A Lynching in 1968: Communism, Violence, and Religion in Mexico

On September 14th of 1968, in the town of San Miguel Canoa in Puebla, Mexico, five university workers from the Universidad Autónoma de Pueblawere lynched by a vast number of neighbors from the community. According to the most recurrent version, the event was triggered by the belief that these workers were actually communist students whose presence represented a direct threat to the religious and social well being of the community. This paper seeks to answer: to what extent can we read these acts in the context of discourses regarding the “communist threat” to Mexico? In what sense does it resonate with a previous trajectory of state-Catholic Church/Catholics conflicts in Mexican history? Can we historicize this event beyond its immediate dimension?