The Global and the Intimate: Cold War Catholicism in a Mexican Town

Catholicism has long been one of the central aspects of Mexican life, its influence ranging from sacred ritual to modern politics, and from urban planning to the inner sanctums of Mexican homes.  Despite this centrality, Catholicism has received relatively little attention in the historiography of twentieth-century Mexico beyond the violent Church-State conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s, known as the Cristiada.  While it is understandable that this period of upheaval and persecution has received the bulk of scholarly attention in recent years, it is also surprising that few scholars have attempted to study Catholicism beyond the conflict.  This paper begins to address this historiographical gap by examining the role of the Catholic Church in the town of San Miguel de Allende from the 1940s to the 1960s.

After World War II Catholic leaders in San Miguel resurrected the nationalist and anti-Communist rhetoric of Catholics in the Cristiada in an attempt to unite their followers with the larger anti-Communist struggle that was the nascent Cold War.  Whereas the earlier Cristiada was primarily a struggle against enemies within the nation, these local leaders urged Catholics to turn their attention to the emergence of the global threat to Christianity.  They could combat this, the leaders argued, through changes in their personal lives and in their town.  Nationalism, or perhaps more appropriately anti-Americanism, revealed the limits to Catholic anti-Communism during this period however, as Catholic leaders struggled to explain why it was feasible to oppose Communism yet support Castro’s revolution in Cuba.  This coupling of nationalism and anti-Communism at the local level sheds light on the complex, often contradictory, and also understudied position of Mexico as a whole during the Cold War.