This book significantly advances the paradigm of studying state formation as “negotiation of rule,” exemplified by Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent’s pathbreaking collection, Everyday Forms of State Formation (1994), by demonstrating that it can help us to answer comparative questions. Purnell seeks to explain why a socially, economically, and ethnically diverse set of rural actors rebelled against the state under the banner of the cristeros in the period 1926–29, to be opposed by equally diverse agrarista peasants who backed a secularizing state, despite, in many cases, retaining personal Catholic convictions. Although the cristiada has evoked a distinguished historiography, this book provides new and more satisfying answers to the two major conundrums. Why was the rebellion concentrated in the center-west of Mexico? What determined alignment with the cristero and agrarista causes?
Purnell’s insightful analysis of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century history is capped by close discussion of three sub-regions of Michoacán: the agrarista...
