Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War
Julia G. Young
Abstract
This book investigates the intersections between Mexico’s Cristero War (1926–1929) and Mexican migration to the United States during the late 1920s. In doing so, it reframes the Cristero War as a transnational conflict, and underscores the deep religious devotion that informed the lives and political affiliations of many Mexican emigrants. The book analyzes the formation, actions, and ideologies of the Cristero diaspora, a network of tens of thousands of Mexican emigrants, exiles, and refugees across the United States who supported the Catholic uprising from beyond the border. This group parti ... More
This book investigates the intersections between Mexico’s Cristero War (1926–1929) and Mexican migration to the United States during the late 1920s. In doing so, it reframes the Cristero War as a transnational conflict, and underscores the deep religious devotion that informed the lives and political affiliations of many Mexican emigrants. The book analyzes the formation, actions, and ideologies of the Cristero diaspora, a network of tens of thousands of Mexican emigrants, exiles, and refugees across the United States who supported the Catholic uprising from beyond the border. This group participated in the conflict in a variety of ways, many of which were nonviolent. They took part in religious ceremonies and spectacles, organized political demonstrations and marches, formed associations and organizations, and planned strategic collaboration with religious and political leaders in order to generate public sympathy for their cause. A few of them even launched militant efforts that included arms smuggling, military recruitment, espionage, and armed border revolts. Ultimately, the Cristero diaspora aimed to overturn the anticlerical government and reform the Mexican Constitution of 1917. Although they were unable to achieve these political goals, these emigrants—and the war itself—would have a profound and enduring resonance for Mexican emigrant community formation, political affiliations, and religious devotion throughout subsequent decades, and up to the present day.
Keywords:
Cristero War,
Mexico,
emigration,
migration,
diaspora,
transnationalism,
US-Mexico border,
religion,
Catholic Church
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190205003 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190205003.001.0001 |
