The Power Of God Against The Guns Of Government

"Writing in a narrative style reminiscent of Womack's Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, author explains a series of 1890s uprisings in Tomochic, in the border state of Chihuahua, against the Porfirians' determination to dictate who would control the lan

In the early 1890's, an armed rebellion fueled by religious fervor erupted over a wide area of northwestern Mexico. At the center of the outburst were a few hundred farmers from the village of Tomochic and a teenage folk saint named Teresa, who was ministering to thousands of people throughout the area. When the villagers proclaimed, "We will obey no one but God!," the Mexican government exiled "Santa Teresa" to the United States and trained its guns and bayonets on the farmers. A bloody confrontation ensued--God against government--that is still remembered in song, literature, films, and civic celebrations. The tangled roots of the conflict reach into Mexico's Indian past, stretch through its colonial experience, embrace the peculiar temperament of its Northerners, and encompass the ambitious program of rapid modernization launched by the government at the end of the nineteenth century. The government and its supporters had one vision of what they wanted Mexico to be; many villagers had a different view of what was right for them. Tomochic was split along fissures that had long marked local society, with religious dissenters reveling in the inspiration of Santa Teresa while others stood aside to await the government's resolution of the upheaval. After suffering several humiliating defeats by the faithful, more than a thousand army troops placed Tomochic under siege. Fighting was fierce, and as the military tightened the noose on its prey, an image of Santa Teresa was seen rising to glory into the heavens above the burning village. In the minds of many, Tomochic has come to symbolize a people's unending search for justice. Santa Teresa, in her day internationally known for miraculous healings, is still invoked by Mexican communities to help cure their social ills. Small wonder that only recently a young peasant rebel in Chiapas avowed: "I seek a decent life--liberation--just as God says."

The Birth of Modern Mexico, 1780-1824 investigates the roots of the Mexican Independence era from a variety of perspectives. The essays in this volume link the pre-1810 late Bourbon period to the War of Independence (1810-1821), analyze many crucial aspects of the decade of conflict, and illustrate the continuities with the first years of the independent Mexican nation. They all contribute to a nuanced view of the period: the different conceptions of legitimacy between the popular masses and the elite, the skill and importance of pro-Spanish propaganda, the process of organizing conspiracies, the survival and thriving of a mercantile family, the causes of failing mines, the role of religious thought in the supposed secular state, and differing conceptions of authority by the legislature and the executive. One of the few readable, concise books on the topic of independence, this volume probes the birth of modern Mexico in a crisply written style that is sure to appeal to historians and students of Mexican history.

In the early years of the twentieth century, newcomer farmers and migrant Mexicans forged a new world in South Texas. In just a decade, this vast region, previously considered too isolated and desolate for large-scale agriculture, became one of the United States' most lucrative farming regions and one of its worst places to work. By encouraging mass migration from Mexico, paying low wages, selectively enforcing immigration restrictions, toppling older political arrangements, and periodically immobilizing the workforce, growers created a system of labor controls unique in its levels of exploitation. Ethnic Mexican residents of South Texas fought back by organizing and by leaving, migrating to destinations around the United States where employers eagerly hired them--and continued to exploit them. In From South Texas to the Nation, John Weber reinterprets the United States' record on human and labor rights. This important book illuminates the way in which South Texas pioneered the low-wage, insecure, migration-dependent labor system on which so many industries continue to depend.

2014 Best International Book Award, Mormon History Association For the first century of their church’s existence, Mormon observers of international events studied and cheered global revolutions as a religious exercise. As believers in divine-human co-agency, many prominent Mormons saw global revolutions as providential precursors to the imminent establishment of the terrestrial kingdom of God. French Revolutionary symbolism, socialist critiques of industrialism, American Indian nationalism, and Wilsonian internationalism all became the raw materials of Mormon millennial theologies which were sometimes barely distinguishable from secular utopianism. Many Mormon thinkers accepted secular revolutionary arguments that the old world order needed to be destroyed, not merely reformed, to clear the way for the new. In From Above and Below, author Craig Livingston tells the story of Mormon commentary on global revolutions from the European revolutions of 1848 to the collapse of Mormon faith in progress in the 1930s when revolutionary communist and fascist regimes exposed themselves as violent and repressive. As the Church bureaucratized and assimilated to mainstream American and capitalist values, Mormons became champions of the conservative view of political and social development for which they are known today. The first Mormon converts in Mexico and France, both political radicals, would scarcely recognize the arch-conservative twenty-first century Church.

In the late nineteenth century, Mexican citizens quickly adopted new technologies imported from abroad to sew cloth, manufacture glass bottles, refine minerals, and provide many goods and services. Rapid technological change supported economic growth and also brought cultural change and social dislocation. Drawing on three detailed case studies—the sewing machine, a glass bottle–blowing factory, and the cyanide process for gold and silver refining—Edward Beatty explores a central paradox of economic growth in nineteenth-century Mexico: while Mexicans made significant efforts to integrate new machines and products, difficulties in assimilating the skills required to use emerging technologies resulted in a persistent dependence on international expertise.

DIVUses the Garza rebellion on the Texas-Mexico border to analyze economic and social change in this region, internationalizing U.S. history with its examination of a transborder area within the larger histories of Mexico and the United States./div

While Mexico's spiritual history after the 1910 Revolution is often essentialized as a church-state power struggle, this book reveals the complexity of interactions between revolution and religion. Looking at anticlericalism, indigenous cults and Catholic pilgrimage, these authors reveal that the Revolution was a period of genuine religious change, as well as social upheaval.