, 22 febrero 1926–20 julio 1929, fojas 355: 28 September 1926 letter from Telésforo Carrillo, head of residents’ committee guarding La Bufa, to’ to presidencia municipal; and 7 October 1926 letter formally resigning. 124 A.M.Z., Copias de oficios giradas por el presidente municipal, 28 septiembre 1927: 27 September 1927 letter from Bruno Hernández, Zacatecas presidente municipal, to state governor detailing closure of La Bufa. 125 A.M.Z., Copias de oficios giradas por el presidente municipal, 1–30 noviembre, 167 hojas: November 1927 letter from presidente municipal to state governor. 126 A.M.Z., Copias de oficios giradas por el presidente municipal, 28 septiembre 1927: 27 September 1927 circular from presidente municipal. 127 Colonial Zacatecas had had a long history of social grievances connected to mining, and the Pánuco Spaniards along with others in the state were quick to abandon their mines to the rebels (Jaime E. Rodríguez O., ‘We are now the True Spaniards’: Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808–1824 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 143–5.

Notes

179

128 26 August 2014 interview with María del Socorro Cardozo Girón, chronicler of the municipio of Pánuco. 129 Butler, Popular Piety, pp. 162–9. 130 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, p. 141. 131 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, p. 110. 132 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Secretaría: undated popular testimony from Sánchez Román (now Tlaltenango) entitled ‘México de vista de luto’ (April 1974 bequest from Jean Meyer). 133 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, p. 37. 134 Mi Pueblo: ‘Pueblos del Viento Norte’, núm. 100, Año XVII, dec. 1994–Feb. 1995, p. 4. 135 A.M.Z., Copias de oficio, 1–31 mayo 1927, 247 hojas (presidencia municipal): 9 May 1927 letter from presidente municipal to state governor and agente del Ministerio Público Federal, detailing report from José Rosales, presidente de la Junta Vecinal de la Catedral. 136 A.M.Z., Traslado y funcionamiento de poderes municipales, 16 marzo 1927, 21 hojas: 12 April letter from presidente municipal to agente del Ministerio Público Federal. 137 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, p. 147. 138 Excélsior, 31 December 1928. 139 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, p. 107. 140 Elise Rockwell, ‘Keys to Appropriation: Rural schooling in Mexico’, in Bradley A. Levinson, Douglas E. Foley and Dorothy C. Holland (eds.), The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, Duke University Press, 2002), p. 422. 141 A.M.Z., Traslado y funcionamiento de poderes municipales, 16 marzo 1927, 21 hojas: 3 April letter from Zacatecas presidente municipal to Zacatecas National Agrarian Committee representative detailing ilegal sale of alcohol. 142 A.M.Z., Copias de Oficio, 1–31 Mayo 1927, 247 hojas (Presidencia Municipal): 9 May 1027 letter from Zacetacs presidencia municipal to Jefe de Departamento de Educación Pública; 9 May 1927 letter from presidente municipal to Inspector General de Policía. 143 A.M.Z., Copias de oficios giradas por el presidente municipal, 1–31 diciembre: 20 December 1927 letter from Bruno Hernández, Zacatecas presidente municipal, to Diputado, Luis M. Reyes, Jefe de las Defensas Sociales del Estado, regarding highwayman, Lorenzo Valenzuela. 144 A.M.Z., Copias de correspondencia enviada por el presidente municipal, 31 marzo 1927, 192 hojas: 8 March 1927 letter from presidencia municipal to Jefe de Departamento de Educación Pública. 145 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Parroquia/ Totatice, 1931:12 September 1935 letter to Dr José Garibi Rivera.

180

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146 Nathaniel Morris, ‘ “Civilising the Savage”: State-building, Education and Huichol autonomy in Revolutionary Mexico, 1920–1940’, JLAS, Vol. 49, No. 4 (November 2017), 729–69. 147 Torres Contreras, Relaciones de frontera entire los huicholes y sus vecinos mestizos, p. 332. 148 Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara, 1927–1928, Carpetón 4, 17 November 1927 order from mayoral office to close illicit religious school. 149 A.H.E.D., Fondo Secretaría de Gobierno, Sección 6, Serie 6–7: 14 December 1926 telegram from governor to President Plutarco Elías Calles. 150 A.M.Z. Copias de oficios giradas por el presidente municipal, 1–31 diciembre: 26 December 1927 letter from Zaactecas presidente municipal to sheriff (comisario) of San Miguel ranch. 151 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. III, pp. 174–5. 152 Brewster, Militarism, Ethnicity and Politics, pp. 148–6; Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution. 153 A.M.Z., Copias de correspondencia enviada por el presidente municipal, 31 marzo 1927, 192 hojas: 11 March 1927 letter from presidente municipal to Jefe del Estado Mayor de la Jefatura de Operaciones Militares. 154 Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, pp. 59–62. 155 Archivo del Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara, Carpetón 4, Exp. 386: 23 March 1927 unanimous compliance of Presidencia Municipal to the request of the 18/a Jefatura de Operaciones Militares. 156 Flysheet: ‘Liga Nacional de la Defensa de la Libertad Religiosa’: Agosto 1927. 157 Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, doc. 2980: 21 June 1929 letter from Presidencia Municipal to Jefe de la Oficina Federal de Hacienda. 158 A.M.Z., Copias de oficios giradas por el presidente municipal, 1–31 octubre, 144 hojas: 1 October 1927 letter from presidente municipal to the director of local Red Cross. 159 A.M.Z., Copias de correspondencia enviada por el presidente municipal, 31 marzo 1927, 192 hojas: 29 March 1927 letter from presidente municipal to Inspector of police requesting apprehension of Juan Velasco. 160 A.M.Z., Copias de Oficio, 1–31 mayo 1927, 247 hojas (presidencia municipal): 3 May 1927 letter from presidente municipal, Bruno Hernández, to state governor alluding to recent security report from Ejecutivo de la Defensa Social de Ojocaliente. 161 Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico: 27 June 1928 complaint from municipal president to garrison brigadier-general. The following day, the Garrison Brigadier-general obligingly banned his soldiers from bathing in the natural springs (Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico: 28 June 1928 reply from garrison brigadier-general to municipality).

Notes

181

1 62 La Voz, 25 March 1928. 163 Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, p. 94. 164 A.M.Z., Circulares giradas en el mes de febrero, 1–28 febrero 1927, 135 hojas: 14 February letter from presidencia municipal to state governor. 165 A.M.Z., Oficios, Diversos, Febrero de 1927 (44): 2 February 1927 jointly-signed letter to presidencia municipal from residents of Avenida Morelos. 166 A.M.Z., Oficios, Diversos, Febrero de 1927 (44): April 1927 appeal by presidencia municipal for greater vigilance against immoral conduct. 167 A.M.Z., Copias de oficios giradas por el presidente municipal, 1–31 octubre, 144 hojas: 11 October 1927 letter from Zacatecas presidente municipal to Federal delegation relating instructions to police. 168 A.M.Z., Copias de oficios giradas por el presidente municipal, 1–30 noviembre, 167 hojas: 15 November letter from Zacatecas presidencia municipal to Federal Hygiene Delegate (Delegado Federal de Salubridad) regarding union complaint. 169 A.M.Z. (21/240) Diversos de la Jefatura de Operaciones y Guarnición de la Plaza, Num. 67, 1933: 29 April 1933 complaint from General de Brigada, Jefe de la Primera Compañía Inspección Permanente del Ejército to presidencia municipal. 170 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, p. 77. 171 Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico: 4 May 1928 letter from Presidente Municipal to Garrison Brigadier-General Arturo L. Alatorre requesting reinforcements. 172 Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, VIII-B-/29, Expediente número 464-VII: 28 May 1929 report from Eusebio Lozano, governor of Aguascalientes male prison. 173 Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, VIII-B-/29, Expediente número 493-VII: 7 June 1929 complaint from governor of Aguascalientes male prison to Presidencia Municipal. 174 For an example of the ‘demilitarisation school’, see Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism. For a recent example of the ‘anti-demilitarisation school’, see Rath, Myths of Demilitarization in postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920–1960.

6  Legacy, memory and conclusion

1 Williamson, Penguin History of Latin America, pp. 244, 343–5, 360. 2 Knight, Mexican Revolution, Vol. I, p. 46; Meyer, La Cristiada. 3 Guerra Manzo, Del fuego sagrado a la acción cívica, p. 17. 4 Adolfo Gilly, ‘Chiapas and the Rebellion of the Enchanted World’, in Daniel Nugent (ed.), Rural Rebellion in Mexico: US Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 315.

182

Notes

5 Carrie C. Chorba, Mexico, from Mestizo to Multicultural: National Identity and Recent Representations of the Conquest (Nashville: Vanderbildt University Press, 2007), p. 26. 6 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, pp. 460–1. 7 Young, Mexican Exodus, p. 15. 8 Morris, ‘The World Created Anew’, pp. 52–4. 9 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 173–7. 10 September 2013 interview with Father López de Larra (q.e.p.d.), Zacatecas. 11 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 284–310. 12 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Caja 12, Exp. 49, doc. 15: 1932 Guardia Nacional manifesto of Cerro Gordo, Michoacán. 13 Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. IV, pp. 142–3. 14 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, pp. 221–2; Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. IV, pp. 121–2. 15 Carlos Blanco, Mi contribución a la epopyea cristera, p. 175. 16 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, p. 291; Navarro, Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco, Vol. II, p. 447. 17 Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes, Fondo Histórico, 765/28: 8 June 1931 complaint from Brigadier-General of XIII Military Zone, Máximo Avila Camacho, to garrison commander at Aguascalientes. 18 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, p. 294; Meyer has calculated that some 5,000 victims were claimed in this manhunt, of whom some 500 were officers (Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, pp. 201–2). 19 Álvarez del Vayo, The Last Optimist, pp. 221–40. 20 Rath, ‘Cardenismo and the Mexican Army’, pp. 172–210. 21 A.M.Z. Doc. 13: 2 July 1932 circular from army press chief, Cristóbal Rodríguez, at War and Naval Ministry in Mexico City. 22 Enrique Guerra Manzo, ‘El fuego sagrado. La Segunda Cristiada y el caso de Michoacán (1931–38)’, Historia Mexicana, Vol. 55, No. 2 (2005), 513–75, 515–30. 23 Meyer, Cristero Rebellion, pp. 204–5. 24 Fallaw, Religion and State Formation, pp. 9–12. 25 UNAM/CESU, Fondo Aurelio Acevedo, Caja 12, Exp. 48: docs. 74 and 94, 19 October 1932 and 19 April 1937 letters from Comité Especial. 26 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Secretaría, 1933, Exp. FS: January 1933 report from Aurelio Acevedo, pp. 9–13, 28 (April 1974 bequest from Jean Meyer). 27 Fallaw, Religion and State Formation, p. 23. 28 Mi Pueblo: ‘Pueblos del Viento Norte’, núm. 100, Año XVII, Octubre-Nov.Dic. de 1995, p. 7.

Notes

183

29 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Secretaría, 1933, Exp. FS: January 1933 report from Aurelio Acevedo, p. 20 (April 1974 bequest from Jean Meyer). 30 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno del Estado de Durango, Sección primera, Exp. 6: 416 November 1932 petition by vecinas of Huazamota, led by Paula Salas; 4 January 1933 rejection of petition by Francisco Correa Icaza, secretario interino del despacho. 31 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno del Estado de Durango, Sección primera, Exp. 6: 8 February 1930 letter from Adelaido Reyes to state governor detailing plea from Francisco Solís, governor of Santa María de Ocotán. 32 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno del Estado de Durango, Sección primera, Exp. 6: 21 February 1930 response from Liborio Espinosa to presidente de la junta provisional de gobierno de Mezquital. 33 de la Torre, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada, pp. 144–7. 34 A.H.E.D., Secretaría del Gobierno, Sección primera, Exp. 570: 10 August 1935 letter from jefe de manzana, José Calderón, to state government. 35 Morris, ‘The World Created Anew’, p. 334. 36 I.N.A.H., Legislación restrictiva del culto católico del estado de Coahuila, 1918: collection of state government decrees showing increasing persecution. 37 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Parroquía San Martín Bolaños, 1936, Caja 3, Exps. 30. 38 Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America, p. 132. 39 Meyer, Sinarquismo, pp. 58, 100. 40 Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey!, pp. 295–309. 41 Tuck, Holy War in Los Altos, p. 12. 42 Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara, Gobierno, Secretaría: 25 August 1933 and 28 November 1935 letters from presbítero of Totatiche, José P. Quezada, to Archdioceses of Guadalajara. 43 Cited in Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, p. 277; Donald J. Mabry, Mexico’s Acción Nacional: a Catholic Alternative to Revolution (Syracuse, 1973), pp. 36–54. 44 Rubio Hernansáez, Zacatecas bronco, p. 300. 45 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 14–18. 46 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, p. 18. 47 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, pp. 20–1. 48 Vázquez Parada, La guerra cristera, p. 24. 49 Roberto Blancarte, Entre la Fe y el Poder: Política y religión en México (México, 2004), pp. 84–6. 50 Blancarte, Entre la Fe y el Poder, pp. 6–7, 80; Matthew Butler, ‘Cristeros y Agraristas de Jalisco: una nueva aportación a la historiografía cristera’, HMex, LII, 2 (2002), p. 493.

184

Sources and Bibliography Archives Archivo del Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara A.H.E.D. (Archivo Histórico del Estado de Durango) Archivo Histórico Estatal de Saltillo A.H.E.Z. (Archivo Histórico del Estado de Zacatecas) Archivo Municipal de Aguascalientes A.M.Z. (Archivo Municipal de Zacatecas) Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara I.N.A.H. (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia) Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa: resumen de la situación política y militar de la república, Agosto 1927 T.N.A. (National Archives, London) UNAM/CESU (Centro de Estudios sobre la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

Interviews September 2013 interview with Father López de Larra (q.e.p.d.), Zacatecas 26 August 2014 interview with María del Socorro Cardozo Girón, chronicler of the municipio of Pánuco, Zacatecas 31 July 2018 interview with Aurora Zepeda of Fresnillo, Zacatecas

Newspapers, pamphlets, art pieces Casti Conubii (1930) David

186

Sources and Bibliography

Diego Rivera, ‘Emiliano Zapata’, Ministry of Education (SEP) Building, Mexico City, 1923–8 El Informador El Universal Excélsior La Prensa La Reconquista La Voz Mi Pueblo: Pueblos del Viento Norte National Catholic Register New York Herald Tribune

Published primary sources Álvarez del Vayo, Julio, The Last Optimist (London: Putnam, 1950). Arellano Viuda de Huerta, Josefina, Viva Cristo Rey! Narración histórica de la revolución cristera en el pueblo de San Julián Jalisco (Zapopan: Amat Editorial, 2003). Blanco Ribera, Carlos, Mi contribución a la epopeya cristera: una época terrible y tormentosa (Guadalajara: Asociación Pro-Cultra Occidental, 2002). Cerrillo, Domingo E., Memorias Cristeras: San Diego de Alejandria, Jalisco (Mexico City, 2013). Cifuentes Guerrero, Jesús, Un capitán cristero, arriero, varillero y ranchero. Mis memorias. Sebastián Arroyo Cruz (Durango: AGLI Editorial, 2018). De la Torre, Luis, 1926: Ecos de la Cristiada (Zapopan: Amate, 2011). De la Torre, Luis, Caldera, Manuel, and del Campo, Xorge, Pueblos del viento norte: Revolución, Cristiada y Rescoldo (Zapopan: Amate, 2012). García Bazán, Mateo, Valparaíso de mis recuerdos (Zacatecas: Editorial la Puya, 2010). Greene, Graham, The Lawless Roads (London, 1939). Gruening, Ernest Mexico and Its Heritage (London, 1928). Guadalupe de Anda, José, Los cristeros: la guerra santa en Los Altos (Mexico City, 1941). Hernández Hurtado, Juan Francisco, Historia de Victoriano Ramírez y de la Revolución Cristera en los Altos de Jalisco (Mexico City, 2009). Macfarland, Charles, Chaos in Mexico (New York, 1935). Santos, Gonzalo N., Memorias (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1986).



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Simpson, Eyler N., The Ejido: Mexico’s Way Out (University of North Carolina Press, 1937).

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Index Acevedo, Aurelio 2, 6, 17, 21, 25, 33, 46, 50, 81, 82, 89, 90, 101, 143, 146 ACJM (Catholic youth movement) 43, 74, 127 agrarista (candidate for state land grants) 7, 18, 37, 52, 53, 56–7, 75–6, 89, 90–2, 95–6, 110, 116, 117 aerial warfare 44, 71, 72, 76, 78, 96, 104 Amaro, Joaquín 2, 9, 44, 46, 76, 124 Apaches 10 apocalypse 11 ‘Arreglos’ (June 1929 peace agreement) 79–81, 89, 101, 103 artillery 8, 9, 27, 44

Decena Trágica 12 Defensas (pro-government paramilitaries) 7, 9, 13, 36, 36–7, 38, 44, 48, 49–50, 51, 52, 55, 100, 101, 109–10, 111, 116–17, 121, 125, 143 Díaz, Porfirio 12, 14, 19, 23, 61, 76, 80, 116, 140

boycott 28, 42, 87, 107, 126

fascism 146 foreign press 43, 119 forestry 39, 54, 144 fort 41, 44, 49, 54 French Revolution 30, 98 fuero militar (separate laws for the army) 8

Cacicazgo (local power network) 1, 3 Cacique (local power broker) 7, 26, 36, 38, 51 Calles, Plutarco Elías 6, 17, 23, 31, 32–3, 35–6, 46, 73, 76, 77, 93, 103, 121, 127, 129, 131, 133 Calwell, Charles (small wars expert) 47–8 Canudo rising (Brazil) 24, 30 cardenismo 19, 142, 145 cavalry 9, 44, 54, 143 Chaco War 41 chango (‘ape’, pejorative term for Federal soldier) 50, 85 Chiapas revolt (1994) 27 communism 15, 104, 107, 108, 142 Congress of Mezquitic (1928) 88 Constitution of 1857 5, 42, 88 Constitution of 1917 10, 14, 42, 108 Cora 4 costumbre (everyday traditions) 26, 32, 35, 37–8, 83, 88 CROM (Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers) 15, 92, 107, 108, 118, 120, 121, 126

ejido (communal land grant) 15, 19, 52, 57, 83–4, 94, 115–16, 118 Escobar revolt 46, 59, 75, 76, 77, 102, 110, 125 exceptionalism (Mexican) 12 exile (sanction) 93, 140

gendarme (police) 18, 49, 60, 111, 114–15, 134–5, 136, 137 gender 121–5, 126, 132 Germany 5 Gómez Farías, José María Valentín 4 Gorostieta, Enrique 24, 46, 51, 73–4, 75, 76, 78–9, 123 gringo (pejorative for USA) 94 hacienda 14–15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 33, 37, 48, 50, 54–5, 56, 61, 84, 90–2, 93–4, 96, 102–3 Huerta, Adolfo de la 7, 9, 22, 25, 32–3, 46, 121, 125 Huerta, Victoriano 12–13, 14, 19 Huichol 4, 21, 37–8 intellectual revolt (1968) 27–8 Juárez, Benito 8, 108

196

Index

Knights of Columbus 17, 32, 72 Ku Klux Klan 32, 72 ‘La Segunda’ (Second Cristero revolt, 1932–38) 80, 133, 140–5 ley fuga (shooting of prisoners) 10, 13, 110, 112 LNDLR (National League for the Defence of Religious Freedom) 16, 28, 31, 42, 43, 44, 47, 73, 74, 78, 88, 101, 104, 120, 123, 125, 142 Lozada, Manuel 4 Madero, Francisco 8, 11, 12, 13, 19, 20, 116 marijuana 60 Mexican Revolution 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 22, 23, 25, 28, 37, 55, 73, 102, 132, 139 militarism 5, 111–15, 117–18, 119 military academy 7, 29, 73 miracles 98 mounted police 9 mourning (Cristero cultural policy) 89–90, 92, 132 ‘new military history’ 29–30, 51 narco wars 1, 148 National Guard (liberal) 5 National Guard (Cristero) 73, 100 navy 78 Obregón Salido, Álvaro 7, 9, 15, 32, 35, 45, 75, 120, 135 oil (nationalization) 145 photograph 43 Plan of Agua Prieta 20 PNR/PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) 13, 104–5, 115, 139, 140, 142, 146, 147

Praetorianism 5 prostitution 135–6 Protestant 17, 32, 84, 86, 97 Prussia 9, 115 Quetzalcoátl (deity) 27 Quintanar, Pedro 36–7, 38, 46–7, 48, 89 racism 10, 11, 21, 84–5, 86–7, 92, 102, 133 radio 71, 142 railways 8, 19, 35, 59, 61, 76, 107, 110, 111, 119–20 reconcentration 35, 59, 60–5, 109, 123 residents’ committees (anti-clerical) 126–32 Rivero, Diego 85 Rosary Belt 2, 17 SEP (Public Education Department) 17–18, 141 Serrano (highland) 2, 19, 26, 86, 137 sexual assault 25, 45, 123–4 Social Catholicism 91–2, 123 soldaderas (female soldiers) 124–5, 135 Spaniards 12, 15, 23–4, 43, 61, 85, 102 Tarahumara 10 Tepeheuano 11, 41, 53, 144–5 Tyrol revolt (1809) 53 Vasconcelos, José 79, 104–5 Vietnam War 29 War of Reform 5, 31 Yaqui 6, 13, 35, 44, 46, 59 Zapatistas 12, 15, 18, 19, 26–7, 30, 44, 103 zones of command 8, 17, 44, 110, 111–12, 113, 119, 134, 145