"Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest" Book Talk by Matthew Butler, University of Texas at Austin

The History Faculty New Book Series presents
Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest: Indigenous Catholics and Father Pérez’s Revolutionary Church (University of New Mexico Press, 2023)
www.unmpress.c...
Monday October 14, 2024
Location: GAR 4.100 & Zoom Livestream
Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest brings to life a classically misunderstood pícaro: liberal soldier turned Catholic priest and revolutionary antipope, "Patriarch" Joaquín Pérez. Historian Matthew Butler weaves Pérez's controversial life story into a larger narrative about the relationship between religion, the state, and indigeneity in twentieth-century Mexico. Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest is at once the history of an indigenous reformation and a deeply researched, beautifully written exploration of what can happen when revolutions try to assimilate powerful religious institutions and groups. The book challenges historians to reshape baseline assumptions about modern Mexico in order to see a revolutionary state that was deeply vested in religion and a Cristero War that was, in reality, a culture clash between Catholics.
"In this first-ever study in English of the pro-revolutionary Mexican Catholic and Apostolic Church and the patriarch who led it, Matthew Butler offers readers a fascinating reconceptualization of popular, indigenous, and revolutionary religiosity in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. In his tremendously rich and detailed book, Butler reveals that Mexico was not simply a Catholic country but was instead a country of 'competing Catholicisms.'"
-Julia G. Young, author of Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War
"Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest radically reshapes our understanding of this long-ignored (or actively misrepresented) independent Catholic church."
-Ben Fallaw, author of Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico
Matthew Butler researches and writes about the history of modern Mexico, the history of Catholicism in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, and rural and indigenous history. He is currently completing a monograph on the history of liberal Catholics in Mexico (working title: Liberty in the Church: Catholic Dissent in Modern Mexico) and an edited volume, with Maggie Elmore, on the Catholicism, Mexicanness, and labor politics of the historian Carlos Eduardo Castañeda. He is also researching two new projects - one the history of the modern Mexican bullfight, and the other on English novelist Graham Greene's odyssey in 1930s Tabasco and Chiapas. He is president of Texas Catholic Historical Society (2023-2025) and directs the Hijuelas Project, a digitization and research project on the history of indigenous communities in nineteenth-century Michoacán, Mexico. Read more about his work and publications here.
Respondents:
Jurgen Buchenau
Dowd Term Professor of Capitalism Studies; Professor of History and Latin American Studies
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Seth Garfield
Professor of History, and Faculty Associate in the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin
Seth Garfield is Professor of History and Chair for Western Hemispheric Trade Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also served as the director of the Brazil Center at Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (2018-22) and the Institute for Historical Studies (2013-17). He is the author of three monographs: Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937-1988 ( Duke, 2001); In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region (Duke, 2014), which received Honorable Mention for the American Historical Association’s Conference on Latin American History’s Bolton-Johnson Prize (2014); and most recently, Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), which was the recipient of nine prizes, including the Bolton-Johnson Prize and the Warren Dean Memorial Prize from the Conference on Latin American History, and the University of Texas Hamilton Book Award.
About the book: bit.ly/4850PPJ
Event details: bit.ly/47UJoBk