When the Sex of the Martyr Matters: Leonor Sánchez, Worker Culture, Catholic Activism, and State Responses in Orizaba, Veracruz, Mexico, 1937

On February 7, 1937, police shot and killed a 20-year-old woman, Leonor Sánchez, during a police raid on an illegal Catholic mass in a working-class neighborhood in Orizaba, Veracruz. The previous governor, Adalberto Tejeda, had signed Law 197 in 1931, severely curtailing the number of priests who could hold Mass.. Following the shooting, Governor Miguel Alemán ordered the closing of all churches in Orizaba. In response, tens of thousands of people mobilized and demanded that churches be reopened. These actions swiftly effected a reversal of state policy as demonstrations were held across Veracruz, resulting in the opening of church buildings. Though not always identified as a location of overt religious contestation during Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion and Segunda, this progression reveals that antagonism among Church, state, labor union, and agrarian actors in Veracruz endured. Sánchez’s death occurred at a pivotal moment when tensions ran high in the region, and its repercussions spread well beyond Orizaba and regulating quantities of priests and churches. A transition happened quickly in official Church representations of Sánchez, though, with much more emphasis on her youth and vulnerability than the urban working-class mobilization and agrarian activists who first joined the protests regarding her. The question central to understanding the significance of her death and its aftermath is whose appeal carried the day in Veracruz, and why? How competing visions of worker mobilization and Catholic mobilizations factored into the unrest, and how and for whom hegemonic masculinity factored into those struggles, has affected how Sánchez is remembered today. This paper explores the intersections among tradition, liberalism, class, masculinity, and gender that emerged with the death of one young woman in Orizaba, and how her death connects to our understanding of the broader class and agrarian struggles permeating the tensions between church and state.