The Unión Nacionalista Mexicana and Mexican Catholic Nationalism in Diaspora, 1926–29

During the late 1920s, as the Cristero War – a bloody Church-state conflict – ravaged central Mexico, thousands of political exiles and religious refugees fled to various cities and towns in the United States. There, many of them worked to engage the larger population of Mexican emigrants around the Catholic cause in Mexico; holding prayer meetings, collecting funds for Catholic monuments, and even sending money, guns, and military recruits back across the border to join the Catholic forces. One group in particular – founded by a militant bishop in Los Angeles, a middle-class Mexican banker in Chicago, and several other influential Mexican Catholics in El Paso – served as an umbrella organization that attempted to incorporate the diverse efforts and agendas of Mexico’s Catholic exiles, emigrants and refugees in the United States. Ultimately, the organization, known as the Unión Nacionalista Mexicana (UNM), was supposed to launch “new crusades that would go later to fight in Mexico for the reconquest of liberty.” While this vision of armed revolt was never realized, the formation of the UNM was an unprecedented act of cooperation among Mexican exiles dispersed all over the United States. Indeed, the story of the UNM provides an important example of one of the many alternative, diasporic visions of Mexican nationalism held by Mexican citizens in the wake of the Revolution and the Church-State conflict of 1926-1929.