In June of 1739, what might have proven to be a festive early-summer afternoon celebrating the fiesta of Corpus Christi in Pátzcuaro (Mexico), instantaneously veered toward deadly combat when a fight broke out in the streets near a commonly used well in the San Augustín neighborhood, close by where the Corpus procession passed. The turn to violence occurred when two groups of men settled an apparently petty dispute with physical measures that ultimately claimed one participant's life. Two Indian nobles, don Juan de Vargas and his nephew, Santiago Valerio, and a Spaniard, Joseph Ruíz (alias Alvarez), composed one party. Two coyotes, Augustín Calvillo and Matías Martínez Serrillo, and a mulatto, Juan Joseph de los Santos, made up the other. The men knew one and other prior to the argument, though it is impossible to glean from the criminal record of the event whether any festering rivalry played into the dispute. Available evidence suggests that Vargas' refusal to accept a sip of charape (a type of pulque) from Ruíz triggered the incident. This rebuff represented an affront that drew Calvillo, Martínez, and Santos into the fray, siding against the native nobles. In the ensuing upheaval, Valerio sustained a fatal stomach wound.

I am touched and surprised by this recognition, from colleagues who don’tknow me personally, as well as from friends in the profession who must havewritten on my behalf. I like Bill Russell’s idea that a good way of leadingis to serve. I have looked for ways to serve, but they have mostly been outof public view. In that spirit I want to acknowledge especially John TePaskewho died a few weeks ago—a colleague I’ve looked up to from the beginning asa wonderful example of integrity, generosity, and wisdom.

In recent years, an impressive effort has been made to supersede established interpretations of religious conflict in revolutionary Mexico that dismissed religious motivations as superstructural derivatives of “true” socio-economic and political factors. This has been accomplished by— pardon the cliché—“bringing religion back in” to the study of the Mexican Revolution. Yet while our post-secular understanding of Mexican religions and their impact has been vastly enhanced, the same cannot be said of revolutionary anticlericalism and irreligiosity, which have similarly been dismissed as mere tools in the hands of a cynical, Machiavellian revolutionary leadership intent on mystifying a credulous people.

Among the nations of the New World, Mexico is probably the country in which the Franciscans worked most intensively. Having been the first missionaries to arrive in Mexico, they covered most of its territory and worked with numerous native groups: Nahuas, Otomies, Mazahuas, Huastecas, Totonacas, Tarascans, Mayas. Their intense missionary activity is evident in the many indigenous languages the Franciscans learned, the grammars and vocabularies they wrote, the numerous Biblical texts they translated, and the catechisms they wrote with ideographical techniques quite alien to the European mind. This activity left an indelible mark in Mexico, a mark still alive in popular traditions, monumental constructions, popular devotions, and folk art. Without a doubt, in spite of the continuous growth of the Spanish and Mestizo populations during colonial times, the favorite concern of Franciscan pastoral activity was the indigenous population. Thus, Franciscan schools and colleges, hospitals, and publications were addressed to it. For their part, the native population showed the same preference for the Franciscans. To the eyes of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, Franciscans and natives appeared as an inseparable body, an association not always welcomed by the Spanish Crown. In fact, since the middle of the sixteenth century bishops and royal officials tried to separate them, assigning secular priests in the native towns and limiting the ecclesiastical authority of the friars.

At approximatety eight o'clock in the morning on the 22nd of June, 1719, Don Gaspar Agüero de los Reyes y San Pelayo, the alcalde mayor (Spanish magistrate) of the district of Villa Alta, Oaxaca, prepared to depart on horseback from the town square of the Zapotec pueblo of San Juan Juquila toward four disputed parcels of land. Standing with him in the square were the cabildo officers of San Juan Juquila and San Juan Tanetze, who had been engaged in a legal battle over the land for four years. Their lawyers stood with them. Juan Tirado, a district interpreter, and court witnesses (in lieu of an official notary) translated and notarized the proceedings. From his perch on the back of his horse, the alcalde mayor read the legal decision in the dispute, which the interpreter translated for the benefit of the Zapotec officials. The auxiliary judge, who rendered the decision in the case from the distance and comfort of the diocesan seat of Antequera, had ordered that the land in question should be divided equally between the two pueblos. The lawyer for the cabildo of Tanetze voiced his official protest and vowed to appeal the case to the Real Audiencia. The alcalde mayor registered the protest. Then, he addressed another group of men who had been waiting in the wings: Juan de Yllescas, Andrés Ramos, Juan Baptista, Pedro Hernandes, and Nicolas Santiago, all natives of the Zapotec pueblo of San Miguel Talea, and all of whom had testified in an earlier probanza on behalf of the pueblo of Juquila. Through his interpreter, the magistrate swore them in as witnesses and ordered them to guide the group to the disputed territory, identify the parcels of land and their borders, and determine where they should be divided. From this point on, the Zapotec witnesses took the lead and proceeded toward the disputed territory along the Camino Real, with their “faces pointing south.” In this manner, the legal ritual of boundary marking (amojonamiento) began.

Two days before Easter 1916, a teacher in the Mérida ferrocarrilleros’ school demolished a pine statue of Saint Joseph with an axe to show “it was simply a monkey on a stick (un tucho de palo)”; students then hacked up smaller icons before approving parents. During the Cristiada, General Eulogio Ortíz ate consecrated hosts with carnitas de puerco in a public market in Zacatecas. Constitutionalist military proconsuls in 1914-15, leftist regional caudillos of the 1920s, and federal educators and some provincial strongmen during the Maximato (1931-35) all believed anticlericalism would build a new nation; these three waves of attacks against the Catholic clergy proved to be decisive moments in revolutionary state formation. At no point, however, did revolutionaries agree on either means or ends. Radicals favored the destruction of the Church (if not organized religion entirely). Their reliance on iconoclasm—literal as well as metaphorical—also distinguished them. Some iconoclastic radicals hoped their attacks would help create a humanistic, post-Christian belief system. More moderate anticlericals advocated less destructive and more persuasive measures, including using education and the law to weaken and/or reform Catholicism. Some moderates promoted alternative creeds; others hoped to remake the Catholic Church in Mexico. Certainly iconoclasts and reformers did collaborate at times, but they also clashed, as in the rancorous debates over the “religious question” at the Querétaro Constitutional Convention and again when anticlerical Reds and moderate Whites battled during the early 1930s.

Between 1722 and 1779, the Bourbon kings managed to achieve financial stability without broadening the tax base or borrowing on a large scale. The incorporation of Aragon's territories under the crown of Castile, the Bourbon administrative reforms, sustained population and economic growth during the first half of the eighteenth century, added to the silver coming from the Americas, explain the general increase in income within the existing fiscal constitution. The revenues extracted from the American possessions, in particular from New Spain, were essential in keeping the metropolitan budget balanced. However, from the 1790s onwards, constant international warfare made ordinary revenues collected in the Americas insufficient for financing deficit spending in Spain. To meet shortfalls, the crown implemented extraordinary measures including the collection of loans, donativos, ecclesiastical subsidies, and the enforcement of the Decreto de Consolidación de vales reales in 1804. These measures demonstrate that the Spanish crown increasingly relied on its imperial financial network to balance its budget, and simultaneously postponed the politically costly implementation of a thorough fiscal reform in the metropolis.

Popular legend suggests that a mysterious curse fated Nina Rodrigues’ deathin 1906. Though a pioneer of Afro-Brazilian studies, he posited thatAfro-descendants possessed a genetic atavism predisposing them to crime andargued that widespread racial miscegenation had contributed to thefin-de-siècle “negro problem” in Brazil. Almost four decades following hisdeath, the curse was reborn, striking Arthur Ramos shortly after he hadrevived the stagnant field of Afro-Brazilian studies using a modifiedversion of Rodrigues’ methodology. Both Brazilian men died in Paris in theirmidforties, just as they were reaching the summit of their respectivecareers.

In this text, motivated by the need to offer a different perspective to the representation of the Senado da Câmara (Municipal Council) in relation to the society that participated in Corpus Christi, I return to the study of the feast in the eighteenth century. The câmara was responsible for the spatial-temporal framework of the ritual in the diverse cities of Portuguese America, among other prerogatives and duties identified and analyzed by the historiography regarding this institution of the Ancien Regime. According to the câmara's minutes, the “Church, the Senate and the People (Povo)” would be present at the feast, thus establishing in the discourse a tripartite and corporative social order that does not identify the participants, whether individuals or the diverse “bodies” that comprised the Church or the people. And, of even greater importance, the câmara's discourse makes reference to the three bodies it claims to represent. However, it is known that if the camara symbolically evokes the respublica (commonwealth) through the organization and appearance at this royal feast, in political terms, the participation of elements that comprised the people in the Senado da Câmara, in other words, of the artisan crafts and skilled trades, was restricted to Bahia and Rio de Janeiro for a short period of time.

One night in April 1822, a slave snuck into Caracas' main plaza, and under cover of darkness, threw the feces of his entire household into the public well. A month later, a local magistrate appeared at the store of José Castellano and Manuel Gonzalez with a contingent of soldiers and arrested them for having ordered their slave to commit this heinous crime. From their jail cell, the two men asserted their innocence and insisted that the magistrate had behaved unacceptably: “Because we have never had any previous warning, because we have not previously been called to appear in court and also because there is no proof … [the magistrate] cannot have been authorised to commit the public insult that he has shamelessly and scandalously put upon our persons.” Their defense relied not only on questions of evidence but also on attacks against the magistrate's civility; they claimed that his actions had transgressed both proper legal and social behavior. This combination of legislative and non-legislative concerns was typical for complaints against officials from the colonial period, and we see it persist directly after independence. In the coming years, however, the formal responsibilities of government employees would change, as would the paradigm for complaints against them.

A new order for the New World was unfolding in the early nineteenth century,or so many in the United States believed. Between 1808 and 1825, all ofPortuguese America and nearly all of Spanish America broke away from Europe,casting off Old World monarchs and inaugurating home-grown governmentsinstead. People throughout the United States looked on with excitement, asthe new order seemed at once to vindicate their own revolution as well asoffer new possibilities for future progress. Free from obsolete Europeanalliances, they hoped, the entire hemisphere could now rally together aroundrepublican government and commercial reciprocity. Statesmen and politicianswere no exception, as men from Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to JohnQuincy Adams and Henry Clay tried to exclude European influence from thehemisphere while securing new markets for American manufactures andagricultural surplus.

The anticlerical attacks of radical nineteenth-century liberals provoked the Church and aided the rise of confessional politics from continental Europe to revolutionary Mexico. In the European case, Stathis Kalyvas has recently proposed that such anticlerical liberalism was often moved by two distinctive motives, one narrow and political, the other broad and institutional. These motives can be associated with the concepts of tactic and strategy as laid out by Michel de Certeau. Working from both conceptual pairings, we can characterize anticlericalism sometimes as a political tactic, responding to conjunctural circumstances, and other times as an institutional strategy, plotting out a terrain and a path on which to forge present and future power relationships. This sort of conceptualization, I believe, is also well-suited to analyses of revolutionary Mexico. Nonetheless, for the distinction between “political-tactical” and “institutional-strategic” to be helpful, historians also need to place anticlericalism within the confusing logic of destruction and reconstruction inherent to Mexico's revolutionary process.

In 1660 Cristóbal de la Cruz presented himself before the commissioner ofthe Holy Office of the Inquisition in Veracruz, Mexico, claiming to beafflicted by doubts about the Catholic faith. Born in Algiers and capturedat the age of nine or ten by a Spanish galley force, he was taken to Spain,where he was quickly sold into slavery and baptized. Thirty years later, Dela Cruz denounced himself to the Mexican inquisitorial tribunal andproceeded to recount to the inquisitors a detailed and fascinating story ofhis life as he crossed Iberian and Mediterranean landscapes: escaping fromhis masters and being re-enslaved, encountering Muslims and renouncingChristianity, denouncing his guilt remorsefully before the Inquisitions ofBarcelona and Seville, and moving between belief in Catholicism and Islam.His case provides important insights into the relationship between religiousidentity and the regulatory efforts of powerful institutions in the earlymodern Spanish world.

As the recent clashes in Mexico City's metropolitan cathedral show, it is not just clericalism that is making an apparent comeback in post-priísta Mexico: clericalism's faithful alter ego, anticlericalism—provoked to violence when clanking church bells disturbed a political rally in the zócalo in November 2007—is also stirring anew. This dialectical affinity between rival ideological traditions goes back a long way, as historic clashes over church bells—auditory symbols of institutional jurisdiction and influence—remind us: and yet, as Alan Knight points out, neither the terrain, nor the terms, of the dispute between clericalism/anticlericalism have been mapped out with enough clarity by Mexicanist historians. The 1910-40 revolution, for instance, is associated with various anticlericalisms— be it the protestant variety studied by Jean-Pierre Bastian; the constitutionalists' liberal clerophobia, irrupting circa 1914; masonic, spiritist, or popular anticlericalisms; or the “socialist” god-burning of the 1930s which climaxed in the iconoclasm studied by Adrian Bantjes. This trajectory— from priest-baiting to dechristianization within a generation—makes it tempting to posit an irreligious revolution, whose anticlericalism was a precursory form of mature godlessness. Some revolutionaries, like Tomás Garrido Canabal in Tabasco, encouraged such a conflation by using anticlerical restrictions—especially state licensing of priests, enshrined in constitutional Article 130—in a vindictive and secularizing way: squeezing the clergy so hard that priests were eradicated, not just rubber-stamped by the state. Such figures clearly hoped that persecuting priests would fatally mine belief: the day would come, Adalberto Tejeda hoped in 1926, when religion would expire and churches become places of recreation for apostate Indians. The Roman Catholic clergy, meanwhile, was fond of denouncing anticlericals as deicides, if not devils, and reinforced its own position by encouraging the association of anticlericalism with anti-Catholicism in the minds of the faithful.

In 1798, the U.S. Congress enacted a series of laws that affected resident aliens by restricting their access to citizenship and making those deemed to be “dangerous to the peace and safety of the Unites States” subject to deportation at the will of the Executive. In 1827, the Mexican government enacted the first of three laws for the expulsion of Spaniards, which ordered the removal of those born on the Spanish peninsula. In both cases, these laws went against the premises for membership that the young nations had set after independence. In both cases, it was argued that such violent measures were necessary to save the nation. As such, they suggest that even though the modern nation is often described as a subjective community, linked by horizontal bonds of solidarity, few mechanisms are as effective in forging an “us” than the construction of a hostile “them.”

This article will argue that a seemingly trivial dispute between the Nicaraguan government and an American lumber company operating on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast escalated to become a major source of tension between the U.S. State Department and Nicaragua, as well as a catalyst that drew U.S. banks into Nicaragua. Despite its significance, the convoluted story of this dispute has attracted little scholarly attention. The importance of the Emery claim was widely acknowledged at the time, however. Stories about it appeared in contemporary newspapers and magazines, and it became a topic worthy of discussion by a U.S. Senate hearing. The claim was also connected to José Santos Zelaya's resignation as president of Nicaragua in the autumn of 1909, a gesture that came shortly after he had agreed to settle the Emery claim.

On 16 April 1938, the school teacher of the Mixtec village of San Andrés Dinicuiti reported that the Easter week procession had taken place, despite government regulations prohibiting public displays of worship. During the event, the faithful had marched through the streets shouting “Long live religion, death to bad government, death to the state governor, death to the president of the republic.” When they arrived at the local school, they yelled “Death to the masons, long live religion” before denigrating the teacher's parentage. During the 1920s and 1930s, devout Catholic peasants throughout Mexico repeatedly denounced the presumed link between government, school teachers, anticlericalism, and the masons. The popular condemnation obviously emanated in part from the ecclesiastical hierarchy's frequent anti-masonic pronouncements. The Apostolic Delegate's charge that masons were “the cause of our persecution and almost all our national misfortunes” was reiterated in countless bulletins, manifestos, and pastoral letters throughout the country. In 1934, the Bishop of Huajuapam de León, which controlled the parish of San Andrés Dinicuiti, reminded local priests that they were to refuse to accept masons and members of the government party as godparents for baptisms, confirmations, or marriages. A year later, Mexican Catholic Action argued that government policies of socialist education and agrarismo were the “impious work of anti-Christian masons.” However, despite this popular cross-class conviction, there is little historical work on the actual role of the masons in modern Mexico. By examining the archives of the Grand Lodge of Oaxaca, this article posits that Masonic lodges were key to the process of post-revolutionary state formation. As the state sought to assert control over a divided country, freemasonry's anticlericalism not only offered a model for cultural practice, masons also formed a vanguard of willing political emissaries. However, the institution's influence should not be overstressed. It was often curtailed by internecine disputes, political infighting, and an essentially conservative leadership.

Dr. Richard Greenleaf has been one of the most influential historians ofcolonial Latin America in general, and of the Inquisition in particular. Hereceived his university and graduate education in his home state at theUniversity of New Mexico. His professional career took him to Mexico Cityduring the exciting period of the 1950s and 1960s. From there he went on tobe one of the guiding forces in the consolidation of the Latin AmericanStudies program at Tulane University. This interview was conducted in thesummer of 2007 at Dr. Greenleaf's residence in Albuquerque.