To commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Mexico’s Cristero War (1926-1929), this roundtable session will convene five early-career scholars from Mexico and the United States to discuss new interpretations of the conflict, its legacies, and historiographical significance in a dynamic setting. This session spotlights innovative approaches that expand the geography and chronology of Mexico’s church-state conflict, integrating understudied actors into the historical conversation while thinking critically about the war’s legacies during the second half of the twentieth century. Papers will be pre-circulated among session participants. At the conference, presenters will have five minutes to outline their key research interventions, followed by fifteen minutes of Q&A among themselves and, subsequently, audience participation.

Drawing on recent scholarship by historians Julia Young, Yves Solís, and Matthew Butler, John Catton and Ethan Besser Fredrick expand the geographies of Mexico’s religious conflict to include Europe and the United States. These scholars connect Mexican Catholics to global conversations, emphasizing the symbolism of their struggle against state anti-clericalism. First, Besser Fredrick sets the stage by examining how the Cristero War became an important reference point for transatlantic networks anchored in anti-communist and antisemitic conspiracy theories. Catton then turns to propaganda to examine the relationship between the Ku Klux Klan and Mexican anti-Catholicism, revealing a curious relationship between U.S. far-right movements and the proletarian discourses of Mexico’s postrevolutionary state.

Victoria Basulto and Luis Herran Avila subsequently analyze how the legacies of the Cristero War influenced Cold War conservatism, establishing a generative dialogue with historians like Jaime Pensado, David Espinosa, Soledad Loaeza, and Laura Alarcón Menchaca. Whereas Basulto examines myth-making in Catholic magazines from the 1950s and 60s, Herran Avila looks to university spaces and higher education as sites where public memory around the Cristero War became a weapon for political contestation during the turbulent 1960s. Finally, Ricardo Alvarez-Pimentel examines the significance of anti-Cristero sentiment among upper-class women and youth in Mexico’s Catholic Action movement. He demonstrates that their opposition to the Cristeros, as informed by anti-Indigenous racial anxieties, was integral to the development of cultures of surveillance, censorship, and repression among Catholic circles during the 1930s and 1940s, thereby enabling greater convergence between church and state institutions.