The author provides a new interpretation of the Cristero War (1926-29) which divided Mexico's peasantry into rival camps loyal to the Catholic Church (cristero) or the Revolution (agrarista). This book puts religion at the heart of our understanding of the revolt.

Dr Butler provides a new interpretation of the cristero war (1926-29) which divided Mexico's peasantry into rival camps loyal to the Catholic Church (cristero) or the Revolution (agrarista). This book puts religion at the heart of our understanding of the revolt by showing how peasant allegiances often resulted from genuinely popular cultural and religious antagonisms. It challenges the assumption that Mexican peasants in the 1920s shared religious outlooks and that their behaviour was mainly driven by political and material factors. Focusing on the state of Michoacán in western-central Mexico, the volume seeks to integrate both cultural and structural lines of inquiry. First charting the uneven character of Michoacán's historical formation in the late colonial period and the nineteenth century, Dr Butler shows how the emergence of distinct agrarian regimes and political cultures was later associated with varying popular responses to post-revolutionary state formation in the areas of educational and agrarian reform. At the same time, it is argued that these structural trends were accompanied by increasingly clear divergences in popular religious cultures, including lay attitudes to the clergy, patterns of religious devotion and deviancy, levels of sacramental participation, and commitment to militant 'social' Catholicism. As peasants in different communities developed distinct parish identities, so the institutional conflict between Church and state acquired diverse meanings and provoked violently contradictory popular responses. Thus the fires of revolt burned all the more fiercely because they inflamed a countryside which - then as now - was deeply divided in matters of faith as well as politics. Based on oral testimonies and careful searches of dozens of ecclesiastical and state archives, this study makes an important contribution to the religious history of the Mexican Revolution.

Abandoning Their Beloved Land offers an essential new history of the Bracero Program, a bilateral initiative that allowed Mexican men to work in the United States as seasonal contract farmworkers from 1942 to 1964. Using national and local archives in Mexico, historian Alberto García uncovers previously unexamined political factors that shaped the direction of the program, including how officials administered the bracero selection process and what motivated campesinos from central states to migrate. Notably, García's book reveals how and why the Mexican government's delegation of Bracero Program–related responsibilities, the powerful influence of conservative Catholic opposition groups in central Mexico, and the failures of the revolution's agrarian reform all profoundly influenced the program's administration and individuals' decisions to migrate as braceros.

This book is a history of the Cold War in Mexico, and Mexico in the Cold War. Renata Keller draws on declassified Mexican and US intelligence sources and Cuban diplomatic records to challenge earlier interpretations that depicted Mexico as a peaceful haven and a weak neighbor forced to submit to US pressure. Mexico did in fact suffer from the political and social turbulence that characterized the Cold War era in general, and by maintaining relations with Cuba it played a unique, and heretofore overlooked, role in the hemispheric Cold War. The Cuban Revolution was an especially destabilizing force in Mexico because Fidel Castro's dedication to many of the same nationalist and populist causes that the Mexican revolutionaries had originally pursued in the early twentieth century called attention to the fact that the government had abandoned those promises. A dynamic combination of domestic and international pressures thus initiated Mexico's Cold War and shaped its distinct evolution and outcomes.

Waged between 1926 and 1929, The Cristero War (also known as The Cristero Rebellion or La Cristiada) resulted from a religious insurrectionary movement, which formed in protest of the Mexican Revolution's anticlerical constitution of 1917. It was arguably the most violent and divisive episode in Mexican history between the 1910 Revolution itself and the ongoing 'Narco Wars'. Filling in major gaps in our understanding of the conflict, Mark Lawrence explores both combatant and civilian experiences in the centre-west Mexican state of Zacatecas and its borderlands. Lawrence shows that, despite the centrality of this key region, it has received little scholarly attention compared with other states, such as Jalisco or Michoacán, which saw similar levels of conflict. In providing a greater understanding of Zacatecas during The Cristero War, Lawrence not only works to even out a major historiographical bias, but he also sheds greater light on the contours of religious conflict and political dissent in early 20th-century Mexican history. In particular, he illustrates how the dynamics of local politics had fundamentally affected the way that a broader movement was embraced (and rejected) at a sub-national level. As such, he offers all historians, irrespective of geographic or temporal specialization, a reminder not to make sweeping assumptions about the everyday nature of compliance and resistance at the local level.

A comprehensive overview of Mexico's military history from 1810 to the present day, including rare facts and information not found online. Mexico's past is riddled with stories of struggle—military battles, internal rebellions, revolutions, and drug wars. This in-depth reference provides a complete military history of that country since its War of Independence in 1810 through the present day. From the evolution of combat in the region, to the motivations and tensions behind recurrent conflicts, to the dubious beginnings of drug gangs and warlords, this is the only book of its kind to explore Mexican warfare in such great depth. This detailed study consists of an alphabetical compilation of roughly 300 entries dealing with different facets of hostile encounters throughout the country's history. In addition to covering key places and people, regional expert and author David F. Marley offers unique insights into more obscure topics such as the 1913 aerial bombardments at the port of Guaymas, visits from American luminaries, colorful Mexican military slang, and the songs that identify various political factions. The work includes a host of important historical documents, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography to encourage further research on the subject.

In this comprehensive collection of essays, three generations of international scholars examines Mexican muralism in its broad artistic and historical contexts,from its iconic figures to their successors in Mexico, the United States, and across Latin America.