In the last decade, a number of studies have explored state building in Mexico during the crucial period of the 1930s, giving us a much better idea of the fragility of the central government and the continuing significance of regional and local leaders as well as diverse forces in opposition to revolutionary projects. By exploring several regional cases of the relationship between the reinstitutionalizing Mexican state and the embattled Roman Catholic Church in the 1930s, Ben Fallaw shows us how tenuous the reach of the central government into the countryside actually was, how central state projects were greeted and resisted in different ways in different places, and how weak, ultimately, was the state’s centralized power. He presents us with a sophisticated and nuanced view of the ways in which revolutionary goals such as agrarian reform, government schools, and the Psychological Revolution against the Roman Catholic Church were negotiated and often...
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