Protestantism and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca

Protestantism and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca
Author: Kathleen M. McIntyre
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826360246

"As fast as men and means are furnished": protestant missions during the Porfiriato -- "La sangre está clamando justicia": constructing martyrdom in postrevolutionary Oaxaca -- Contested spaces: local conflicts, conedef, and the Mexican state -- The Summer Institute of Linguistics in Oaxaca -- Liberation theology, indigenous rights, and nationalism -- "Here the people rule": customary law and state formation -- Conclusion. Reimagining communities.

Protestantism and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca

Protestantism and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca
Author: Kathleen M. McIntyre
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2019-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826360254

In this fascinating book Kathleen M. McIntyre traces intra-village conflicts stemming from Protestant conversion in southern Mexico and successfully demonstrates that both Protestants and Catholics deployed cultural identity as self-defense in clashes over local power and authority. McIntyre’s study approaches religious competition through an examination of disputes over tequio (collective work projects) and cargo (civil-religious hierarchy) participation. By framing her study between the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Zapatista uprising of 1994, she demonstrates the ways Protestant conversion fueled regional and national discussions over the state’s conceptualization of indigenous citizenship and the parameters of local autonomy. The book’s timely scholarship is an important addition to the growing literature on transnational religious movements, gender, and indigenous identity in Latin America.

Oaxaca Resurgent

Oaxaca Resurgent
Author: A. S. Dillingham
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503627853

Oaxaca Resurgent examines how Indigenous people in one of Mexico's most rebellious states shaped local and national politics during the twentieth century. Drawing on declassified surveillance documents and original ethnographic research, A. S. Dillingham traces the contested history of indigenous development and the trajectory of the Mexican government's Instituto Nacional Indigenista, the most ambitious agency of its kind in the Americas. This book shows how generations of Indigenous actors, operating from within the Mexican government while also challenging its authority, proved instrumental in democratizing the local teachers' trade union and implementing bilingual education. Focusing on the experiences of anthropologists, government bureaucrats, trade unionists, and activists, Dillingham explores the relationship between indigeneity, rural education and development, and the political radicalism of the Global Sixties. By centering Indigenous expressions of anticolonialism, Oaxaca Resurgent offers key insights into the entangled histories of Indigenous resurgence movements and the rise of state-sponsored multiculturalism in the Americas. This revelatory book provides crucial context for understanding post-1968 Mexican history and the rise of the 2006 Oaxacan social movement.

Liberation Theology and the Others

Liberation Theology and the Others
Author: Christian Büschges
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1793633649

Looking beyond prominent figures or major ecclesial events, Liberation Theology and the Others offers a fresh historical perspective on Latin American liberation theology. Thirteen case studies, from Mexico to Uruguay, depict a vivid picture of religious and lay activism that shaped the profile of the Latin American Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century. Stressing the transnational character of Catholic activism and its intersections with prevalent discourses of citizenship, ethnicity or development, scholars from Latin America, the US, and Europe, analyze how pastoral renewal was debated and embraced in multiple local and culturally diverse contexts. Contributors explore the connections between Latin American liberation theology and anthropology in Peru, armed revolutionaries in highland Guatemala, and the implementation of neoliberalism in Bolivia. They identify conceptions of the popular church, indigenous religiosity, women’s leadership, and student activism that circulated among Latin American religious and lay activists between the 1960s and the 1980s. By revisiting the multifaceted and oftentimes contingent nature of church reforms, this edited volume provides fascinating new insights into one of the most controversial religious movements of the 20th century.

Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest

Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest
Author: Matthew Butler
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2023-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826345085

Mexico’s Spiritual Reconquest brings to life a classically misunderstood pícaro: liberal soldier turned Catholic priest and revolutionary antipope, “Patriarch” Joaquín Pérez. Historian Matthew Butler weaves Pérez’s controversial life story into a larger narrative about the relationship between religion, the state, and indigeneity in twentieth-century Mexico. Mexico’s Spiritual Reconquest is at once the history of an indigenous reformation and a deeply researched, beautifully written exploration of what can happen when revolutions try to assimilate powerful religious institutions and groups. The book challenges historians to reshape baseline assumptions about modern Mexico in order to see a revolutionary state that was deeply vested in religion and a Cristero War that was, in reality, a culture clash between Catholics.

Sacrifice and Regeneration

Sacrifice and Regeneration
Author: Yael Mabat
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2022-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496233948

At the dawn of the twentieth century, while Lima’s aristocrats hotly debated the future of a nation filled with “Indians,” thousands of Aymara and Quechua Indians left the pews of the Catholic Church and were baptized into Seventh-day Adventism. One of the most staggering Christian phenomena of our time, the mass conversion from Catholicism to various forms of Protestantism in Latin America was so successful that Catholic contemporaries became extremely anxious on noticing that parts of the Indigenous population in the Andean plateau had joined a Protestant church. In Sacrifice and Regeneration Yael Mabat focuses on the extraordinary success of Seventh-day Adventism in the Andean highlands at the beginning of the twentieth century and sheds light on the historical trajectories of Protestantism in Latin America. By approaching the religious conversion among Indigenous populations in the Andes as a multifaceted and dynamic interaction between converts, missionaries, and their social settings and networks, Mabat demonstrates how the religious and spiritual needs of converts also brought salvation to the missionaries. Conversion had important ramifications on the way social, political, and economic institutions on the local and national level functioned. At the same time, socioeconomic currents had both short-term and long-term impacts on idiosyncratic religious practices and beliefs that both accelerated and impeded religious change. Mabat’s innovative historical perspective on religious transformation allows us to better comprehend the complex and often contradictory way in which Protestantism took shape in Latin America.

Love and Despair

Love and Despair
Author: Jaime M. Pensado
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2023-06-13
Genre:
ISBN: 0520392957

Love and Despair explores the multiple and mostly unknown ways progressive and conservative Catholic actors, such as priests, lay activists, journalists, intellectuals, and filmmakers, responded to the significant social and cultural shifts that formed competing notions of modernity in Cold War Mexico. Jaime M. Pensado demonstrates how the Catholic Church as a heterogeneous institution--with key transnational networks in Latin America and Western Europe--was invested in youth activism, state repression, and the counterculture from the postwar period to the more radical Sixties. Similar to their secular counterparts, progressive Catholics often saw themselves as revolutionary actors and nearly always framed their activism as an act of love. When their movements were repressed and their ideas were co-opted, marginalized, and commercialized at the end of the Sixties, the liberating hope of love often turned into a sense of despair.

Indigenous America in the Spanish Language Classroom

Indigenous America in the Spanish Language Classroom
Author: Anne Fountain
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2023
Genre: Indigenous peoples
ISBN: 1647123534

"Many Spanish language teachers have little understanding of the indigenous languages and cultures that are part of the Spanish-speaking Americas. This book proposes to fill that gap and help teachers include the history and culture of Indigenous Peoples using a social justice lens. Indigenous America begins with an overview of the history of colonialism throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas and ties it to language teaching curricula and standards. Each substantive chapter ends with a list of conclusions, a list of questions for discussion and debate, and a set of teaching topics and concrete classroom exercises. Fountain will include photographs of places, people, and artifacts to make this history tangible. Appendices with more details about incorporating some rich resources into the Spanish language classroom are included, as is a glossary of important terms. This book is the first resource of its kind and is timely--teachers are eager to include more voices in their courses"--

Missionaries of the State

Missionaries of the State
Author: Todd Hartch
Publisher: University Alabama Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN:

An account of American missionary activity abetted by Mexican nationalists. Lázaro Cárdenas, president of Mexico 1934-40, is widely remembered as the most nationalistic and populist Mexican executive and was demonized by foreign investors scandalized by his nationalization programs, particularly in the oil industry. Less well known are his efforts to 'Mexicanize' indigenous populations and to reduce the power of the conservative Catholic hierarchy by encouraging anti-clericalism and Protestant evangelical activity. Common aims therefore united Cárdenas and Cameron Townsend, an American Protestant missionary. With the support of Cárdenas and like-minded Mexican officials, Townsend formed the Summer Institute of Linguistics, or SIL, a training school for Protestant missionaries who undertook to learn indigenous languages and to translate the Bible into those tongues. The official justification of this project was that the Indians' new vernacular literacy would serve as a bridge to learning Spanish and thus to assimilation into the larger national population. If at the same time Townsend's linguists also served as evangelists of a fundamentalist form of Protestantism, so much the better; in doing so, the SIL effort would undermine the Catholic hierarchy, which was seen as a rival of the Mexican state and its plans for secular national development. This unusual yet enduring alliance of a national government not known for friendship to foreigners and an unlikely collection of North Americans who united scholarship, political savvy, and religious zeal is this book's topic. The author relates the development of the SIL from its close association with official Mexico in the early 1930s to the late 1970s, when a growing anti-SIL alliance led by a new generation of Mexican anthropologists induced the Mexican government to curtail its support for the SIL. Hartch contributes objectivity to a topic that has been dominated by the polemics of either SIL supporters or opponents, recognizing the self-interest that actuated all parties, but also acknowledging that SIL, whether or not it meant to, empowered and enriched many indigenous communities through the provision of literacy.

La Santa Muerte in Mexico

La Santa Muerte in Mexico
Author: Wil G. Pansters
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2019-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826360815

This book examines La Santa Muerte's role in people's daily lives and explores how popular religious practices of worship and devotion developed around a figure often associated with illicit activities.