Claudio Lomnitz
My object in this essay is to present elements for a study of radical Mexican secularism in a fashion that is in critical dialogue with Charles Taylor’s account of secularism. It is a double-edged endeavor that seeks, on one hand, to explore the pertinence of some of Taylor’s core concepts for the analysis of secularism in Mexico and Ibero-America and, on the other, to try to place that region in relation to the historical arc that Taylor conceptualizes and explicates. My contribution is offered with the aim of identifying a few general conceptual and historical parameters in the case, and not as an appraisal of an existing bibliography or as a novel empirical exploration.
When I read The Secular Age, I felt some unease with regard to the boundaries of its historical subject, “the West,” whose secularism Taylor describes as developing dialectically out of a medieval “Latin Christendom.” My sense of discomfort may very well be shared by other scholars working in Latin America, a region that was from its inception a kind of “far West,” with a religious sphere that was built largely on the efforts of militant “Latin Christians” who were direct participants in the cultural matrix discussed by Taylor. The unease, in short, relates to a question that almost any sensible student of Latin America would rather avoid.
Indeed, the question of whether or not Ibero-America is Western is so politically fraught that any schema that provides it with a clear response is liable to get bogged down in a quagmire. Thus, the politically seminal generation of Latin American intellectuals led by figures such as José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, and later José Vasconcelos viewed “Our America” (Ibero-America) as the true heir of Western culture, as against a materialist United States that had turned its back on its inheritance and, later, during World War I, also as against a Europe that had lost its way. Latin American nationalisms thus have often had a kind of Hellenistic affectation (not unlike German nationalism), or else they identified with French civilization and pan-Latinism, as opposed to English civilization.
Anti-Western views of the nature of the Latin American nations exist as well, certainly. One can even find them enshrined in official documents—as in Bolivia’s new constitution, for instance. Last but perhaps not least, there are stock images of these nations as developing (late, of course) along a path similar to that of the United States. These are all readily available modes of identification that can always be adopted at any or all of the region’s nationalist carnivals (so to speak).
From a strictly historical perspective, Ibero-America has about as much right to be thought of as Western as the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, but it also has about as much right to think of itself as non-Western as South Africa or India. It is important to clarify this ambiguity from the start, because the question of the position of this Ibero-America in relation to Taylor’s story cannot begin from any prejudice with regard to its position inside or out of the West.
My itinerary will be to offer a few general parameters for thinking historically about the problem of secularization in Spanish America, in order then to focus on the political and cultural dynamics of secularization in the postcolonial history of one of the republics that emerged from the breakup of the Spanish empire, Mexico, and then to supply a brief analysis of the cultural conditions and politics of secularism around the time of the Mexican Revolution (1910).
EARLY BACKGROUND: “SPAIN” AND SPANISH AMERICA
I am by no means a specialist in early modern Spanish or Colonial Latin American history, nevertheless all analyses of secularism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexico rely, in the end, on some historical presuppositions with regard to these times and places, and it is best to make those explicit, since they are not necessarily shared, even by all specialists.
Politically, the Iberian Peninsula in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was a ground of coexistence and conflict between Christian and Muslim kingdoms, with a strong Christian pole in the north, a strong Muslim pole in the south, and a patchwork in between. This fact of competition, however, should not distract us from the fact that realms were all multireligious: Muslim kingdoms had Christian minorities, and Christian kingdoms had Muslim minorities. Jews were also prominent and numerically significant in both Muslim and Christian cities.
The complicated history of interfaith relations in the Christian and Muslim kingdoms of Iberia gave rise to two competing stereotypes: late medieval Iberia as a site of radical religious intolerance and anti-Semitism and an early home of ethnoreligious “cleansing,” or alternatively, as a site of an unparalleled and relatively harmonious convivencia that was wrecked at the end by a few fanatics. These two contrasting views were deeply inflected by their implications for twentieth-century history—Spanish progressive historians of the early twentieth century explored convivencia as an image of alternative possibilities for Spain, in the face of both ultramontane Catholicism and the rising tide of fascist-Catholic sinarquistas. Emphasis on the deep history of anti-Semitism and of anti-Muslim sentiments and their connection to the expulsion of the Jews, and later of the Moors, was developed by Jewish historians particularly as part of the broader history of ethnic cleansing. And more recent reactions to that view are, again, related to the desire to counter contemporary Islamophobia in Europe or to provide Arab nationalists with a genealogy that promotes a tolerant self-image.
Thanks to much new research, the two key contrasting images of tolerance and intolerance have been superseded, in at least some recent scholarship, by a perspective that understands the Spanish convivencia not as a regime of tolerance but rather as a web of policies that were oriented to the carefully calibrated management of intolerance.1 Conviviality did not mean equality but was, rather, a regime of power and economy that built on religious differences, emphasizing and containing them within a fundamentally hierarchical order. Thus, Iberia was one of Christianity’s most intense contact zones with Islam, as well as with Judaism
On the Christian side, the reforms and reformist movements that are key to Taylor’s theory of the origin of Western secularism, what he calls “the mother of all revolutions,” also had a robust presence in the Iberian Peninsula. The mendicant orders—Franciscans and Dominicans—gained ground there, and a militant Christianity was visible in various dimensions of social life—from religious art, to an emerging militant popular literature, to the legislation of civil life.
On the other hand, Spanish towns were often not the tranquil parishes that Taylor seems to have in mind in his discussion of the enchanted life prior to these reforms, because policies regulating irreconcilable religious differences—what might best be thought of as codes developed for the “regulation of intolerance”—were equally in place in Christian towns that had Muslim and Jewish minorities as in Muslim towns with Christian and Jewish minorities. There was not, in short, the kind of uniformity of belief that is implicit in Taylor’s view of the (northern) European parish.
Indeed, Iberia was a land of religious competition, subordination, differentiation, and toleration. As a result, there developed in it a peculiar dynamic with regard to the question of reform. The dialectic discussed by Charles Taylor for Latin Christendom concerned the elaboration of distances between elite and popular forms of (Christian) religiosity and the development of a kind of hyper-Christian interiority as a result of the dialectics of distinction between the high and the low.
In Spain, tensions between elite and popular Christianity were complicated by a variety of borders and frontiers between the Christian and the infidel. The emphasis on a variety of interreligious boundaries and interdependencies is important, because Christians related to Muslims in ways that were in some respects distinct from their connections to Jews, for instance. On the other hand, as Christianity expanded and came to dominate the entire peninsula and beyond, the boundaries between external irreconcilable differences (Christian/infidel) dissolved, insofar as there were no more Muslim kingdoms in the peninsula, and these differences now became useful mainly to give shape to internal boundaries and to formulate new forms of subjectivity as Spain colonized the Americas. In that context, militant attitudes of reform and vigilance developed into a veritable political economy.
One key example is the development of distinctions that were drawn between “Old” and “New” Christians—a process that gained legal recognition in the fourteenth century around the formulation of limpieza de sangre (blood purity) and was then re-adapted in the Americas, where it was used to legitimate a new caste system.
THE SPIRIT OF REFORM IN SPANISH AMERICA
Moving on to Spanish America, there is no question that colonization there was subject to the kind of reform dynamics that Charles Taylor discusses. Indeed, the pressure to demonstrate Christian loyalty—noted in shorthand as the distinction between Old and New Christians—became the basis for the organization of political power, status, and class.
This issue has rather subtle implications from the viewpoint of reform. As the Americas entered the imperial fold, the Iberian Peninsula itself was undergoing a process that we today would call ethnic cleansing—the forced assimilation, persecution, or expulsion of the infidels. The Americas, by contrast, were meant to be a space that was being founded without the macula of infidelity. The so-called Indians were regarded as pagans rather than infidels. Contrary to Spain’s Jews and Muslims, they had never yet been exposed to the Word. Here was, then, a chance to develop a society that was pure and free of the infidels’ influence. For this reason, Jews, Moors, and conversos were not allowed to emigrate to the Americas, and there were efforts to proscribe or regulate the trans-Atlantic movement of New Christians. After the Reformation, of course, Protestants too were most resolutely banned.
On the other hand, the distinction between Old and New Christians that had been used in the Iberian Peninsula in order to justify political and economic prerogatives for Old Christians as against Jewish and Muslim converts was now found by colonizers to be a useful instrument for framing emerging caste divisions between “Spaniards” (now Old Christians) and natives or “Indians” (now New Christians).
There is a tension here that deserves to be acknowledged. While the Americas were being cast as a novel space of Christian purity, they also were being colonized on the basis of old and invidious distinctions between Old and New Christians, which were now deployed to create a stark and entirely new caste system, wherein the New Christians (i.e., the Indians) owed tribute and political subservience to the Old Christians (i.e., the Spaniards).
These trends implied the formation of at least some versions of what Charles Taylor has called hyper-Christians. The conceptualization of America as a Christian utopia was particularly important to the early missionaries. Friars as different from one another as the Dominican Las Casas and the Franciscan Toribio Benavente (“Motolinía”) coincided in their representation of natives as being more sincere Christians than most Spanish colonizers. Las Casas even went as far as to claim that native paganism proved that the Indians were superior material for this Christian utopia—they were, so to speak, all potentially hyper-Christians. So, for instance, Las Casas made the bold argument that even such apparent abominations as human sacrifice were proof of the Indians’ superior diligence in following natural law, and therefore of their promise as Christians: “And so, as to the first point, concerning how to prepare the cult and religion of their gods, the people of New Spain proved to exceed all others of the world, and in this they had a better, clearer, less confused intelligence, and a more subtle judgment and clearer reasoning than the rest.”2
For his part, the Franciscan friar Vasco de Quiroga set up “hospitals” in Michoacan and the Valley of Mexico modeled on Thomas Moore’s ideas. Though they eventually failed and foundered, these hospitals could have served admirably for Taylor’s (or Michel Foucault’s) discussion of Latin Christendom’s reform spirit and its connection to modernity. Moreover, despite the failures of some of the early missionizing utopias, the conceit that Spanish America would be a pure Christian space was strengthened after the Council of Trent. Spain’s role as the bulwark of Roman Christianity in the Counter-Reformation made axiomatic the notion that Spaniards would make true and worthy tutors of their New Christian wards.
It is certainly true that the various visions of America as a “pure” Christian space were defeated by the pragmatic realities of colonization (including not only the economics of the new colonies but also the very low ratio of clergy to converts); however, the potential of America as a space for the ignition of Christian values remained very much alive and has in fact been a leitmotif in Spanish-American social, political, and intellectual history.
On the other hand, the idea that Indians were New Christians, weak in the faith, who required constant discipline and vigilance, also implied a trend toward reforming the people, albeit within a framework that was more widely tolerant of a “popular Christianity” that was viewed as being laden with error and superstition and prone to various forms of “idolatry.”
There was, in short, a twin dynamic that is pertinent to Taylor’s arguments regarding the formation of a divide between popular religion and reform militancy: the conceit of being Old Christians justified Spanish tutelage (spiritual and political) and extraction of Indian tribute, but it also required some formal attention to the upper caste’s claim to greater religious knowledge and devotion. On the other hand, the image of the Indian as moldable and pure: Indians were not infidels but they were, rather, a childlike and humble people, whose very simplicity, which had once made them Satan’s instrument, could now transform them into a peculiarly devout flock.
Spaniards were under pressure to demonstrate regularly and publicly that they were truer Christians than Indians. This pressure was to a large degree alleviated by church policy, which supported those pretensions by demanding the observation of more holy days (via fasting, charity, masses, or suffrages) by Spaniards than by Indians. Thus, the ecclesiastical councils of Mexico and Lima—and the pope himself—legislated differences between Spaniards and Indians by inscribing a differentiated set of ritual demands and expectations on each “caste.”
In addition, Spanish settlers in New Spain developed informal mechanisms to patrol the boundary. This is manifested, for instance, in the turn that terms such as “ladino” took. In principle, ladino referred to (neo)Latin, either as a language or as the ability to be conversant in it. The term soon came to refer to Jews and Muslims who were, let us say, acculturated. However, in Spain (and contrary to Pascal’s idea) external practice was not enough to make a true Christian. Indeed, the distinction between external signs of conversion and true trustworthiness of faith was a litmus test for holding royal office, for membership in guilds, and for noble status. In the American context, María Elena Martínez’s research shows that certificates of blood purity, which in Spain itself had become passé by the early sixteenth century, flourished once again in the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.3 In such a context, the term “ladino” slowly evolved to signify being two-faced, hypocritical, or untrustworthy, a meaning that is still dominant in Mexican Spanish today.
All of this generated a space for reform that was distinct from that of Protestant Europe but not alien to it, and this reformism, in turn, became a referent in recurring waves of Christian renewal. Utopian ideas about reviving the Primitive Christian faith among indigenous peoples, for instance, have been cyclically revived: in eighteenth-century Jesuit missions; in various experiments in religious education, certainly; but especially in nineteenth- and twentieth-century political life. On the other hand, the chasm between elite and popular religion also created ample space for the sort of distinctions between high and low that Taylor represents as the characteristic modality of religiosity in Latin Christendom in the medieval period.
In short, it is difficult to place late medieval Spain and early-modern Spanish America squarely within the reform processes of late medieval Latin Christendom as Taylor understands them (insofar as there were quotidian boundaries with the infidel within Spanish Christianity in the early period and then a routinization of a caste system based on the Christian/hyper-Christian distinction in America). But neither can the Ibero-American experience be placed squarely outside the history he has outlined, suggesting that Taylor’s typology may be insufficiently attentive to the problem of reform in border regions, like Iberia, or in areas of militant expansion, like Iberia and America.
THE PROBLEM OF SECULARISM IN THE SPANISH-AMERICAN REPUBLICS
De-colonization in most of Spanish America occurred in the form of republican revolutions. These revolutions changed the playing field for the development of political secularism (which Taylor refers to as “secularism 1”) and for the cultural conditions of secular belief (Taylor’s “secularism 3”).
Some of the key policies of this new playing field had in fact been instituted during the late colonial period in a set of imperial reforms that began during the 1740s and continued through the eighteenth century. I have no space to develop this, so I will be very schematic. The Bourbon monarchs who gained the Spanish succession at the turn of the eighteenth century sought to implement a project of modernization inspired by the model of French absolutism. That involved a range of familiar policies: the substitution of monastic orders with a secular clergy that was squarely in the control of the Crown (a process that began in 1749 and culminated with the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Crown’s domains in 1767); reduction in the number of religious holidays; a decisive move away from earlier emphasis on purgatory, hell, and the afterlife; an emphasis on practical education; a rationalization of political-administrative territories; an emphasis on urban hygiene and policing; and (greater) emphasis on enlightenment and public knowledge.
All of this was in play or in place by the early 1800s, but new pressures emerged with independence. The Spanish-American republics needed allies among the great powers, and those allies were either Protestant (England, and later the United States and Germany) or much more deeply secularized than Spain (postrevolutionary France). So, even in cases such as Mexico, where Catholicism was kept as the national religion after independence, at least some practical policies of toleration had to be set in place: British mining concerns were allowed to set up Protestant services and special sections for non-Catholics in at least a few graveyards, for example. Of greater import, secular transnational organizations, Freemasonry in particular, became an indispensable resource for political and merchant classes.
Secularized spaces gained ground only slowly at first, because Mexico stagnated economically in the decades following independence, but they gained importance in the final decades of the nineteenth century, when direct foreign investment intensified and ambitious immigration and colonization projects began to take shape. True, the bulk of the immigrants who arrived to places like Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela, or Cuba were from Catholic countries, but there many non-Catholics as well—Jews, Protestants, Japanese, Chinese, among others. Moreover, even many of the Catholic migrants were anticlerical, or at least secularists: German émigrés from the 1848 revolution and Jacobins, socialists, and anarchists from Spain and Italy or Russia and Germany. In short, openness to foreign capital and labor implied increased toleration in the Lockean tradition, regardless of whether Catholicism was or was not the official religion.
At the same time, the Catholic religion was arguably the only shared basis for the new national identities being built, a point was consistently argued by Conservative politicians. Literacy was very limited in nineteenth-century Mexico; the Spanish language was unevenly spread through the population; regional militias were often more powerful than the new federal army; and transportation was incredibly cumbersome, making regional isolation endemic. So there were strong incentives to avoid the separation between church and state coming both from religious conviction and political expedience. In other words, the position against separation between church and state was upheld by at least some “enlightened” members of the elite, who nonetheless favored urban reform, modernization of church ritual, and clamping down on popular Catholicism.
SECULARISM IN MID- AND LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEXICO
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Mexican economy and Mexican society had many of the elements that were needed for the development of a robust secular project, including a rich tradition of religious reform; a prolonged experience with the modernizing policies and illusions that stemmed from French absolutism and “enlightenment”; and a set of real economic and political incentives.
In addition to all of this, a set of political developments produced heightened tensions around the relationship between church and state. After bitter defeat in its war with the United States (1848), the Mexican state faced deep fiscal and political difficulties that increased tensions between the Liberal and Conservative parties, leading Liberals to an increasingly radicalized, “Jacobin” position that promoted the expropriation of church property and a decisive shift of control over social reproduction (education, marriage, baptism, and burial) from the hands of the church to those of the state. Tensions culminated in a civil war in the 1850s, which the Liberals momentarily won, but the conflict was prolonged to the following decade, when Conservatives built an alliance with Napoleon III, who sent troops and helped instate an empire led by Maximilian von Hapsburg. That adventure, however, also ended in defeat in 1867.
The triumph of the Liberals in 1867 again enshrined their constitution, the Constitution of 1857, which was radically anticlerical and secularist. All church property was permanently confiscated and convents were outlawed, as were religious schools. A civil registry was instated, and religious weddings, baptisms, and burials no longer had legal standing.
At least on paper, these changes have been long-standing. This is because, after the defeat of the French/Conservative alliance in 1867, the Catholic Party was de facto banned: in a foreign invasion and a foreign monarch, the Conservative Party had dealt in treason and so had forfeited its own legal standing. Although the Catholic Party was again legalized during the fourteen-month presidency of revolutionary leader Francisco I. Madero (1911–1913), it made the mistake of supporting a counterrevolutionary coup. As a result, the 1917 Constitution, which superseded that of 1857, was every bit as anticlerical as its predecessor, and between 1867 and 2000, Mexico was governed either by liberal parties or by heirs of liberal parties.
Nevertheless, banishment of the Catholic Party left Mexico’s Liberals in a paradoxical position. Liberalism was now the only acceptable patriotic ideology; as result, it was above democratic debate. The radical separation between church and state and the political ban on the Catholic Party left the Liberals open to the criticism that the state was secular but the society was Catholic. Indeed, the inability of Catholics to organize in a political party fed this very illusion. In Charles Taylor’s terms, we had a particularly radical version of political secularism (secularism 1) that created the illusion of an absolute absence of societal secularism (secularism 2). That illusion has, I think, been responsible for the mistaken notion that Mexico is “not secular” in the sense either of secular society (secularism 2) or of having produced cultural conditions for disenchantment (secularism 3).
I believe that the commonly held notion that Mexican society and culture were not secular and that secularism was championed only by the state, against society, is in fact an illusion fostered by the elimination of the Catholic Party from political life after 1867 and the undemocratic practices of Mexican liberalism. But this position requires some elaboration, because I also do not take the contrary position, that is, that Mexican society and culture were in fact secular. Instead, I wish to emphasize that there was a deep history around societal and cultural secularization, with a correspondingly complex repertoire of reform and modernization. Secularism was a state project, but it was not only a state project.
It is not simply not true, for instance, that Mexican elites were secular while the popular classes were Catholic. There was, as we shall see in our discussion of the Mexican Revolution, a robust tradition of “popular liberalism” (as historians have called it), as indeed there were Catholic and Conservative elites. As a result, the secularist trend relied heavily on cross-class alliances as much as on Conservative or Catholic, trends.
There were, moreover, other social implications. Because there was no longer space for the Conservative Party to champion Catholic interests, Liberal governments had to concern themselves with appeasing at least some religious sensibilities. During the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1876–1911), this led to a set of informal agreements between the government and the church hierarchy, known colloquially as las contentas (“the happy ones”), as well as to gendering of the relationship between state and church, with Porfirio Díaz’s wife, Carmelita, assuming her Catholicism openly, and thus feeding the illusion that politics was to religion what public was to private, what male was to female, and what state was to society.
Although I have no space to make an extended analysis of the significance of this historical development for cultural and political history, I at least wish to point out that this form of gendering secular politics and religious life is also consonant with a broader Ibero-American development that was described a few decades ago by Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta, who pointed out that in Brazil, possessive individualism and hierarchical complementarity (which correspond roughly to Charles Taylor’s “buffered self” and “porous self”) are both widely and simultaneously available as discursive registers, and the individuals and groups shift from one register to another depending on context. The buffered self is a mask that is as widely available and as widely used as that of the porous self.4
In other words, Ibero-American developments generated more space for play in the development of the self than what Taylor has described for Europe. The “individual” and “the person” (to use Marcel Mauss’s terminology) are subject positions that can be inhabited by the same individual, sometimes even in the very same contexts. There are, in other words, a performative choice and a politics of play and movement between the buffered self and the porous self that makes personhood more intensely existential and less monotonous.
SECULARISM AND THE PEASANT COMMUNITY
The cozy arrangement between the church and the Liberal dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz encouraged a deep transformation of the religious environment and of the various meanings of secularism. Within Catholicism, it led to the formation of a political fringe that was antidictatorship and antihierarchy—that is, a militant Catholicism based principally in urban sectors of artisans and the middle class. These Catholics were adamant in their attack on the dictatorship’s corruption, and they were also critical of the corruption of the church hierarchy. They were nationalists and associated the ills of capitalism with American imperialism and often also with Protestantism (which they also nationalized and represented as American influence). The sensibilities of this Catholic wing were distinct from both the pro-accommodation segments of the Catholic elite and from peasant popular Catholicism, and its position was strengthened to some degree by the church’s own attempt to counter the rise of socialism with the Rerum Novarum encyclical (1891).
Also on the modernizing side, though with a different political philosophy, were two strands of liberal and patriotic groups that were radically secularist and critical of both the church and the accommodationist state: the Protestants, and the Jacobin liberals, some of whom turned to socialism or anarchism as the nineteenth century came to a close. These tendencies were not confined to urban middle classes. There were Protestant associations arising in villages that had conflicts with hacienda owners who were allied to village priests, for instance. Anticlericalism, in other words, was being generated as a reaction against alliances between landowners and village priests.
Perhaps an aside is needed to help clarify this point. During the colonial period, the Crown was interested in mitigating the power of local landowners and merchants in the Americas. This was because distances and the lack of a robust standing army demanded a delicate policy of balance of power. In that context, the Crown used the church as an instrument for defending Indian communities with regard to the Spanish landowning class, thereby putting limits on the latter’s autonomy. After independence, though, this policy all but disappeared. There was a marked tendency for republican governments to align themselves with the landowning class and for landowners to build alliances with parish priests, either directly or through the mediation of a bishop. This meant that some peasants—and sometimes entire villages—found themselves in an antagonistic position vis-à-vis the clergy. Some of them turned to Protestantism, others to Jacobin liberalism—the so-called popular liberalism.
The image of the peasant community as an idealized site of popular Catholicism and transcendence that lived with its back turned to cultural secularism was shaped from a variety of diverging positions. One might say that it was an illusion produced by a confluence of many disparate interests. Thus, the positivist intellectuals—who were the Porfirian state’s most prominent ideologues—saw peasant villages as a locus of popular ignorance that needed to be eradicated to move resolutely into the positive or scientific era (a position they shared with the “enlightened despots” of the eighteenth century and with many conservative elites of the nineteenth). Similarly, the peasant community was figured by Jacobins and Protestants as the inert and abject by-product of the alliance between the Catholic Church and political power (for them, popular ignorance was the result of a deliberate policy rather than the natural emulsion of an inferior race). Finally, Catholic politicians viewed peasant religiosity as proof that the Liberal state was fundamentally unpopular and undemocratic.
This multiplicity of perspectives about the nature of the same object (the peasant village) provides a cautionary example of the effect of infusing such localities with utopian possibilities—Mexico’s peasant communities have too long been overloaded with varying, often contradictory, emancipatory expectations, many of which were and are mutually incompatible and correspond to different dimensions of social reality. But they add up, and present villagers as wrapped in an enchanted veil of either religiosity or ignorance. Or both.
ILLUSTRATIVE DEVELOPMENTS, 1892 AND 1910
The agrarian revolts and upheavals that transpired in Mexico between 1891 and 1893 are a useful place from which to think about the split between secularism and religious community in peasant villages of the period. These upheavals are interesting, because contrary to what happened during the revolution of 1910, these village revolts were very rarely in communication with one another. The Mexican railroad was still very new then, and although economic articulation to markets was being achieved at a rapid pace (which is what accounts for the relative synchronicity of the revolts), means of communication were still insufficiently developed for local revolts to articulate to one another.
The revolts in question—which were geographically scattered and widespread—were nevertheless more or less simultaneous. They were responding to a period of rapid modernization that involved changes in land use, the commercial exploitation of areas that had historically been marginal to world markets (for instance, the Mexican tropics), privatization of village commons, termination of long-term rental and sharecropping agreements between peasants and haciendas, and increased land values and taxes. Moreover, revolts coincided with a world economic recession that caused layoffs in some sectors. Finally, they coincided with the third consecutive reelection of Porfirio Díaz (1892), which was distinctly a moment of transition of that regime into a durable and hardened dictatorship.
The interest of these revolts for our discussion of secularism is that some of them took on a strong “millenarian” turn—casting economic and political developments as demonic departures from a moral economy and an enchanted world—while other revolts were directed at what was perceived as the dictator’s betrayal of liberal principles and most particularly a betrayal of the separation between church and state. Both kinds of revolts were popular, though the liberal revolts also tended to incorporate the middle classes.
The millenarian sort of revolt had, I think, two dimensions. One of these was traditional to a certain genre of peasant and Indian upheaval known in Mexico as caste wars (guerras de castas). As we have seen, the church played a key role in the legitimation of the caste system in the colonial period. As a result, it was not unusual for indigenous movements to claim direct, unmediated connections to God, casting aside the church and then violently attacking and trying to eliminate the dominant caste. These movements typically centered upon a symbolic figure or object, for instance, an Indian Virgin Mary in the Chiapas revolt of 1712 or the “Talking Cross” that was the fetish and inspiration of the Mayan revolt in Yucatán.
One added dimension of at least some of the millenarian-style revolts of 1891–1893, though, was tuned to the new developments of the late nineteenth century. It involved rejection of secularization (rather than a simple reappropriation of the church) and associated the perversion of the local moral economy to that process. So, for instance, in their political “manifesto,” peasants of the Guerrero Mountains, whose revolt centered around the cult of an image of El Señor de las Misericordias, wrote:
And because we want to know whether there will be help for our King of Heaven, because we have already overburdened the Savior; because today in the fiesta of our Lord, those who go no longer go with a promise, they only go to steal and to make trouble. And may the Lord lend us grace and courage, and for seven years we will not pay a cent, but from to those who help, and so as to get something edible from the rich, because the rich are Freemasons and Protestants.5
On the other hand, not all revolts took on this kind of millenarian character: others took up radically anti-Catholic positions. So, for example, the revolt led by Catarino Garza on the Texas-Tamaulipas border adopted the same language that Porfirio Díaz had used in his revolt of 1876 and argued for the restoration of its liberal principles. Thus, Garza denounced “the betrayal of the Revolution of Tuxtepec and our Constitution of 1857, which cost the country so much blood.” Similarly, the student riots of Mexico City of 1892, which protested Díaz’s reelection, claimed to be following in the footsteps of Benito Juárez and other liberal fathers of anticlerical reform.
These two opposed reactions to Porfirian progressivism suggest that Mexico had been secularized by the late nineteenth century, at least to some degree: the secularization of public space was only incipient or even nonexistent in many places, but it was legally on the books, and there existed clear options of nonreligious identification, as well as infrequent but nevertheless growing possibilities of belonging to another religion (Protestantism). Moreover, the secularist pole of political society felt that it had been betrayed by the accommodationist policies of Porfirian positivist evolutionism, and so a radical Jacobin trend, which had been fundamental in the 1850s and 1860s, reemerged, and came into fully blown expression by the time of the revolutionary outbreak of 1910.
By the time the revolution of 1910 erupted, there was a complex mosaic in place from the viewpoint of secularism. Francisco I. Madero’s political platform included the legalization of the Catholic Party, and for a brief period of a about two years, that party came into existence and was a real contender for political power. Nevertheless, the democratic play between political parties during Madero’s brief presidency can be said to have furthered the secular trend of consolidation of cultural secularism (secularism 3—the buffered self, the immanent frame), regardless of the fact that Jacobin liberals saw it as a betrayal of the separation between church and state. This was most particularly the case, since the Catholic Party, too, was by and large a party of “modernizers.” But even beyond that, the image of religion as a political choice of course implied cultural secularism.
Among the anticlerical leaders of the Mexican Revolution, some were traditional Jacobin liberals (Carranza, Obregón, Calles), others Protestants (Pascual Orozco, Aaron Sáenz), and yet others socialists (Antonio Villarreal, Eulalio Gutiérrez) or anarchists (Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón). At the same time, many radical agrarian movements had no major conflict with religion or the church. Villismo was not so very opposed to Catholics. Zapatistas often wielded images of the Virgin of Guadalupe in their hats.
In short, the situation during the Mexican Revolution was not unlike that of 1892, but with a difference: broad regional coalitions were now formed. As a result, local millenarian movements were less important, and a true national revolution developed. With it came a moment of radical and violent revolutionary anticlericalism, followed by a second prolonged era of state accommodation with the church.
CONCLUSION
It is possible to argue that, despite the separation of church and state, Mexico remained an “enchanted” region, insofar as liberal conceptions of the autonomous self remained ideals, dear only to one segment of political society. The salience of corporations throughout the nineteenth century—the church, the peasant village, the hacienda, the artisanal guild—is generally understood as standing in the way of the emergence of the modern individual. This, of course, is just as true for early modern Europe, but what is distinct about Ibero-American contexts is that, due to the political crisis wrought by national revolutions and republicanism, capitalist development was slowed down, particularly compared with what was transpiring in northern Europe and in the United States. Indeed, Spanish America “fell behind” economically at a precipitously rapid rate in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. This process of economic stagnation—which occurred alongside the rise of popular politics—strengthened the peasantry considerably, both in landed villages and in convenient tenancy arrangements with the latifundia.
All of that hindered the development of individualism and what Taylor usefully calls the buffered self, insofar as secure individual property matters to that mode of existence. But does that place Spanish America outside the dynamics of secularization that emerged out of Latin Christendom and then developed along with the history of capitalism? By no means. The ideological mechanisms and the economic and political projects that militated for such a development of the self were alive and well, both within the Catholic camp, in the form of modernized secular religion, and under the broad umbrella of liberalism.
Indeed, the strength of this push was such that Spanish-American Conservative parties were never able to wrench themselves away from key aspects of Liberal rhetoric. And this was so not only because of the logical and argumentative consistency of liberalism but also because the economic situation of these nations required clear property laws and openness to globalization, a process that made the future of the buffered self secure or at least supplied it with a viable social base within a fragmented economic sphere.
Indeed, one result of this economic heterogeneity is nineteenth-century Spanish America’s obsession with “imagined citizens,” as both François Xavier Guerra and Fernando Escalante put it. The obsession with the citizen as a kind of utopian figure has too often been interpreted as proof of the failure of secularizations 1, 2, and 3, that is, as the failure of political secularization, though compromises like las contentas, which were just reflections of a deeper failure to secularize society or even to create the cultural conditions of secularism
My position here questions this interpretation. The dynamics of political secularism in Mexico had more of a social basis than is often recognized, underwritten as it was not only by modernized and urban middle classes but also by agrarian class conflict. As a result, cultural conditions for secularization in fact suffused the political landscape, albeit most often either as a fantasy or as a precariously constructed alternative.
Because of this, the peculiarities of Mexican (and Ibero-American) development led to the cultural elaboration of competing codes or registers of the self, one of which corresponds squarely with the ideals of the buffered self and the other with those of the porous self. The movement between these registers and modes of identification has become a durable characteristic of everyday life.
NOTES