Religious Violence and the Battle for Martyrdom in Mexico, 1930s–50s

This paper examines martyrdom, its different representations, and its contested meanings, as a central analytical site to understand the history of religious violence in twentieth-century Mexico. It does so by focusing in the 1930s-1950s decades, a period characterized by the occurrence of several forms of religious violence - understood as violence perpetrated by, or against, people who actively and overtly professed a religious faith. This violence included not only attacks against Catholics on behalf of revolutionary leaders, anticlericals, and iconoclasts, but also acts of violence perpetrated by Catholics against both revolutionaries and Protestants. In the face of the state’s anticlerical violence, Catholics articulated different – and at times opposing – discourses and public representations of martyrdom. These “martyrial narratives” (López Menéndez 2015) helped Catholics to make sense of their religious persecution or, in some cases, justify their use of belligerent forms of activism in order to defend their faith. Catholics were not alone in the creation of these martyrial narratives. Postrevolutionary leaders and their supporters also constructed a narrative of martyrdom (secular in this case) around those individuals who died at the hands of so-called Catholic “fanatics” while defending the values and goals of the revolution. Similar to other secular and revolutionary martyrs that emerged in nineteenth and twentieth-century Latin America, Mexican revolutionary martyrs became “emblems of the Fatherland” who ostensibly contributed, through their deeds and their sacrifice, to the revolutionary project (Soledad Catoggio 2020). The battle for martyrdom was not only fought between Catholics and revolutionaries. Protestants also advanced their own narratives of martyrdom in order to account for, and denounce, the attacks they endured on behalf of Catholics, particularly during the 1940s and 1950s decades.