Matthew Butler

This seminar focuses on the history of Catholicism in twentieth-century Mexico, often seen as Latin America’s most “Catholic” nation. Chronologically, the course runs approximately from the Revolution of 1910 to the constitutional reforms of the 1990s that restored the Church’s legal standing in Mexico. Conceptually, the seminar will explore both the political and institutional aspects of Catholicism; at the same time, however, we will stress that the Church is a diverse community of believers that is actively engaged in interpreting and transforming the social world on religious lines. Individual seminar topics will include Catholic responses to economic modernisation and the postrevolutionary persecutions of the 1920s and 1930s; the Church’s role both in underpinning and undermining the one-party (PRI) state of the post-1940 period; Catholicism’s contribution (via guadalupanismo) to the creation of a Mexican national identity; the role played by Liberation Theology in driving the neo-Zapatista revolt in the southern state of Chiapas; and Church responses to democratic reform and the onset of religious pluralism. As well as discussing secondary readings, students will analyse a number of significant primary documents in class and also complete a final project using primary documents.

Texts:
Class reader
Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927-1929 (2004)
Jason Dormady, Primitive Revolution: Restorationist Religion and the Idea of the Mexican Revolution, 1940-1968 (2011)

Grading:
In-class participation (20%)
Reading reviews (x4 @ 10%) = 40%
Research for final paper (10%)
Final paper (30%)

This lecture course offer students an introduction to the history of modern Mexico from the close of the Mexican Revolution (1940) to the present. Our overarching theme will be the tense interplay between authority and freedom––the deconstructing and rebuilding, as it were, of a Mexican pyramid. In political terms, the course will cover the rise and fall of the authoritarian system dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)––the “perfect dictatorship” in Mario Vargas Llosa’s celebrated phrase––and Mexico’s transition to imperfect democracy since 2000. The course will first explore the development of the PRI regime in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, a period marked by one-party rule, cultural nationalism, industrialization, tourism, rapid urbanization, and a Mexican economic “miracle” that also generated huge inequality. We will look critically at the conventional view that Mexico’s pax priista (“peace of the PRI”) was a period of bland authoritarianism and peaceful prosperity in which nothing basically happened. Looking behind this telenovela history, we will explore the efforts made by campesinos, railway workers, schoolteachers, progressive Catholics, students, and others to change the regime. The second part of the course will explore the decline of the PRI state: topics will include the student democracy movement and 1968 Tlatelolco massacre; the 1970s oil crisis; the papal visit of 1979 that sapped the restrictions on public religious worship; the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the revitalization of civil society; neoliberal eonomic reform and the 1994 indigenous uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). The course will close by looking at the double tragedy that Mexico has experienced since 2000: ferocious competition in some areas (politics, religion, narcotics, human rights) coupled with searches for a new authoritarian principle that will somehow resurrect the certainties of the pyramid.


Set Texts
Benjamin Smith and Paul Gillingham, Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico,  
                1938–1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)
Anabel Hernández, Narcoland (New York: Verso, 2014)
Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York:
                Vintage, 2011)
Elena Poniatowksa, Massacre in Mexico (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1991)
Subcomandante Marcos, Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings (New York: Seven Stories
                Press, 2002)


Grading Policy:
 
Quiz (Mexican presidentes, 10%)
Reading responses (4 x 15% = 60%)
Final paper (30%)

This course examines Mexico’s Revolution through both its armed and post-revolutionary phases, from 1910-1940. During the semester we will focus on several key questions. What kind of revolution was the Mexican Revolution: an agrarian, political, social, cultural, or even mythical process? What caused and drove it? What did ordinary people think about the revolution and how far did they shape its course or simply suffer its consequences? Did “many Mexicos” just produce many revolutions, or can a broad narrative be discerned? What were the main contours of the post-revolutionary regime, and how different were they to those of the old regime? The course will consist of lectures, group discussions of set readings, primary documents, and folk songs (corridos), and occasional viewings of theater films made during (or about) the revolution. By the end of the course you will have a broad theoretical sense of what constitutes a social revolution and a detailed knowledge of Mexico’s revolutionary history that will help you to make up your own mind about the $64K questions: did twentieth-century Mexico truly experience a revolution? If so, how “revolutionary” was it?

Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution 
 
Gilbert Joseph and Jurgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution
Martín Luis Guzmán, In the Shadow of the Strongman
Luis González y González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition 
Stephen E. Lewis and Mary Kay Vaughan, The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940 
John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

Map quiz, 5%
Reading papers, 60%
Final paper, 35%

This course traces the history of the politics of religion, and of the religion of politics, in modern Latin America, with special emphasis placed on the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the region. Chronologically, the course covers begins with a brief survey of the colonial period and then gives special attention to the national period running from independence (circa 1820) up to the Cuban Revolution (circa 1960), after which Church and state entered significantly new and distinctive phases (e.g. Liberation Theology). Thematically, we will examine the various causes of Church-state tension in the aftermath of Latin American independence, and the Church’s multifaceted response sto the gradual rise of political liberalism, nationalism, and secularism. In the second half of the course, we will emphasize significant national cases (e.g. Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala), allowing the course to branch out in a more comparative sense as we proceed. As the focus on questions of devotion as well as power implies, we will not just be looking at the way in which the Church responded to changing political circumstances after the demise of the colonial regime, but at changes in religious practice and meaning, and how these were experienced by ordinary people.


Texts:
John Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: from Conquest to Revolution and Beyond
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
Austin Ivereigh (ed.) The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival
Edward Wright Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934
Shorter readings (supplied)


Grading:
Reading responses, 60%
Final essay, 40%

This graduate-level seminar focuses on the history of modern Mexico, from the mid-century liberal Reforma through the revolution of 1910-1940 and the Global Sixties. We will look at the ways in which recent historians have approached and conceptualized the linkages between popular groups and diverse iterations of the Mexican state and we will read some new works covering such major topics as secularization, crime and punishment, foreign policy, the development of commodity capitalism, labor history, indigenous history, and gender history.
 
In the first half of the semester, until Spring Break, we will convene as a readings seminar: students will write short weekly responses to the set readings as a basis for class discussion, and if desired there will be an emphasis on professionalization (project management, conference organization, seeing a manuscript through to publication).
 
In the second half of the semester, we will convene more as a research seminar: a longer research paper on an aspect of modern Mexico is expected by the end of the semester. Students who wish may also elect to complete the seminar as a readings track and produce a longer historiographical paper.

Texts may include:
 
Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Berkeley: University of California, 2020)
 
Helga Baitenmann, Matters of Justice: Pueblos, the Judiciary, and Agrarian Reform in Revolutionary Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2020)

Casey Lurtz, From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019)
 
Brian Stauffer, Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019)
 
Eric Zolov, The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020)
 
Susie Porter, From Angel to Office Worker: Middle-Class Identity and Female Consciousness in Mexico, 1890–1950 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2018)

Grading:
Book reviews (30%)
 
Class participation/presentation (20%)
 
Final paper (50%)
 

This seminar focuses on the history of Catholicism in twentieth-century Mexico, often seen as Latin America’s most “Catholic” nation. Chronologically, the course runs approximately from the Revolution of 1910 to the constitutional reforms of the 1990s that restored the Church’s legal standing in Mexico. Conceptually, the seminar will explore both the political and institutional aspects of Catholicism; at the same time, however, we will stress that the Church is a diverse community of believers that is actively engaged in interpreting and transforming the social world on religious lines. Individual seminar topics will include Catholic responses to economic modernisation and the postrevolutionary persecutions of the 1920s and 1930s; the Church’s role both in underpinning and undermining the one-party (PRI) state of the post-1940 period; Catholicism’s contribution (via guadalupanismo) to the creation of a Mexican national identity; the role played by Liberation Theology in driving the neo-Zapatista revolt in the southern state of Chiapas; and Church responses to democratic reform and the onset of religious pluralism. As well as discussing secondary readings, students will analyse a number of significant primary documents in class and also complete a final project using primary documents.

Texts:
Class reader
Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927-1929 (2004)
Jason Dormady, Primitive Revolution: Restorationist Religion and the Idea of the Mexican Revolution, 1940-1968 (2011)

Grading:
In-class participation (20%)
Reading reviews (x4 @ 10%) = 40%
Research for final paper (10%)
Final paper (30%)

Please check back for updates.

Prerequisite: Upper-division standing.

This course examines Mexico’s Revolution through both its armed and post-revolutionary phases, from 1910-1940. During the semester we will focus on several key questions. What kind of revolution was the Mexican Revolution: an agrarian, political, social, cultural, or even mythical process? What caused and drove it? What did ordinary people think about the revolution and how far did they shape its course or simply suffer its consequences? Did “many Mexicos” just produce many revolutions, or can a broad narrative be discerned? What were the main contours of the post-revolutionary regime, and how different were they to those of the old regime? The course will consist of lectures, group discussions of set readings, primary documents, and folk songs (corridos), and occasional viewings of theater films made during (or about) the revolution. By the end of the course you will have a broad theoretical sense of what constitutes a social revolution and a detailed knowledge of Mexico’s revolutionary history that will help you to make up your own mind about the $64K questions: did twentieth-century Mexico truly experience a revolution? If so, how “revolutionary” was it?

Texts:
Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution  
Gilbert Joseph and Jurgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution
Martín Luis Guzmán, In the Shadow of the Strongman
Luis González y González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition
Stephen E. Lewis and Mary Kay Vaughan, The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940
John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

Grading:
Map quiz, 5%
Reading papers, 60%
Final paper, 35%

This course traces the history of the politics of religion, and of the religion of politics, in modern Latin America, with special emphasis placed on the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the region. Chronologically, the course covers begins with a brief survey of the colonial period and then gives special attention to the national period running from independence (circa 1820) up to the Cuban Revolution (circa 1960), after which Church and state entered significantly new and distinctive phases (e.g. Liberation Theology). Thematically, we will examine the various causes of Church-state tension in the aftermath of Latin American independence, and the Church’s multifaceted response sto the gradual rise of political liberalism, nationalism, and secularism. In the second half of the course, we will emphasize significant national cases (e.g. Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala), allowing the course to branch out in a more comparative sense as we proceed. As the focus on questions of devotion as well as power implies, we will not just be looking at the way in which the Church responded to changing political circumstances after the demise of the colonial regime, but at changes in religious practice and meaning, and how these were experienced by ordinary people.

Texts:

John Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: from Conquest to Revolution and Beyond

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Austin Ivereigh (ed.) The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival 

Edward Wright Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934

Shorter readings (supplied)

Grading:

Reading responses, 60%

Final essay, 40%

This course examines Mexico’s Revolution through both its armed and post-revolutionary phases, from 1910-1940. During the semester we will focus on several key questions. What kind of revolution was the Mexican Revolution: an agrarian, political, social, cultural, or even mythical process? What caused and drove it? What did ordinary people think about the revolution and how far did they shape its course or simply suffer its consequences? Did “many Mexicos” just produce many revolutions, or can a broad narrative be discerned? What were the main contours of the post-revolutionary regime, and how different were they to those of the old regime? The course will consist of lectures, group discussions of set readings, primary documents, and folk songs (corridos), and occasional viewings of theater films made during (or about) the revolution. By the end of the course you will have a broad theoretical sense of what constitutes a social revolution and a detailed knowledge of Mexico’s revolutionary history that will help you to make up your own mind about the $64K questions: did twentieth-century Mexico truly experience a revolution? If so, how “revolutionary” was it?

Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution 
 
Gilbert Joseph and Jurgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution
Martín Luis Guzmán, In the Shadow of the Strongman
Luis González y González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition 
Stephen E. Lewis and Mary Kay Vaughan, The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940 
John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

Map quiz, 5%

Reading papers, 60%

Final paper, 35%

This course examines Mexico’s Revolution through both its armed and post-revolutionary phases, from 1910-1940. During the semester we will focus on several key questions. What kind of revolution was the Mexican Revolution: an agrarian, political, social, cultural, or even mythical process? What caused and drove it? What did ordinary people think about the revolution and how far did they shape its course or simply suffer its consequences? Did “many Mexicos” just produce many revolutions, or can a broad narrative be discerned? What were the main contours of the post-revolutionary regime, and how different were they to those of the old regime? The course will consist of lectures, group discussions of set readings, primary documents, and folk songs (corridos), and occasional viewings of theater films made during (or about) the revolution. By the end of the course you will have a broad theoretical sense of what constitutes a social revolution and a detailed knowledge of Mexico’s revolutionary history that will help you to make up your own mind about the $64K questions: did twentieth-century Mexico truly experience a revolution? If so, how “revolutionary” was it?

Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution 
  
Gilbert Joseph and Jurgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution
Martín Luis Guzmán, In the Shadow of the Strongman
Luis González y González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition
Stephen E. Lewis and Mary Kay Vaughan, The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940
John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

Map quiz, 5%
Reading papers, 60%
Final paper, 35%

This intensive writing course focuses on some of the main topics that have affected rural Latin American society in the later nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, with a view to understanding the causes of some of the tensions and unresolved conflicts affecting Latin America today. Using selective national case studies, the course will discuss the social-agrarian relationships linking landlords and campesinos; the role of the state and the impact of official ideologies embracing (or constraining) indigenous people, such as indigenismo; religion and the Catholic Church; the history of rural institutions, such as the hacienda; and the success or failure of the main land reforms enacted in countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico. Our focus throughout will be on understanding the different ways in which Latin American peasants have been protagonists in, not merely passive witnesses to, the histories of the countries in which they live. The course will follow a seminar as opposed to strict lecture format: the emphasis throughout will fall on researching and crafting extended written assignments in consultation with the instructor; there will also be elements of peer review, in which students will engage critically with the work of other members of the group. Students will be expected to participate actively in class through responses to readings or presentations.

This course traces the history of the politics of religion, and of the religion of politics, in modern Latin America, with special emphasis placed on the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the region. Chronologically, the course covers begins with a brief survey of the colonial period and then gives special attention to the national period running from independence (circa 1820) up to the Cuban Revolution (circa 1960), after which Church and state entered significantly new and distinctive phases (e.g. Liberation Theology). Thematically, we will examine the various causes of Church-state tension in the aftermath of Latin American independence, and the Church’s multifaceted response sto the gradual rise of political liberalism, nationalism, and secularism. In the second half of the course, we will emphasize significant national cases (e.g. Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala), allowing the course to branch out in a more comparative sense as we proceed. As the focus on questions of devotion as well as power implies, we will not just be looking at the way in which the Church responded to changing political circumstances after the demise of the colonial regime, but at changes in religious practice and meaning, and how these were experienced by ordinary people.

This course examines Mexico’s Revolution through both its armed and post-revolutionary phases, from 1910-1940. During the semester we will focus on several key questions. What kind of revolution was the Mexican Revolution: an agrarian, political, social, cultural, or even mythical process? What caused and drove it? What did ordinary people think about the revolution and how far did they shape its course or simply suffer its consequences? Did “many Mexicos” just produce many revolutions, or can a broad narrative be discerned? What were the main contours of the post-revolutionary regime, and how different were they to those of the old regime? The course will consist of lectures, group discussions of set readings, primary documents, and folk songs (corridos), and occasional viewings of theater films made during (or about) the revolution. By the end of the course you will have a broad theoretical sense of what constitutes a social revolution and a detailed knowledge of Mexico’s revolutionary history that will help you to make up your own mind about the $64K questions: did twentieth-century Mexico truly experience a revolution? If so, how “revolutionary” was it?

Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution 
  
Gilbert Joseph and Jurgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution
Martín Luis Guzmán, In the Shadow of the Strongman
Luis González y González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition
Stephen E. Lewis and Mary Kay Vaughan, The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940
John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

Map quiz, 5%
Reading papers, 60%
Final paper, 35%

This intensive writing course focuses on some of the main topics that have affected rural Latin American society in the later nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, with a view to understanding the causes of some of the tensions and unresolved conflicts affecting Latin America today. Using selective national case studies, the course will discuss the social-agrarian relationships linking landlords and campesinos; the role of the state and the impact of official ideologies embracing (or constraining) indigenous people, such as indigenismo; religion and the Catholic Church; the history of rural institutions, such as the hacienda; and the success or failure of the main land reforms enacted in countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico. Our focus throughout will be on understanding the different ways in which Latin American peasants have been protagonists in, not merely passive witnesses to, the histories of the countries in which they live. The course will follow a seminar as opposed to strict lecture format: the emphasis throughout will fall on researching and crafting extended written assignments in consultation with the instructor; there will also be elements of peer review, in which students will engage critically with the work of other members of the group. Students will be expected to participate actively in class through responses to readings or presentations.

Texts:
Kouri, Emilio. A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Veracruz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)
Gotkowitz, Laura. A revolution for our rights: indigenous struggles for land and justice in Bolivia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)
Larson, Brooke. Trials of nation making: liberalism, race, and ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005)
Lyons, Barry. Remembering the hacienda: religion, authority, and social change in highland Ecuador (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006)

Grading:
There is no final exam. Instead, each student will complete two shorter reading reviews (collectively 30%) and two extended essays in the form of a mid-term paper and a final paper (40-50%). In the final two weeks of term, students may deliver short presentations in which they circulate their written findings to then group for discussion and peer review (probable 10%).

This course traces the history of the politics of religion, and of the religion of politics, in modern Latin America, with special emphasis placed on the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the region. Chronologically, the course covers begins with a brief survey of the colonial period and then gives special attention to the national period running from independence (circa 1820) up to the Cuban Revolution (circa 1960), after which Church and state entered significantly new and distinctive phases (e.g. Liberation Theology). Thematically, we will examine the various causes of Church-state tension in the aftermath of Latin American independence, and the Church’s multifaceted response sto the gradual rise of political liberalism, nationalism, and secularism. In the second half of the course, we will emphasize significant national cases (e.g. Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala), allowing the course to branch out in a more comparative sense as we proceed. As the focus on questions of devotion as well as power implies, we will not just be looking at the way in which the Church responded to changing political circumstances after the demise of the colonial regime, but at changes in religious practice and meaning, and how these were experienced by ordinary people.

Texts:
John Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: from Conquest to Revolution and Beyond
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
Austin Ivereigh (ed.) The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival
Edward Wright Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934
Shorter readings (supplied)

Grading:
Reading responses, 60%
Final essay, 40%

This seminar focuses on the history of Catholicism in twentieth-century Mexico, often seen as Latin America’s most “Catholic” nation. Chronologically, the course runs approximately from the Revolution of 1910 to the constitutional reforms of the 1990s that restored the Church’s legal standing in Mexico. Conceptually, the seminar will explore both the political and institutional aspects of Catholicism; at the same time, however, we will stress that the Church is a diverse community of believers that is actively engaged in interpreting and transforming the social world on religious lines. Individual seminar topics will include Catholic responses to economic modernisation and the postrevolutionary persecutions of the 1920s and 1930s; the Church’s role both in underpinning and undermining the one-party (PRI) state of the post-1940 period; Catholicism’s contribution (via guadalupanismo) to the creation of a Mexican national identity; the role played by Liberation Theology in driving the neo-Zapatista revolt in the southern state of Chiapas; and Church responses to democratic reform and the onset of religious pluralism. As well as discussing secondary readings, students will analyse a number of significant primary documents in class and also complete a final project using primary documents.

Texts:

Class reader

Primary documents (supplied)

Grading:

In-class participation (20%)

Reading reviews (x4 @ 10%) = 40%

Research for final paper (10%)

Final paper (30%)

This course examines Mexico’s Revolution through both its armed and post-revolutionary phases, from 1910-1940. During the semester we will focus on several key questions. What kind of revolution was the Mexican Revolution: an agrarian, political, social, cultural, or even mythical process? What caused and drove it? What did ordinary people think about the revolution and how far did they shape its course or simply suffer its consequences? Did “many Mexicos” just produce many revolutions, or can a broad narrative be discerned? What were the main contours of the post-revolutionary regime, and how different were they to those of the old regime? The course will consist of lectures, group discussions of set readings, primary documents, and folk songs (corridos), and occasional viewings of theater films made during (or about) the revolution. By the end of the course you will have a broad theoretical sense of what constitutes a social revolution and a detailed knowledge of Mexico’s revolutionary history that will help you to make up your own mind about the $64K questions: did twentieth-century Mexico truly experience a revolution? If so, how “revolutionary” was it?

Texts:

Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution

Gilbert Joseph and Jurgen Buchenau (eds)., Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution
David Brading (ed.), Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution

Luis González y González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition

Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz

Stephen E. Lewis and Mary Kay Vaughan, The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940

John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

Grading:

Map quiz, 5%

Reading papers, 60%

Final paper, 35%

This course examines Mexico’s Revolution through both its armed and post-revolutionary phases, from 1910-1940. During the semester we will focus on several key questions. What kind of revolution was the Mexican Revolution: an agrarian, political, social, cultural, or even mythical process? What caused and drove it? What did ordinary people think about the revolution and how far did they shape its course or simply suffer its consequences? Did “many Mexicos” just produce many revolutions, or can a broad narrative be discerned? What were the main contours of the post-revolutionary regime, and how different were they to those of the old regime? The course will consist of lectures, group discussions of set readings, primary documents, and folk songs (corridos), and occasional viewings of theater films made during (or about) the revolution. By the end of the course you will have a broad theoretical sense of what constitutes a social revolution and a detailed knowledge of Mexico’s revolutionary history that will help you to make up your own mind about the $64K questions: did twentieth-century Mexico truly experience a revolution? If so, how “revolutionary” was it?

Texts:

Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution 
Leslie Bethell (ed.), Mexico since Independence

David Brading (ed.), Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution

Luis González y González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition

Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz

Stephen E. Lewis and Mary Kay Vaughan, The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940

John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

Grading:

Map quiz, 5%

Reading papers, 60%

Final paper, 35%

This intensive writing course focuses on some of the main topics that have affected rural Latin American society in the later nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, with a view to understanding the causes of some of the tensions and unresolved conflicts affecting Latin America today. Using selective national case studies, the course will discuss the social-agrarian relationships linking landlords and campesinos; the role of the state and the impact of official ideologies embracing (or constraining) indigenous people, such as indigenismo; religion and the Catholic Church; the history of rural institutions, such as the hacienda; and the success or failure of the main land reforms enacted in countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico. Our focus throughout will be on understanding the different ways in which Latin American peasants have been protagonists in, not merely passive witnesses to, the histories of the countries in which they live. The course will follow a seminar as opposed to strict lecture format: the emphasis throughout will fall on researching and crafting extended written assignments in consultation with the instructor; there will also be elements of peer review, in which students will engage critically with the work of other members of the group. Students will be expected to participate actively in class through responses to readings or presentations.

Kouri, Emilio. A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Veracruz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)

Gotkowitz, Laura. A revolution for our rights: indigenous struggles for land and

justice in Bolivia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)

Larson, Brooke. Trials of nation making: liberalism, race, and ethnicity in the Andes,

1810-1910 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005)

Lyons, Barry. Remembering the hacienda: religion, authority, and social change in

highland Ecuador (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006)

There is no final exam. Instead, each student will complete two shorter reading reviews (collectively 30%) and two extended essays in the form of a mid-term paper and a final paper (40-50%). In the final two weeks of term, students may deliver short presentations in which they circulate their written findings to then group for discussion and peer review (probable 10%).

This graduate-level seminar focuses on the history of modern Mexico, from roughly the mid-century Reforma to the revolution of 1910-1940. We will look particularly closely at the ways in which recent historians have approached and conceptualised the linkages between popular groups and the emerging Mexican state, for instance through their analyses of local religion, peasant politics, ethnicity, and popular liberalism. Pursuing these themes into the twentieth century, we will end by considering the construction of authority in post-revolutionary (1920s-1930s) Mexico. In the first half of the semester, until Spring Break, we will convene as a readings seminar: students will write short weekly responses to the set readings as a basis for class discussion and one historiographical paper (typically on the Mexican historiography, and as a prelude to the research paper, if desired). In the second half of the semester, we will convene more as a research seminar: a longer research paper on an aspect of modern Mexico is expected by the end of the semester. If desired, students may also electto complete the seminar as a readings track and produce a longerhistoriographical paper.

Texts:

Joseph, Gilbert, and Nugent, Daniel. Everyday forms of state formation: revolution and the negotiation of rule in modern Mexico (1994).

Kouri, Emilio. A pueblo divided: business, property, and community in Papantla, Mexico (2004).

McNamara, Patrick. Sons of the sierra: Juárez, Díaz, and the people of Ixtlán,Oaxaca, 1880-1920 (2007)

Vaughan, Mary Kay. Cultural politics in revolution: teachers, peasants, andschools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (1997)

Wright-Rios, Edward. Revolutions in Mexican catholicism: reform and revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934 (2009)

Emily Wakild, Revoluionary parks: conservation, social justice, and Mexico'sNational Parks, 1910-1940 (2011)

Grading:

Book reviews (30%)

Comparative/bibliographical paper (15%)

Class participation/presentation (15%)

Final paper (40%)

This course traces the history of the politics of religion, and of the religion of politics, in modern Latin America, with special emphasis placed on the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the region. Chronologically, the course covers begins with a brief survey of the colonial period and then gives special attention to the national period running from independence (circa 1820) up to the Cuban Revolution (circa 1960), after which Church and state entered significantly new and distinctive phases (e.g. Liberation Theology). Thematically, we will examine the various causes of Church-state tension in the aftermath of Latin American independence, and the Church’s multifaceted response sto the gradual rise of political liberalism, nationalism, and secularism. In the second half of the course, we will emphasize significant national cases (e.g. Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala), allowing the course to branch out in a more comparative sense as we proceed. As the focus on questions of devotion as well as power implies, we will not just be looking at the way in which the Church responded to changing political circumstances after the demise of the colonial regime, but at changes in religious practice and meaning, and how these were experienced by ordinary people.

Texts:

John Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: from Conquest to Revolution and Beyond

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Austin Ivereigh (ed.) The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival 

Edward Wright Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934

Shorter readings (supplied)

Grading:

Reading responses, 60%

Final essay, 40%

This course examines Mexico’s Revolution through both its armed and post-revolutionary phases, from 1910-1940. During the semester we will focus on several key questions. What kind of revolution was the Mexican Revolution: an agrarian, political, social, cultural, or even mythical process? What caused and drove it? What did ordinary people think about the revolution and how far did they shape its course or simply suffer its consequences? Did “many Mexicos” just produce many revolutions, or can a broad narrative be discerned? What were the main contours of the post-revolutionary regime, and how different were they to those of the old regime? The course will consist of lectures, group discussions of set readings, primary documents, and folk songs (corridos), and occasional viewings of theater films made during (or about) the revolution. By the end of the course you will have a broad theoretical sense of what constitutes a social revolution and a detailed knowledge of Mexico’s revolutionary history that will help you to make up your own mind about the $64K questions: did twentieth-century Mexico truly experience a revolution? If so, how “revolutionary” was it?

Texts:

Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution ?Leslie Bethell (ed.), Mexico since Independence

David Brading (ed.), Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution

Luis González y González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition

Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz

Stephen E. Lewis and Mary Kay Vaughan, The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940

John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

Grading:

Map quiz, 5%

Reading papers, 60%

Final paper, 35%

This course examines Mexico’s Revolution through both its armed and post-revolutionary phases, from 1910-1940. During the semester we will focus on several key questions. What kind of revolution was the Mexican Revolution: an agrarian, political, social, cultural, or even mythical process? What caused and drove it? What did ordinary people think about the revolution and how far did they shape its course or simply suffer its consequences? Did “many Mexicos” just produce many revolutions, or can a broad narrative be discerned? What were the main contours of the post-revolutionary regime, and how different were they to those of the old regime? The course will consist of lectures, group discussions of set readings, primary documents, and folk songs (corridos), and occasional viewings of theater films made during (or about) the revolution. By the end of the course you will have a broad theoretical sense of what constitutes a social revolution and a detailed knowledge of Mexico’s revolutionary history that will help you to make up your own mind about the $64K questions: did twentieth-century Mexico truly experience a revolution? If so, how “revolutionary” was it?

Texts:

Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution ?Leslie Bethell (ed.), Mexico since Independence

David Brading (ed.), Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution

Luis González y González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition

Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz

Stephen E. Lewis and Mary Kay Vaughan, The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940

John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

Grading:

Map quiz, 5%

Reading papers, 60%

Final paper, 35%

This seminar focuses on the history of Catholicism in twentieth-century Mexico, often seen as Latin America’s most “Catholic” nation. Chronologically, the course runs approximately from the Revolution of 1910 to the constitutional reforms of the 1990s that restored the Church’s legal standing in Mexico. Conceptually, the seminar will explore both the political and institutional aspects of Catholicism; at the same time, however, we will stress that the Church is a diverse community of believers that is actively engaged in interpreting and transforming the social world on religious lines. Individual seminar topics will include Catholic responses to economic modernisation and the postrevolutionary persecutions of the 1920s and 1930s; the Church’s role both in underpinning and undermining the one-party (PRI) state of the post-1940 period; Catholicism’s contribution (via guadalupanismo) to the creation of a Mexican national identity; the role played by Liberation Theology in driving the neo-Zapatista revolt in the southern state of Chiapas; and Church responses to democratic reform and the onset of religious pluralism. As well as discussing secondary readings, students will analyse a number of significant primary documents in class and also complete a final project using primary documents.

Texts:

Class reader

Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927-1929 (2004)

Jason Dormady, Primitive Revolution: Restorationist Religion and the Idea of the Mexican Revolution, 1940-1968 (2011)

Grading:

In-class participation (20%)

Reading reviews (x4 @ 10%) = 40%

Research for final paper (10%)

Final paper (30%)

Please check back for updates.

Prerequisite: Upper-division standing.

This intensive writing course focuses on some of the main topics that have affected rural Latin American society in the later nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, with a view to understanding the causes of some of the tensions and unresolved conflicts affecting Latin America today. Using selective national case studies, the course will discuss the social-agrarian relationships linking landlords and campesinos; the role of the state and the impact of official ideologies embracing (or constraining) indigenous people, such as indigenismo; religion and the Catholic Church; the history of rural institutions, such as the hacienda; and the success or failure of the main land reforms enacted in countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico. Our focus throughout will be on understanding the different ways in which Latin American peasants have been protagonists in, not merely passive witnesses to, the histories of the countries in which they live. The course will follow a seminar as opposed to strict lecture format: the emphasis throughout will fall on researching and crafting extended written assignments in consultation with the instructor; there will also be elements of peer review, in which students will engage critically with the work of other members of the group. Students will be expected to participate actively in class through responses to readings or presentations.

Texts:

Friedrich, Paul. Agrarian revolt in a Mexican village (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986)

Gotkowitz, Laura. A revolution for our rights: indigenous struggles for land and

justice in Bolivia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)

Handy, Jim. Revolution in the countryside: rural conflict and agrarian reform in

Guatemala, 1944-1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)

Larson, Brooke. Trials of nation making: liberalism, race, and ethnicity in the Andes,

1810-1910 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005)

Lyons, Barry. Remembering the hacienda: religion, authority, and social change in

highland Ecuador (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006)

 Grading:

There is no final exam. Instead, each student will complete two shorter reading reviews (collectively 30%) and two extended essays in the form of a mid-term paper and a final paper (40-50%). In the final two weeks of term, students may deliver short presentations in which they circulate their written findings to then group for discussion and peer review (probable 10%).

This intensive writing course focuses on some of the main topics that have affected rural Latin American society in the later nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, with a view to understanding the causes of some of the tensions and unresolved conflicts affecting Latin America today. Using selective national case studies, the course will discuss the social-agrarian relationships linking landlords and campesinos; the role of the state and the impact of official ideologies embracing (or constraining) indigenous people, such as indigenismo; religion and the Catholic Church; the history of rural institutions, such as the hacienda; and the success or failure of the main land reforms enacted in countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico. Our focus throughout will be on understanding the different ways in which Latin American peasants have been protagonists in, not merely passive witnesses to, the histories of the countries in which they live. The course will follow a seminar as opposed to strict lecture format: the emphasis throughout will fall on researching and crafting extended written assignments in consultation with the instructor; there will also be elements of peer review, in which students will engage critically with the work of other members of the group. Students will be expected to participate actively in class through responses to readings or presentations.

Texts:

Friedrich, Paul. Agrarian revolt in a Mexican village (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986)

Gotkowitz, Laura. A revolution for our rights: indigenous struggles for land and

justice in Bolivia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)

Handy, Jim. Revolution in the countryside: rural conflict and agrarian reform in

Guatemala, 1944-1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)

Larson, Brooke. Trials of nation making: liberalism, race, and ethnicity in the Andes,

1810-1910 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005)

Lyons, Barry. Remembering the hacienda: religion, authority, and social change in

highland Ecuador (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006)

Grading:

There is no final exam. Instead, each student will complete two shorter reading reviews (collectively 30%) and two extended essays in the form of a mid-term paper and a final paper (40-50%). In the final two weeks of term, students may deliver short presentations in which they circulate their written findings to then group for discussion and peer review (probable 10%).

This seminar focuses on the history of Catholicism in twentieth-century Mexico, often seen as Latin America’s most “Catholic” nation. Chronologically, the course runs approximately from the Revolution of 1910 to the constitutional reforms of the 1990s that restored the Church’s legal standing in Mexico. Conceptually, the seminar will explore both the political and institutional aspects of Catholicism; at the same time, however, we will stress that the Church is a diverse community of believers that is actively engaged in interpreting and transforming the social world on religious lines. Individual seminar topics will include Catholic responses to economic modernisation and the postrevolutionary persecutions of the 1920s and 1930s; the Church’s role both in underpinning and undermining the one-party (PRI) state of the post-1940 period; Catholicism’s contribution (via guadalupanismo) to the creation of a Mexican national identity; the role played by Liberation Theology in driving the neo-Zapatista revolt in the southern state of Chiapas; and Church responses to democratic reform and the onset of religious pluralism. As well as discussing secondary readings, students will analyse a number of significant primary documents in class and also complete a final project using primary documents.

Texts:

Class reader

Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927-1929 (2004)

Jason Dormady, Primitive Revolution: Restorationist Religion and the Idea of the Mexican Revolution, 1940-1968 (2011)

Grading:

In-class participation (20%)

Reading reviews (x4 @ 10%) = 40%

Research for final paper (10%)

Final paper (30%)

Please check back for updates.

Prerequisite: Upper-division standing.

This intensive writing course focuses on some of the main topics that  have affected rural Latin American society in the later nineteenth to  mid-twentieth centuries, with a view to understanding the causes of  some of the tensions and unresolved conflicts affecting Latin America  today. Using selective national case studies, the course will discuss  the social-agrarian relationships linking landlords and campesinos;  the role of the state and the impact of official ideologies embracing  (or constraining) indigenous people, such as indigenismo; religion and  the Catholic Church; the history of rural institutions, such as the  hacienda; and the success or failure of the main land reforms enacted  in countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador, and Mexico. Our focus  throughout will be on understanding the different ways in which Latin  American peasants have been protagonists in, not merely passive  witnesses to, the histories of the countries in which they live. The  course will follow a seminar as opposed to strict lecture format: the  emphasis throughout will fall on researching and crafting extended  written assignments in consultation with the instructor; there will  also be elements of peer review, in which students will engage  critically with the work of other members of the group. Students will  be expected to participate actively in class through responses to  readings or presentations. This course has a writing flag.

Tentative texts.

Gotkowitz, Laura. A revolution for our rights: indigenous struggles  for land and justice in Bolivia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)

Handy, Jim. Revolution in the countryside: rural conflict and agrarian  reform in Guatemala, 1944-1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North  Carolina Press, 1994)

Larson, Brooke. Trials of nation making: liberalism, race, and  ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge  Press, 2005)

Lyons, Barry. Remembering the hacienda: religion, authority, and  social change in highland Ecuador (Austin: University of Texas Press,  2006)

Grading Policy.

There is no final exam. Instead, each student will complete two-three  shorter reading reviews (collectively 30%) and two extended essays in  the form of a mid-term paper and a final paper (40-50%). In the final  two weeks of term, students may deliver short presentations in which  they circulate their written findings to then group for discussion and  peer review (probable 10%).

This graduate-level seminar focuses on the history of modern Mexico,  from roughly the mid-century Reforma to the revolution of 1910-1940. We  will look particularly closely at the ways in which recent historians  have approached and conceptualised the linkages between popular groups  and the emerging Mexican state, for instance through their analyses of  local religion, peasant politics, ethnicity, and popular liberalism.  Pursuing these themes into the twentieth century, we will end by  considering the construction of authority in post-revolutionary  (1920s-1930s) Mexico. In the first half of the semester, until Spring  Break, we will convene as a readings seminar: students will write  short weekly responses to the set readings as a basis for class  discussion and one historiographical paper (typically on the Mexican  historiography, and as a prelude to the research paper, if desired).  In the second half of the semester, we will convene more as a research  seminar: a longer research paper on an aspect of modern Mexico is  expected by the end of the semester. If desired, students may also electto complete the seminar as a readings track and produce a longerhistoriographical paper.

 Tentative reading list, subject to review.

Joseph, Gilbert, and Nugent, Daniel. Everyday forms of state  formation: revolution and the negotiation of rule in modern Mexico  (1994).

Kouri, Emilio. A pueblo divided: business, property, and community in  Papantla, Mexico (2004).

McNamara, Patrick. Sons of the sierra: Juárez, Díaz, and the people of Ixtlán,Oaxaca, 1880-1920 (2007)

Vaughan, Mary Kay. Cultural politics in revolution: teachers, peasants, andschools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (1997)

Wright-Rios, Edward. Revolutions in Mexican catholicism: reform and  revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934 (2009)

Emily Wakild, Revoluionary parks: conservation, social justice, and Mexico'sNational Parks, 1910-1940 (2011)

Grading policy.

Book reviews (30%)

Comparative/bibliographical paper (15%)

Class participation/presentation (15%)

Final paper (40%)

This course traces the history of the politics of religion, and of the religion of politics, in modern Latin America, with special emphasis placed on the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the region. Chronologically, the course covers begins with a brief survey of the colonial period and then gives special attention to the national period running from independence (circa 1820) up to the Cuban Revolution (circa 1960), after which Church and state entered significantly new and distinctive phases (e.g. Liberation Theology). Thematically, we will examine the various causes of Church-state tension in the aftermath of Latin American independence, and the Church’s multifaceted response sto the gradual rise of political liberalism, nationalism, and secularism. In the second half of the course, we will emphasize significant national cases (e.g. Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala), allowing the course to branch out in a more comparative sense as we proceed. As the focus on questions of devotion as well as power implies, we will not just be looking at the way in which the Church responded to changing political circumstances after the demise of the colonial regime, but at changes in religious practice and meaning, and how these were experienced by ordinary people.

Texts:

John Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: from Conquest to Revolution and Beyond

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Austin Ivereigh (ed.) The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival 

Edward Wright Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934

Shorter readings (supplied)

Grading:

Reading responses, 60%

Final essay, 40%

Texts:

John Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: from Conquest to Revolution and Beyond (New York: New York University Press, 2011)Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (London: Penguin, 2003)Austin Ivereigh (ed.) The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival (London: ILAS, 2000) (NB: often out of print: required chapters provided on Blackboard) Edward Wright Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009)

Grading:

There is no final exam. Instead there will be weekly (five) writing assignments.

This course examines Mexico’s Revolution through both its armed and post-revolutionary phases, from 1910-1940. During the semester we will focus on several key questions. What kind of revolution was the Mexican Revolution: an agrarian, political, social, cultural, or even mythical process? What caused and drove it? What did ordinary people think about the revolution and how far did they shape its course or simply suffer its consequences? Did “many Mexicos” just produce many revolutions, or can a broad narrative be discerned? What were the main contours of the post-revolutionary regime, and how different were they to those of the old regime? The course will consist of lectures, group discussions of set readings, primary documents, and folk songs (corridos), and occasional viewings of theater films made during (or about) the revolution. By the end of the course you will have a broad theoretical sense of what constitutes a social revolution and a detailed knowledge of Mexico’s revolutionary history that will help you to make up your own mind about the $64K questions: did twentieth-century Mexico truly experience a revolution? If so, how “revolutionary” was it?

Texts:

Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution

Leslie Bethell (ed.), Mexico since Independence

David Brading (ed.), Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution

Luis González y González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition

Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz

Stephen E. Lewis and Mary Kay Vaughan, The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940

John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

Grading:

Map quiz, 5%

Reading papers, 60%

Final paper, 35%

This course traces the history of the politics of religion, and of the religion of politics, in modern Latin America, with special emphasis placed on the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the region. Chronologically, the course covers begins with a brief survey of the colonial period and then gives special attention to the national period running from independence (circa 1820) up to the Cuban Revolution (circa 1960), after which Church and state entered significantly new and distinctive phases (e.g. Liberation Theology). Thematically, we will examine the various causes of Church-state tension in the aftermath of Latin American independence, and the Church’s multifaceted response sto the gradual rise of political liberalism, nationalism, and secularism. In the second half of the course, we will emphasize significant national cases (e.g. Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala), allowing the course to branch out in a more comparative sense as we proceed. As the focus on questions of devotion as well as power implies, we will not just be looking at the way in which the Church responded to changing political circumstances after the demise of the colonial regime, but at changes in religious practice and meaning, and how these were experienced by ordinary people.

 Texts:

John Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: from Conquest to Revolution and Beyond

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Austin Ivereigh (ed.) The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival

Edward Wright Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934

Shorter readings (supplied)

Grading:

Reading responses, 60%

Final essay, 40%

Campesinos. Twentieth-Century Rural Latin America

This intensive writing course focuses on some of the main topics that have affected rural Latin American society in the later nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, with a view to understanding the causes of some of the tensions and unresolved conflicts affecting Latin America today. Using selective national case studies, the course will discuss the social-agrarian relationships linking landlords and campesinos; the role of the state and the impact of official ideologies embracing (or constraining) indigenous people, such as indigenismo; religion and the Catholic Church; the history of rural institutions, such as the hacienda; and the success or failure of the main land reforms enacted in countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico. Our focus throughout will be on understanding the different ways in which Latin American peasants have been protagonists in, not merely passive witnesses to, the histories of the countries in which they live. The course will follow a seminar as opposed to strict lecture format: the emphasis throughout will fall on researching and crafting extended written assignments in consultation with the instructor; there will also be elements of peer review, in which students will engage critically with the work of other members of the group. Students will be expected to participate actively in class through responses to readings or presentations.

Tentative texts

Friedrich, Paul. Agrarian revolt in a Mexican village (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986)

Gotkowitz, Laura. A revolution for our rights: indigenous struggles for land and

justice in Bolivia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)

Handy, Jim. Revolution in the countryside: rural conflict and agrarian reform in

Guatemala, 1944-1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)

Larson, Brooke. Trials of nation making: liberalism, race, and ethnicity in the Andes,

1810-1910 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005)

Lyons, Barry. Remembering the hacienda: religion, authority, and social change in

highland Ecuador (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006)

Grading Policy

There is no final exam. Instead, each student will complete two shorter reading reviews (collectively 30%) and two extended essays in the form of a mid-term paper and a final paper (40-50%). In the final two weeks of term, students may deliver short presentations in which they circulate their written findings to then group for discussion and peer review (probable 10%).

Please check back for updates.

Prerequisite: Upper-division standing.

Please check back for updates.

Prerequisite: Upper-division standing.

CHURCH AND STATE IN MODERN LATIN AMERICAThis course traces the history of the politics of religion, and of the  religion of politics, in modern Latin America. The course is thematic  and chronological in its organization: chronologically, the course  covers begins with a brief survey of the colonial period and then  gives special attention to the national period running from  independence in the 1820s up to the Cuban Revolution, Liberation  Theology, and the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.Thematically, special emphasis is placed on the causes of Church-state  tension after Independence (Church wealth; allegations of clerical  hostility to the nation); and on the Church's multifaceted response to  the rise of political liberalism (the sponsorship of new devotions;  the promotion of Social Catholicism and confessional political  parties; mobilization of lay men and women, especially). We will also  consider the character of Latin American anticlericalism in this  period; the diplomatic and political relationships linking the Latin  American republics (and their national churches) with Rome; and the  social and educational influence of the Church.In the second part of the course, we will study significant national  cases (Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala),  allowing the course to branch out in a more comparative sense. We will  focus on questions of devotion as well as power, that is, we will not  just be looking at the way in which the Church responded to changing  political circumstances but at changes inreligious practice and meaning, and how these were experienced by  ordinary people.The course materials include films, novels, and primary sources, as  well as books. Set texts:John Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America  (New York: University Press of New York, 2010)Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (London: Penguin, 2003)Austin Ivereigh (ed.) The politics of religion in an age of revival  (London: ILAS, 2000)Edward Wright Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and  Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009)Assessment is by weekly response papers to readings and by a final paper only.

This graduate-level seminar focuses on the history of modern Mexico, from roughly the mid-century Reforma to the revolution of 1910-40. We will look particularly closely at the ways in which recent historians have approached and conceptualised the linkages between popular groups and the emerging Mexican state, for instance through their analyses of local religion, peasant politics, ethnicity, and popular liberalism. Pursuing these themes into the twentieth century, we will end by considering the construction of authority in post-revolutionary (1920s-1930s) Mexico. In the first half of the semester??until Spring Break??we will convene as a readings seminar: students will write short weekly responses to the set readings as a basis for class discussion and one historiographical paper (typically on the Mexican historiography, and as a prelude to the research paper, if desired). In the second half of the semester, we will reconvene as a research seminar: a longer research paper on an aspect of modern Mexico is expected by the end of the semester (early May).

Tentative reading list

Becker, Marjorie. Setting the virgin on fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán peasants, and the redemption of the Mexican revolution (1995).

Joseph, Gilbert, and Nugent, Daniel. Everyday forms of state formation: revolution and the negotiation of rule in modern Mexico (1994).

Kouri, Emilio. A pueblo divided: business, property, and community in Papantla, Mexico (2004).

McNamara, Patrick. Sons of the sierra: Juárez, Díaz, and the people of Ixtlán, Oaxaca, 1880-1920 (2007)

Rugeley, Terry. Of wonders and wise men: religion and popular cultures in  southeast Mexico (2001)

Vaughan, Mary Kay. Cultural politics in revolution: teachers, peasants, and schools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (1997)

Wright-Rios, Edward. Revolutions in Mexican catholicism: reform and revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934 (2009)

Grading

Book reviews (30%)

Comparative/bibliographical paper (15%)

Class participation/presentation (15%)

Final paper (40%)

Course description.

This intensive writing course focuses on some of the main topics that have affected rural Latin American society in the later nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, with a view to understanding the causes of some of the tensions and unresolved conflicts affecting Latin America today. Using selective national case studies, the course will discuss the social-agrarian relationships linking landlords and campesinos; the role of the state and the impact of official ideologies embracing (or constraining) indigenous people, such as indigenismo; religion and the Catholic Church; the history of rural institutions, such as the hacienda; and the success or failure of the main land reforms enacted in countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador, and Mexico. Our focus throughout will be on understanding the different ways in which Latin American peasants have been protagonists in, not merely passive witnesses to, the histories of the countries in which they live. The course will follow a seminar as opposed to strict lecture format: the emphasis throughout will fall on researching and crafting extended written assignments in consultation with the instructor; there will also be elements of peer review, in which students will engage critically with the work of other members of the group. Students will be expected to participate actively in class through responses to readings or presentations. This course has a writing flag.

Tentative texts

Gotkowitz, Laura. A revolution for our rights: indigenous struggles for land and justice in Bolivia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)

Handy, Jim. Revolution in the countryside: rural conflict and agrarian reform in Guatemala, 1944-1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)

Larson, Brooke. Trials of nation making: liberalism, race, and ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005)

Lyons, Barry. Remembering the hacienda: religion, authority, and social change in highland Ecuador (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006)

Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1977)

Grading Policy

There is no final exam. Instead, each student will complete two shorter reading reviews (collectively 30%) and two extended essays in the form of a mid-term paper and a final paper (40-50%). In the final two weeks of term, students may deliver short presentations in which they circulate their written findings to then group for discussion and peer review (probable 10%).

Course description.

This graduate-level seminar focuses on the history of modern Mexico, from roughly the mid-century Reforma to the revolution of 1910-40. We will look particularly closely at the ways in which recent historians have approached and conceptualised the linkages between popular groups and the emerging Mexican state, for instance through their analyses of local religion, peasant politics, ethnicity, and popular liberalism. Pursuing these themes into the twentieth century, we will end by considering the construction of authority in post-revolutionary (1920s-1930s) Mexico. In the first half of the semester??until Spring Break??we will convene as a readings seminar: students will write short weekly responses to the set readings as a basis for class discussion and one historiographical paper (typically on the Mexican historiography, and as a prelude to the research paper, if desired). In the second half of the semester, we will reconvene as a research seminar: a longer research paper on an aspect of modern Mexico is expected by the end of the semester (early May).

Tentative reading list.

Becker, Marjorie. Setting the virgin on fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán peasants, and the redemption of the Mexican revolution (1995).

Joseph, Gilbert, and Nugent, Daniel. Everyday forms of state formation: revolution and the negotiation of rule in modern Mexico (1994).

Kouri, Emilio. A pueblo divided: business, property, and community in Papantla,

Mexico (2004).

McNamara, Patrick. Sons of the sierra: Juárez, Díaz, and the people of Ixtlán,

Oaxaca, 1880-1920 (2007)

Rugeley, Terry. Of wonders and wise men: religion and popular cultures in   southeast Mexico (2001)

Vaughan, Mary Kay. Cultural politics in revolution: teachers, peasants, and

schools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (1997)

Wright-Rios, Edward. Revolutions in Mexican catholicism: reform and revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934 (2009)

Grading policy.

Book reviews (30%)

Comparative/bibliographical paper (15%)

Class participation/presentation (15%)

Final paper (40%)

This upper division option examines the life-course of Mexico’s Revolution through both its armed and post-revolutionary phases, from about 1910-1940. During the semester we will focus on several key questions. What kind of revolution was the Mexican Revolution: an agrarian, political, social, cultural, or even mythical process? What caused and drove it? What did ordinary people think about the revolution and how far did they shape its course or simply suffer its progress and consequences? Did “many Mexicos” just produce many revolutions, or can broad narratives be discerned? What were the main contours of Mexico’s post-revolutionary regime, and how different were they to those of the old regime?

Thematically, the course will cover central topics such as the Porfiriato (1876-1911); the maderista revolution of 1910-1913; the rise and fall of popular movements (zapatismo, villismo) from 1910-1920; the Constitutionalist successes of 1916-1917; and the political and cultural construction of post-revolutionary Mexico by Sonoran (1920-1934) and later cardenista (1934-1940) state-builders, agrarians, schoolteachers, and anticlericals. The course will consist of lectures; group discussions of set readings, primary documents, and folk songs (corridos); and occasional viewings of theater films made during (or about) the revolution.

To do well, you will need to develop your analytical skills (e.g. concerning different interpretations of the Revolution, not just factual recall); your compositional skills (by presenting a reasoned, opinionated case on paper); and your communication skills (by contributing to discussions). By the end of the course you will have a broad theoretical sense of what constitutes a social revolution and a detailed knowledge of Mexico’s revolutionary history that will help you to make up your own mind about the $64K questions: did twentieth-century Mexico truly experience a revolution? If so, how “revolutionary” was it?

Grading

• Map quiz (5%)

• Reading papers (collectively 60%)

• Final paper (35%)

Texts

Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2008) Leslie Bethell (ed.), Mexico since Independence (Cambridge: CUP, 1994)

David Brading (ed.), Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: CUP, 1980)

Luis González y González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition (Austin: UT, 1974)

Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1991)

Stephen E. Lewis and Mary Kay Vaughan, The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940 (Durham: Duke, 2006)*

John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1969)

Church and State in Modern Latin America

HIS363K (39440); LAS366 (40155); RS368 (43710)            Instructor: Dr. Matthew Butler
Semester: FALL 2010                                                            Office: Garrison 3.414
Time: TUE/THU 11:00-12:30 (12:15)                        Office hours: THU 3:30-5:30
Venue: GAR 1.126                                                            Phone: 512-475-7972
Prerequisite: Upper Division Standing                                     Email: mbutler@mail.utexas.edu

Description

This course traces the history of the politics of religion, and of the religion of politics, in modern Latin America. Throughout, special emphasis is placed on the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the region. Within these basic parameters, the course is both thematic and chronological in its organization.

Chronologically, the course covers begins with a brief survey of the colonial period and then gives special attention to the national period running from independence (circa 1820) up to the Cuban Revolution (circa 1960), after which both Church and state entered significantly new and distinctive phases (e.g. the emergence of bureaucratic-authoritarian military dictatorships, and of Liberation Theology and Protestantization).

Thematically, special emphasis is placed on the causes of Church-state tension in the aftermath of Latin American independence (Church wealth; allegations of clerical aloofness from the nation; disputes over ecclesiastical patronage); and on the Church’s multifacetd response to the gradual rise of political liberalism (the counter-development of a modern, intransigent Catholic culture; the sponsorship of new devotions; the promotion of “social” Catholicism and Catholic political parties; mobilization of the laity and of women, especially; identification with supportive regimes). We will also consider the character of Latin American anticlericalism in this period; the diplomatic and political relationships linking the Latin American republics (and their national churches) with Rome; and the social and educational influence of the clergy. In the second half of the course, we will begin to emphasize significant national cases (Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala), allowing the course to branch out in a more comparative sense as we proceed.

As the focus on questions of devotion as well as power implies, we will not just be looking at the way in which the Church responded to changing political circumstances after the demise of the colonial regime, but at changes in religious practice and meaning, and how these were experienced by ordinary people.

During the course we will read as a group and make time to see a selection of relevant films. There will also be at least one field trip to the San Antonio Missions.

1. Course Materials

Set texts

Justo L. González and Ondina E. González, Christianity in Latin America: A History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (London: Penguin, 2003)
Austin Ivereigh (ed.) The politics of religion in an age of revival (London: ILAS, 2000)
Edward Wright Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in
Oaxaca, 1887-1934 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009)

The Greene book is a short novel. Ivereigh is an anthology, while Wright Ríos is a case study of Mexico and González and González is a general survey. We will not be reading the texts systematically, but using selections in conjunction with the essays in the reading packet. Again, we can be selective in using these so that the reading load is appropriate.

  Though it is not prescribed as a set text since it is out of print, the classic work by John Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America: A History of Politico-Ecclesiastical Relations (1934. Second ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), is absolutely indispensable as a work of reference. Long out of print it is available in electronic version through the UT library catalog (simply find the item and follow the links to the “electronic resource” version). 

Reading packet contents

Christopher Clark, “The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars,” in Clark,
Christopher, & Kaiser, Wolfram (eds). Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict
in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 11-46
John Lynch, “The Catholic Church in Latin America, 1830-1930,” in Bethell, Leslie
(ed.), Cambridge History of  Latin America vol. IV (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), 527-95
Hubert Miller, “Conservative and Liberal Concordats in Nineteenth-Century
Guatemala: Who Won?,” A Journal of Church and State  33 (1991):115-30
Hubert Miller, “Liberal Modernization and Religious Corporate Property in Nineteenth-
Century Guatemala,” in Jackson, Robert H (ed.). Liberals, the Church, and
Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in 19th-Century Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 95-122
Robert Knowlton, “Expropriation of Church Property in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
and Colombia: A Comparison,” The Americas 25, no. 4 (1969): 387-401
Jeffrey Klaiber, “Anticlericalism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in
  Lee Penyak and Walter Petry (eds.), Religion and Society in Latin America: Interpretive
  Essays from Conquest to Present (Maryknoll, 2009), 157-174
Jeffrey Klaiber, “The Great Temple of the Law. The Nineteenth-Century Origins of
Anticlericalism,” in Jeffrey Klaiber, Religion and Revolution in Peru (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 7-23 (inc. notes 201-4)
Jeffrey Klaiber, “González Prada’s Anti-Catholic Knee. The Rise of Radical
Anticlericalism,” in Jeffrey Klaiber, Religion and Revolution in Peru (Notre Dame” University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 24-44 (inc. notes, 205-9)
Pamela Voekel, “Liberal Religion. The Schism of 1861,” in Martin A. Nesvig (ed.),
  Religious Cultures in Modern Mexico (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 78- 105
Frederick B. Pike, “Heresy, Real and Alleged, in Peru: An Aspect of the Conservative -
  Liberal Struggle, 1830-1870,” Hispanic American Historical Review 47 (1967): 50-74
Terry Rugeley, “A Culture of Conflict. Anticlericalism, Parish Problems, and
Alternative Beliefs,” in Terry Rugeley, Of Wonders and Wise Men. Religious Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800-1876
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 169-202
Douglass Sullivan-González, “Carrera, the Church, and Nation Formation,” in
Douglass Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics: Religion and Nation
Formation in Guatemala, 1821-1871 (Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh, 2008), 81-119
Derek Williams, “The Making of Ecuador’s Pueblo Católico, 1861-1875,” in Political
  Cultures in the Andes, 1750-1950, ed. Nils Jacobsen and Cristóbal Aljovín de
Losada (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 207-29
Karen Mead, “Gender, Welfare, and the Catholic Church in Argentina: Conferencias
             de San Vicente de Paúl, 1890-1916,” The Americas 58, no. 1 (2001): 91-119
Arthur F. Liebscher, “Towards a Pious Republic: Argentine Social Catholicism in
Córdoba, 1895-1930,” A Journal of Church and State 30 (1988): 549-67
Patience Schell, “An Honorable Avocation for Ladies: The Work of the Mexico City
Unión de Damas Católicas Mexicanas, 1912-1926,” Journal of Women’s History, 10, no. 4 (1999): 78-103.
Gertrude Yeager, “In the Absence of Priests: Young Women as Apostles to the
Poor, Chile, 1922-1932,” The Americas 64, no. 2 (2007): 207-42
Enrique Dussel, “Catholic Church in Latin America since 1930,” in Bethell, Leslie (ed.),
Cambridge History of  Latin America vol. VI (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 547-82
Jean Meyer, “The Conflict between the Two Swords,” in Jean Meyer, The Cristero
Rebellion (Cambridge: CUP, 2006, reprinted 2009), 32-66
Matthew Butler, “Revolution and the Ritual Year: Religious Conflict and Innovation in
Cristero Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006): 465-90
Michael A. Burdick, “Perón, Religion, and the Catholic Church,” in For God and the
Fatherland: Religion and Politics in Argentina (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 45-81
Austin Ivereigh, “Catholicism and Peronism,” Catholicism and Politics in Argentina,
1810-1960 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 145-82
Margaret Crahan, “Catholicism in Cuba,” Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos 19 (1989): 3-24
Jeffrey Klaiber, “The Catholic Lay Movement in Peru: 1867-1959,” The Americas 40,
no. 2 (1983): 149-70
Hannah Stewart-Gambino, “The Chilean Church’s Rural Policy, 1925-52,” in The
             Church and Politics in the Chilean Countryside (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 63-89

Supplementary bibliography (suggested reading)
Kristina Boylan, “Gendering the Faith and Altering the Nation. Mexican Catholic
Women’s Activism, 1917-1940,” in Olcott, Jocelyn et al, Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern
Mexico (Durham: Duke U. Press, 2006), 199-222
Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French
Revolution to the Great War (London: Harper Collins, 2005)
___. Sacred Causes. Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda
(London: Harper  Collins, 2006)
Matthew Butler, “Liberalism, Anticlericalism, and Anti-religious Currents in the
             Nineteenth-Century,” in Virginia Garrard-Burnett and Paul Freston (eds.), in
             Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America (forthcoming)
___. ‘Religious Developments in Mexico, 1865–1945,’ in Stephen J. Stein (ed.), Cambridge
             History of Religions in the Americas (3 vols. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming
             as ch. 32, vol. 2)
___. Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán,
             1927-1929 (Oxford: OUP, 2004)
Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 1830-1914 (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2003)
Michael P. Costeloe, Church and State in Independent Mexico: A Study of the
Patronage Debate, 1821-1857 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978)
Margaret Crahan, “Cuba: religion and revolutionary institutionalization,” Journal of Latin
American Studies 17, no. 2 (1985): 319-340
___. The Church and revolution: Cuba and Nicaragua (La Trove: La Trove University Institute
             of Latin American Studies, 1983)
David F. D’Amico, “Religious liberty in Argentina during the first Perón regime, 1943-
             1955,” Church History 46, no. 4 (1977): 490-503
Helen Delpar, Red against Blue: The Liberal Party in Colombian Politics, 1863-1899
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981)
Michael Dodson, “Priests and Peronism: Radical Clergy and Argentine Politics,” Latin 
             American Perspectives 1, no. 3 (1974): 58-72
Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997)
Peter Henderson, Gabriel García Moreno and Conservative State Formation in
             Nineteenth-Century Ecuador (Austin: UT Press, 2008)
John Hoyt Williams, “Dictatorship and the Church: Doctor Francia in Paraguay,” A
             Journal of Church and State 15, no. 3 (1973): 419-436.
José Roberto Juárez, Reclaiming Church Wealth: The Recovery of Church Property
after Expropriation in the Archdiocese of Guadalajara, 1860-1911 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2004)
John M. Kirk, “Between God and the Party: The Church in Revolutionary Cuba, 1969-
1985,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 11, no. 21 (1986):
93-109
Jeffrey Klaiber, The Catholic Church in Peru, 1821-1985: A Social History
(Washington: Catholic University Press of America, 1992)
Patricia Londoño-Vega, Religion, Society, and Culture in Colombia: Antioquia and
Medellín 1850-1930 (Oxford: OUP, 2002)
Tomás Eloy Martínez, Santa Evita (NY: Vintage, 1997)
Paul Christopher Manuel; Lawrence Reardon; Clyde Wilcox (eds.),The Catholic
Church and the Nation-state: Comparative Perspectives (Georgetown:
Georgetown University Press, 2006)
Jesús Méndez, “Church-State Relations in Argentina in the Twentieth Century: A
Case Study of the Thirty-Second International Eucharistic Congress,” A
Journal of Church and State 27 (1985): 223-43
Lee M. Penyak and Walter J. Petry (eds.), Religion and Society in Latin America: Interpretive
             Essays from Conquest to Present (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2009)
John C. Super, “Interpretations of Church and state in Cuba, 1959-1961,” Catholic
Historical Review 89, no. 3 (2003): 511-29
Richard Trexler, Reliving Golgotha: The Passion Play of Iztapalapa (Cambridge, Mass.:
             Harvard University Press, 2003)
Derek Williams, “Assembling the ‘Empire of Morality’: State-Building Strategies in
Catholic Ecuador, 1861-1875,” Journal of Historical Sociology 14 (2001): 149-74
Mary Watters, A History of the Church in Venezuela, 1810-1930 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1933)
Gertrude Yeager, “Female Apostolates and Modernization in Mid-Nineteenth-
Century Chile,” The Americas 55, no. 3 (1999): 425-58

There is a vast literature in Spanish also, which covers any imaginable aspect of Church-state relations. A good starting point to explore this parallel literature is Jean Meyer, Historia de los Cristianos en América Latina (Mexico City, 1989)

Films

We will make time to view a selection of films that have a direct bearing on the religious question in Latin America, which may including some of the following: Nazarín, Canoa, Yo la peor de todas, ¡Qué Viva México!, El desierto adentro, El niño Fidencio: el taumaturgo de Espinazo

Primary documents

Select first hand documents will be supplied and distributed for discussion in class.

2. Assessment

There will be three forms of written assessment, in the form of eight short written papers (roughly one a fortnight); a mid-term quiz completed in class; and a longer final paper. There is no final exam for this course. Details on the mid-term and final will be given nearer the time. With prior agreement, small amounts of extra credit may occasionally be available by reviewing non-assigned readings by or attending relevant lectures outside class. The credit weightings for specific assignments break down as follows:

(i) Reading papers: 8 x 1-2 pp. double-spaced papers @ 5% each (= 40%)

These papers will take the form of single-question short essays based on the weekly readings. These papers are designed to ensure critical engagement with the readings and stimulate classroom discussion. Completing the papers involves a commitment as much from you (the writing) as from me (the grading). My commitment to you is that I will normally undertake to return papers within 7 days, just as you will complete your assignment in 7 days.

Reading papers are due in Weeks: 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12
NB: you are allowed one freebie reading review: that is, you may elect to omit one review with no penalty. In this case, I will simply duplicate the highest grade from the other reviews that you complete across the semester. All I ask is that you notify me at or before the relevant deadline (by email or in class) that you will be exercising this option, so that I do not grade the paper as simply missing and penalize it with a zero grade.

(ii) Mid-term quiz: short answer and/or multiple choice responses (20%). For Week 8

(iii) Final paper: 10-12 pp. double-spaced (40%). For Week 15
There are two tracks for completing the final paper, one following a standard or default essay question and the other based on a topic of your choice in agreement with me. Students writing more individualized papers have previously covered topics such as the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico; the Church and its links to the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua; and the conservative Catholic state pioneered by Gabriel García Moreno in nineteenth-century Ecuador. Substantial bibliographical research is required for both papers. There is no preference or bias in favor of either the standard or individual option, though the latter can often produce more interesting work.

Grading policies

(a) Weighting at a glance

Reading response papers             (x 8 @ 5% ea. = 40%)
Mid-term quiz                               ( = 20%)                   +
Final essay                                   (= 40%)
__________________________________________

                                                     = 100%

(b) Grading scale
UT now has a plus/minus scale for both coursework and final grades, and which will be used in this course. Letter grades will be given for individual assignments and are deemed equivalent to the percentage bands given below. At the end of the semester, the accumulated scores will be converted into a final % and final letter grade for the course using the same scale. The grading scale used in this course will be as follows:

To do well in the assignments, you will need to keep pace with the readings; develop your analytical skills (e.g. concerning different interpretations of Latin American history, not just factual recall); develop your compositional skills (by presenting a reasoned, opinionated case on paper); and improve your communication skills (by contributing to discussions). By the end  of the course, you will have an understanding of the theoretical and historical problems associated with organized religion in Latin American states and detailed knowledge of specific cases drawn selectively from across the region.

3. Course Format and Provisional Schedule

The course convenes twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Usually, but not infallibly, the format will consist of a Tuesday lecture/introduction followed by a more group-based discussion on Thursday, when assignments will also be due; roughly every two weeks you will be asked to produce written papers in response to the readings.

4. Classroom Policies

Attendance. You are allowed up to four unexcused absences. Each additional unexcused absence will carry a 5% penalty, applied to the course grade. If you arrive late, it is your responsibility at the end of class to ensure that you are marked as “present” for that day. For medical absences to be excused, a doctor’s statement/evidence is usually required. If you miss class, consult with me about catch-up procedures/materials for that day.

Late work. Please bring completed assignments to class on the due day. For work submitted late, and without demonstrably good cause, there will be a penalty of one letter grade per day, up to a maximum of three days & including weekends. Work submitted more than three days late will be given a grade of zero. I do not accept work by email attachment, except by agreement.

Extensions will be granted only by agreement: they are exceptional, not guaranteed.

Email. I will try to answer reasonable email queries within a couple of days. Please check your email for course announcements.

Plagiarism. Plagiarism will result in an official report to the registrar and/or automatic failure of the course (see UT policy below).

Other syllabus information required by the Provost’s Office:

Policy on Scholastic Dishonesty drafted by Student Judicial Services (SJS)
Students who violate University rules on scholastic dishonesty are subject to disciplinary penalties, including the possibility of failure in the course and/or dismissal from the University. Since such dishonesty harms the individual, all students, and the integrity of the University, policies on scholastic dishonesty will be strictly enforced. For further information please visit the Student Judicial Services website: http://deanofstudents.utexas.edu/sjs.

University of Texas Honor Code
The core values of The University of Texas at Austin are learning, discovery, freedom, leadership, individual opportunity, and responsibility. Each member of the university is expected to uphold these values through integrity, honesty, trust, fairness, and respect toward peers and community.

Use of E-Mail for Official Correspondence to Students
Email is recognized as an official mode of university correspondence; therefore, you are responsible for reading your email for university and course-related information and announcements. You are responsible to keep the university informed about changes to your e-mail address. You should check your e-mail regularly and frequently—at minimum twice a week—to stay current with university-related communications, some of which may be time-critical. You can find UT Austin’s policies and instructions for updating your e-mail address at http://www.utexas.edu/its/policies/emailnotify.php.

Documented Disability Statement
If you require special accommodations, you must obtain a letter that documents your disability from the Services for Students with Disabilities area of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement (471-6259 voice or 471-4641 TTY for users who are deaf or hard of hearing). Present the letter to me at the beginning of the semester so we can discuss the accommodations you need. No later than five business days before an exam, you should remind me of any testing accommodations you will need. For more information, visit http://www.utexas.edu/diversity/ddce/ssd/.

Religious Holidays
By UT Austin policy, you must notify me of your pending absence at least fourteen days prior to the date of observance of a religious holy day. If you must miss a class, an examination, a work assignment, or a project in order to observe a religious holy day, I will give you an opportunity to complete the missed work within a reasonable time after the absence.

Behavior Concerns Advice Line (BCAL)
If you are worried about someone who is acting differently, you may use the Behavior Concerns Advice Line to discuss by phone your concerns about another individual’s behavior. This service is provided through a partnership among the Office of the Dean of Students, the Counseling and Mental Health Center (CMHC), the Employee Assistance Program (EAP), and The University of Texas Police Department (UTPD). Call 512-232-5050 or visit http://www.utexas.edu/safety/bcal.

Emergency Evacuation Policy
Occupants of buildings on the UT Austin campus are required to evacuate and assemble outside when a fire alarm is activated or an announcement is made.  Please be aware of the following policies regarding evacuation:

• Familiarize yourself with all exit doors of the classroom and the building. Remember that the nearest exit door may not be the one you used when you entered the building.

• If you require assistance to evacuate, inform me in writing during the first week of class.

• In the event of an evacuation, follow my instructions or those of class instructors.

• Do not re-enter a building unless you’re given instructions by the Austin Fire Department, the UT Austin Police Department, or the Fire Prevention Services office.

This course contains a Global Cultures flag.

Description

This course examines Mexico's Revolution through both its armed and post-revolutionary phases, from 1910-40. We will focus on several key questions. What kind of revolution (agrarian, political, social, cultural) was the Mexican Revolution? What caused it? How ?revolutionary? was it? Did ?many Mexicos? simply produce many revolutions, or can broader narratives be discerned? What were the main contours of Mexico?s post-revolutionary regime, and how different were they compared to those of the old regime? How was Mexico different in 1940 compared to 1910?

The course will cover central topics such as the dictatorship of the Porfiriato, 1876-1911; the maderista revolution of 1910-13; the rise and fall of popular movements (zapatismo, villismo); the Constitutionalist successes of 1916-17; and the construction of post-revolutionary Mexico by Sonoran and later cardenista state-builders, agrarians, and anticlericals (1920-40). The course will consist of lectures, discussions of set readings, and occasional viewings of documentary or theater films made during (or about) the revolutionary years.

Grading

Map quiz (10%)
Shorter response papers (collectively 60%)
Final paper (30%)

Texts

Fuentes, Carlos. The Death of Artemio Cruz
Vaughan, Mary Kay, and Lewis, Stephen. The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940
Bethell, Leslie. Mexico since Independence
Gonzalez y Gonzalez, Luis. San Jose de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition
Azuela, Mariano. The Underdogs
Womack, John. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

Please check back for updates.

Prerequisite: Upper-division standing.

Please check back for updates.

Prerequisite: Upper-division standing.