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lolaraincoatI have nothing useful to say about current events, just the powerful urge to clutch my head and moan. So let's just turn our eyes to Mexico, all right?
About a decade after the worst of the fighting of the Mexican Revolution ended, a religious war broke out. The Catholic Church went on strike -- that is, the Church refused to offer any sacraments at all for about 30 months -- in response to the anticlerical policies of the new, Revolutionary government (which were frequently rapacious and sometimes vulgar and cruel); some of the Catholic hierarchy in Mexico also organized violent resistance to the government's new cultural initiatives (which in practice meant raping and murdering schoolteachers.) It was an ugly little struggle, lasting almost three years and leaving perhaps twenty thousand dead.
Making peace between church and state, and keeping it for the subsequent eighty years, required that both sides give up their most extreme positions. But it also meant that the topic of the Cristero War became pretty much unmentionable in public. Historians know about it, of course; and I think it comes up in very briefly in high-school level history classes too. It's been almost a secreto a voces, an open secret, one of those things in Mexican public life that everyone knows but that everyone claims nobody knows.
Well, until this year's Miss Universe contest anyway.
Check this out. Or here's a similar story but without pictures and in English.
Yes, this year's Mexican contestant for the Miss Universe crown planned to attend the contest in a gown covered in the bloodiest images from the Cristero conflict. And sequins. She managed to offend nearly everyone in Mexico, secular and religious, leftwing and right, which is unusual in a beauty queen, and almost even admirable. So now she's editing the gown, apparently.
But the whole story is just so ... so Mexican, you know? Because, you know, some nations deal with the historical memory of civil war and religious conflict by having even bloodier wars later. Some nations practice ethnic cleansing. Some nations obsessively police their borders to prevent contamination by the ever-lurking threat of [insert menance here]. But not Mexico. In Mexico, they just take that unbearable memory and turn it into telenovelas and historietas and the tackiest possible outfits.
Seriously, I admire Mexican culture so much for doing precisely this, and doing it so well.
About a decade after the worst of the fighting of the Mexican Revolution ended, a religious war broke out. The Catholic Church went on strike -- that is, the Church refused to offer any sacraments at all for about 30 months -- in response to the anticlerical policies of the new, Revolutionary government (which were frequently rapacious and sometimes vulgar and cruel); some of the Catholic hierarchy in Mexico also organized violent resistance to the government's new cultural initiatives (which in practice meant raping and murdering schoolteachers.) It was an ugly little struggle, lasting almost three years and leaving perhaps twenty thousand dead.
Making peace between church and state, and keeping it for the subsequent eighty years, required that both sides give up their most extreme positions. But it also meant that the topic of the Cristero War became pretty much unmentionable in public. Historians know about it, of course; and I think it comes up in very briefly in high-school level history classes too. It's been almost a secreto a voces, an open secret, one of those things in Mexican public life that everyone knows but that everyone claims nobody knows.
Well, until this year's Miss Universe contest anyway.
Check this out. Or here's a similar story but without pictures and in English.
Yes, this year's Mexican contestant for the Miss Universe crown planned to attend the contest in a gown covered in the bloodiest images from the Cristero conflict. And sequins. She managed to offend nearly everyone in Mexico, secular and religious, leftwing and right, which is unusual in a beauty queen, and almost even admirable. So now she's editing the gown, apparently.
But the whole story is just so ... so Mexican, you know? Because, you know, some nations deal with the historical memory of civil war and religious conflict by having even bloodier wars later. Some nations practice ethnic cleansing. Some nations obsessively police their borders to prevent contamination by the ever-lurking threat of [insert menance here]. But not Mexico. In Mexico, they just take that unbearable memory and turn it into telenovelas and historietas and the tackiest possible outfits.
Seriously, I admire Mexican culture so much for doing precisely this, and doing it so well.
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-18 10:56 am (UTC)We Brazilians just shrug or make a joke. We're not noble at all. We're pragmatic. (But this is a big generalisation.)
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Date: 2007-04-19 04:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-18 12:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 04:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-20 04:11 am (UTC)Pienso que esté es verdad en todos de los países, no solo en Mexico.
¿Es de Mexico?
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Date: 2007-04-18 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-18 03:39 pm (UTC)O.O
Awesome. In a way I can't quite relate to, but awesome nonetheless.
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Date: 2007-04-19 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 04:03 am (UTC)Seriously.
And . . . no sacraments for 30 months?
*jaw drops, and shudders*
Jeeeeeeeeesus. I mean, hit us believers where we live, how 'bout it? How could they reconcile that with being, you know, priests?
Awful. And of course, much worse for the schoolteachers. And yes, what a marvelous way of airing laundry (with sequins).
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Date: 2007-04-19 04:21 am (UTC)And right at the beginning of the war -- well, first, a group of believers organized by a nun assasinated President Obregon, and then in retaliation a revolutionary went and SHOT THE VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE. Seriously: he went and put a bullet into the cloak into which She had miraculously imprinted her image back in the 1500s.
Oh Mexico, where surrealism is just par for the course. And yet also, consider the global context. It was the 1920s, you know? Compared to what was going on the brand-new Soviet Union, this was nothing.
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Date: 2007-04-19 04:27 am (UTC)Oh, I can just imagine. There are moments where you, as the translator-for-the-past, just stand there in front of the audience, simply stumped and thinking, "now how the hell am I going to make them understand how this happened>"
Over 2 years? I mean. I'd be having to sneak across the border regularly to get my fix. There must have been huge border crossings (or influxes into regions that still had priests) during Holy Week, those years. Pilgrimages.
Can you rec me a monograph on this, in English? I need to know more.
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Date: 2007-04-19 04:33 am (UTC)The standard monograph on this is available in varying lengths in French (shortest), Spanish (longest, but most recently updated) and English (now somewhat out of date and rather stiffly translated if memory serves, but hey, English.) It's by Jean Meyer, and the title in Spanish is La Cristiada -- so probably called something like The Cristero War. I had to read it for comps, lo these many years ago.
Mexican history is the best history. Somebody SHOT THE VIRGIN!
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Date: 2007-04-19 04:38 am (UTC)Also, if you want something a little more fun to read than Meyer, though a whole lot less reliable, Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory is about this period in Mexico (and, obviously, very much on the side of the Church.)
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Date: 2007-04-19 04:42 am (UTC)I have to read that novel, obviously.
Just the thought of being cut off for 30 months. I mean, like losing air. And you'd be so haunted by the idea that what if you died during this period, cut off from last rites, and not having made confession or taken communion in months. And you couldn't get your baby baptised. And no communion, when you're used to getting it regularly.
Just . . . well, it's like losing oxygen. I can't imagine what the Church was thinking. They must have gone to a very, very bad place.
And someone SHOT THE VIRGIN?
Mexican history wins. Absolutely.
Maybe it's time for a gender historian to revisit this set of events, given that you say the standard work is a rather old one?
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Date: 2007-04-19 04:57 am (UTC)It depends what you mean by Catholic. The most religious person I know in Mexico? Her parents are Spaniards. Most of my Mexican friends are academics and atheist/agnostic. Even the ones associated with the big Catholic university. So to get a sense of what the loss of the sacrements would mean to ordinary Catholics in the 1920s in Mexico I had to turn to experiences with Catholics mostly outside of Mexico who I knew through solidarity-movement activities or whatever.
Catholic countries are different, you know?
Maybe it's time for a gender historian to revisit this set of events, given that you say the standard work is a rather old one?
I haven't read the spiffy new updated version of the monograph (2nd ed. en espanol) but it does exist. A gender angle would be interesting but I think that problem is being approached piecemeal by historians of women (mostly) who specialize in the regions -- Guadelajara above all -- where the revolt was concentrated, or in education (those murdered schoolteachers) or radical women. It's definitely not for me, though. Not enough of the action took place in Mexico City!
I do want, someday, to get an article out of the Virgin-assassination story, though ...
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Date: 2007-04-19 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 04:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-22 01:22 am (UTC)Thank you!
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Date: 2007-04-19 04:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-22 01:24 am (UTC)So, I won't worry about that for awhile.
Thanks!