[our goal] is nothing less that the coordination of the living forces of Mexican Catholic youth for the purpose of restoring Christian social order in Mexico …

(A.C.J.M.’s “General Statutes”)

The Mexican Catholic Youth Association emerged during the Mexican Revolution dedicated to the goal of creating lay activists with a Catholic vision for society. The history of this Jesuit organization provides insights into Church-State relations from the military phase of the Mexican Revolution to its consolidation in the 1920s and 1930s. The Church-State conflict is a basic issue in Mexico's political struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the Church mobilizing forces wherever it could during these years dominated by anticlericalism. During the 1920s, the Mexican Catholic Youth Association (A.C.J.M.) was in the forefront of the Church's efforts to respond to the government's anticlerical policies. The A.C.J.M.’s subsequent estrangement from the top Church leadership also serves to highlight the complex relationship that existed between the Mexican bishops and the Catholic laity and the ideological divisions that existed within Mexico's Catholic community as a whole.

The study of marriageways in colonial Latin America has altered and deepened our understanding of the societies and cultures within the Spanish and Portuguese empires of the New World. During the last thirty or forty years a series of studies have explored the complex and varied patterns of marriage and family formation in colonial Latin America. Inspired by the work of Peter Laslett, Lawrence Stone and Louis Flandrin among others, historians of the region have produced a rich historical literature on the demographic, social and cultural aspects of colonial marriageways. Most studies have focused on the late colonial period, and the years after 1778 when the Pragmática sanción de matrimonios (first issued in Spain in 1776) was extended to Spanish America. One effect of the new law was an astonishing outpouring of reports, questions, lawsuits and regulations concerning marriage, which in turn have been seized upon by historians to reconstruct important aspects of late colonial Latin American societies. Despite the frequent use of these sources, the legislation itself has received little serious attention, and several basic misunderstandings prevail regarding its background and meaning. As a consequence, the political implications of marriage have been poorly understood.

When 22 Capuchin friars landed in Barcelona in 1843, they could not anticipate the troubles they faced in the years to come. As refugees from the Spanish Carlista wars, Gallegos and Catalans who did not even speak much Spanish, the friars must have been happy enough to serve a nation that did not want them dead—yet. In their contract with the Venezuelan government, the 22 Capuchin friars who labored in Venezuela's Oriente promised to stay in Venezuela for at least ten years. In return, the Venezuelan government promised to pay them 400 pesos annually, to leave all spiritual matters in the hands of the missionaries, and to cede to the missionaries all authority in Indian mission matters.

If only things worked out that well. The Capuchin friars found themselves inextricably bound in complex relationships of race and class, often intertwined with matters of land and labor. Poverty and politics (or the politics of poverty) did not allow clergy to use their position as parish priests to maintain any degree of neutrality in the tug of war between the white elite and the poor, primarily Indians, ex-slaves, and the mixed race descendants of all groups. To the contrary, poverty and politics made clergy important players in the ongoing high stakes game of chess between the elite and the masses.

A contributor to La Lei, the journalistic mouthpiece of Chile's reformist Radical Party, attended a peculiar cultural event on a mild spring evening in 1909 that evidently made quite an impression. Workers with their spouses and children, all donning their best suits and dresses, had gathered in one of the capital's dance halls to enjoy what the onlooker grasped as an evening of “aesthetic enjoyment without ostentation.” As the writer noted, “For three hours I was enchanted by the order, by the discretion, by the culture of the dancers. [The cultured worker] is a natural friend of order, he does not let himself be convinced by high-sounding words, nor does he accept subversive ideas; the revolutionary preaching of the Utopians and those without spirits repulse him. He loves tranquillity and has a profound respect for republican laws. A man of this nature is not only a pillar of our democracy but also an unceasing producer of wealth and social well being.” What the writer recognized as “culture” evidently was conducive to the perpetuation of liberal democracy, the defense of the economic order, and the preservation of social peace during the so-called Parliamentary Republic (1891-1925). Indeed, if workers were culturally educated, if they properly understood, imitated, and enjoyed a “mainstream” culture, they would be less apt to engage in disruptive political endeavors, or so it was suggested in La Lei.

Marian apparitions and miraculous images in Mexico inevitably bring to mind one renowned figure — Our Lady of Guadalupe and its shrine at Tepeyac in the Valley of Mexico. Guadalupe is, indeed, a touchstone to the history of Catholicism and popular devotion in Mexico, and Mexico is a special case of a religious image becoming the main symbol for an emerging nation. As Jeannette Rodríguez recently wrote, “To be of Mexican descent is to recognize the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.” But devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe has a history. This image has not always been, and in some ways still is not, the dominant symbol throughout Mexico, and the location of its principal shrine on the edge of Mexico City is as much a key to its importance as is its association with the oldest Marian apparition officially recognized by the Catholic Church. Dozens of different shrines to other miraculous images have captured the hearts of thousands, sometimes millions of followers in Mexico. They still do.