| Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz reportedly once said, "Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States." Perhaps more than any other forces, Catholicism and the omnipresence of the United States have long shaped Mexico. The Mexican Revolutionary time period, 1910--1929, is particularly marked by U.S. influence, though not necessarily in expected ways. This study explores the role of Catholicism in U.S.-Mexican relations during the Mexican Revolution. I examine how religion and nation are re-imagined, on both sides of the border, during this critical era of U.S.-Mexican interaction.; My project moves beyond studies of U.S. banking and oil interests, and class-based studies of the Mexican peasantry. I show that governments in both countries were focused on the religion question in Mexico, and both governments understood that in order to achieve economic stability in Mexico, the religion question must be resolved. At the same time, religion shaped expressions of patriotism, duty and nationalism in both countries. Religion raised the concern and ire of the U.S. and Mexican publics in ways that oil and banking could not. The anti-clericalism of the mid-1920s strengthened the identification of Catholicism with national identity for Mexican Catholics. In the United States, Catholics believed it was their patriotic duty to address the anticlericalism expressed by the Mexican government. I demonstrate that religion was more significant in U.S.-Mexican relations than has previously been understood, and that the Mexican religious conflict produced unexpected alliances between U.S. government officials and both U.S. and Mexican Catholics. The U.S. Catholic Church and the U.S. government worked simultaneously to shape post-Revolutionary Mexico to meet their own needs and expectations.; This project draws on extensive archival research including government, individual, organizational and church records, in both Spanish and English in the United States and Mexico. I also examine important religious, political, historical, and anthropological writings published in both countries during the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on postcolonial and postnational theories, I analyze U.S. imperialism and Mexican nationalism during the Revolution and how Catholicism impacted these competing projects. |
