Abstract
“Defanaticizing” the people was an important theme in Ministry of Public Education (SEP) reports from 1926–29, a time of religious crisis, church closures, and cristero violence. In this period, the aims of revolutionary reconstruction mixed political reforms, economic development, and sociocultural (religious, educative, pro-Indian [indigenista]) questions. The projects of indigenous incorporation and religious defanaticization must therefore be interpreted within a broader framework of postrevolutionary modernization, which achieved its greatest radicalism to date under President Calles (1924–28). A note written after a 1927 trip to Puebla by SEP Under-secretary Moisés Sáenz captures callismo’s incorporationist spirit. For Sáenz, it was necessary to “incorporate civilization into the Indian,” and vice versa, so that indigenous people would assimilate “white civilization” and transform it into a true “Mexican civilization.” The link between national integration and religious defanaticization was strong, and SEP missionaries were particularly concerned about “fanatical” indigenous resistance to modernization. Sáenz, too, concluded that indigenous resistance was an obstacle to “national redemption,” if not militarily (as shown in the 1926 defeated Yaqui rising) then culturally.2 This was clear in southern Mexico—in Chiapas, Yucatán, and Tabasco—where “rationalist” schools, cooperatives, and revolutionary leagues led the fight against “fanaticism.”
It is important to control that pueblo [San Carlos] because it is the most fanatical in the state. This year they celebrated religious fiestas with ceremonies from the time of the conquest, contradicting the socialist ideas of the state government.1
Translated by Matthew Butler.
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Notes
Carlos Martínez Assad, El Laboratorio de la Revolución: El Tabasco Garridista (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2004);
Alan Kirshner, Tomás Garrido Canabal y el Movimiento de los Camisas Rojas (Mexico City: Sep Setentas, 1976);
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Jean Meyer, La Cristiada (3 vols. Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1973–4), 2:148–66.
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Carlos Martínez Assad, Breve Historia de Tabasco (Mexico City: FCE, 1996), 161.
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C. Inchaustegui, Las Márgenes del Tabasco Chontal (Villahermosa: Gobierno del Estado de Tabasco, 1987), 259–303.
S. Cadena Kima-Chang and S. Suárez Paniagua, Los Chontales ante una Nueva Expectativa de Cambio: El Petrôleo (Mexico City: INI, 1988).
Leonor Correa Etchegaray, “El Rescate de una Devoción Jesuítica: El Sagrado Corazón de Jesûs en la Primera Mitad del Siglo XIX,” in Historia de la Iglesia en el Siglo XIX, ed. Manuel Ramos Medina (Mexico City: Condumex, 1998), 369–80.
S. Ramírez, “Cultura Indígena. El Pulimento Espiritual del Indio,” Redenciôn, 1 Jul. 1931.
Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo: Una Civilizaciôn Negada (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 2001), 73.
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© 2007 Matthew Butler
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De Giuseppe, M. (2007). “El Indio Gabriel”: New Religious Perspectives among the Indigenous in Garrido Canabal’s Tabasco (1927–30). In: Butler, M. (eds) Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230608801_12
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