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The presence of the conservatives in Mexico, and their main characters, is long-standing. In Mexican history, some of the conservative movements have been present in religious thinking, especially in Catholicism, e.g., the quick departure from socio-cultural and political Mexican spaces as a consequence of the evangelical Spanish process, whose roots come from the XVI century Of the population in contemporary Mexico (7.7% belong to Catholicism, 2.5% to Evangelical Christians and Protestants, and 2.5% to non-Christian groups, while 8.1% do not follow a religion. Catholicism has a significant presence and influence on different forms of belief and practice in daily life in Mexico. This paper aims to highlight the role of the conservative movement called Frente Nacional por la Familia. It presents its history as the heritage of other conservative movements in Mexico, the stages of its formation, and the agenda and intervention in public life. The methodological approach is qualitative, using multi-situated ethnography. The results allow us to visualize the construction of the public agenda with legislative strategies that have operated with relative success and national presence, obstructing the progress of the proposals of feminist groups and sexual diversity and the defense of a national and cultural project that has as one of the symbols the traditional family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the material, spiritual, and collecting histories of both pre-invasion and colonial New Spanish (Mexican) featherworks. Rapidly and globally disseminated through religious and family networks, these objects traveled from Mexico to Spain, and other locations, before the end of the sixteenth century. This article explores the little-known history of a devotional featherwork Ecce Homo sent from Portugal to southeastern Africa in 1569. Originally a gift to Sebastian I of Portugal sent from the Spanish-colonized Americas, the Ecce Homo later entered the collection of Catherine of Austria, Sebastian's grandmother. Catherine presented it to the Jesuits accompanying the Portuguese evangelizing and gold-seeking mission to Mutapa, a vast kingdom that encompassed parts of present-day Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Its intended recipient was the Mutapa emperor. However, this was not a gift meant to grease the wheels of diplomacy, nor was it designated as a tool for conversion: it was, instead, meant for the Mutapa emperor "se se convertese"—if he is converted. That is, it was conceived as a gift from one Catholic monarch to another, for use in personal devotion. The perceived spiritual efficacy of these feather images —themselves recently assimilated to Catholic Iberia from polytheistic Mesomerica—thus extended well beyond the transatlantic Iberian realms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines popular indigenous religiosity in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca in the 1990s, in the context of a "progressive" pastoral program formed within the campaign of the New Evangelization, and attuned to the region's large indigenous population. Based on ethnographic research in an urban Oaxacan context, I offer an account of the popular Catholic ritualization of death which highlights its independence, and sensuous, material, collective orientation. I approach popular Catholicism as a field of potential tension, hybridity, and indeterminacy, encompassing the discourses and teachings of the Catholic Church in continuous interaction with people's own sacred imaginaries and domestic devotional practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of the conservatives in Mexico, and their main characters, is long-standing. In Mexican history, some of the conservative movements have been present in religious thinking, especially in Catholicism, e.g., the quick departure from socio-cultural and political Mexican spaces as a consequence of the evangelical Spanish process, whose roots come from the XVI century Of the population in contemporary Mexico (7.7% belong to Catholicism, 2.5% to Evangelical Christians and Protestants, and 2.5% to non-Christian groups, while 8.1% do not follow a religion. Catholicism has a significant presence and influence on different forms of belief and practice in daily life in Mexico. This paper aims to highlight the role of the conservative movement called Frente Nacional por la Familia. It presents its history as the heritage of other conservative movements in Mexico, the stages of its formation, and the agenda and intervention in public life. The methodological approach is qualitative, using multi-situated ethnography. The results allow us to visualize the construction of the public agenda with legislative strategies that have operated with relative success and national presence, obstructing the progress of the proposals of feminist groups and sexual diversity and the defense of a national and cultural project that has as one of the symbols the traditional family.

Global histories commonly attribute the secularization of the state exclusively to Europe. However, the church state conflict over these issues has been an important thread in much of Latin America. In Mexico, questions about the role of religion and the church in society became a major political conflict after independence. Best known for the Mexican case are the disputes over the constitution of 1857, which laid down the freedom of religion, and the Cristero Revolt in the 1920s. However, the history of struggles over secularization goes back further. In 1835, the First Republic ultimately failed, because of the massive protests against the anticlerical laws of the government. In the paper, this failure is understood as a genuine religious conflict over the question of the proper social and political order, in which large sections of the population were involved. Beginning with the anticlerical laws of 1833, political and religious reaction in Mexico often began with a pronunciamiento (a mixture of rebellion and petitioning the authorities) and evolved into conflicts over federalism vs. centralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1937 and 1945, numerous American journalists became gravely concerned about a rapidly growing Mexican Catholic right-wing movement, the Unión Nacional Sinarquista (UNS). Founded in 1937, the UNS spread rapidly across Mexico and by 1941, the Sinarquistas had formed numerous chapters in the United States as well. This coincided with the U.S. entry into World War II, and a heightened concern about the potential threat represented by immigrants loyal to Axis powers. Thus, U.S. journalists devoted significant coverage to the Sinarquista movement, casting it as a Fifth Column movement that was taking money, arms, and direct orders from enemies of the United States. In doing so, journalists largely downplayed the inherently Catholic character of the movement, as well as its deep roots in Mexican Church-state history, interpreting it instead within the framework of contemporary geopolitics. As a result, U.S. media consumers received an incomplete portrait of this particular religious "other". In this article, I focus on the writings of the journalists Allan Chase and Betty Kirk, in order to assess how and why religion and religious belief was de-emphasized in influential media portrayals of the UNS, and why this matters for historians and journalists interested in religious movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global histories commonly attribute the secularization of the state exclusively to Europe. However, the church state conflict over these issues has been an important thread in much of Latin America. In Mexico, questions about the role of religion and the church in society became a major political conflict after independence. Best known for the Mexican case are the disputes over the constitution of 1857, which laid down the freedom of religion, and the Cristero Revolt in the 1920s. However, the history of struggles over secularization goes back further. In 1835, the First Republic ultimately failed, because of the massive protests against the anticlerical laws of the government. In the paper, this failure is understood as a genuine religious conflict over the question of the proper social and political order, in which large sections of the population were involved. Beginning with the anticlerical laws of 1833, political and religious reaction in Mexico often began with a pronunciamiento (a mixture of rebellion and petitioning the authorities) and evolved into conflicts over federalism vs. centralism.

In this article, we trace the syncretic origins and development of the new religious movement centered on the Mexican folk saint of death, Santa Muerte. We explore how she was born of the syncretic association of the Spanish Catholic Grim Reapress and Pre-Columbian Indigenous thanatologies in the colonial era. Through further religious bricolage in the post-colony, we describe how as the new religious movement rapidly expanded it integrated elements of other religious traditions, namely Afro-Cuban Santeria and Palo Mayombe, New Age beliefs and practices, and even Wicca. In contrast to much of the Eurocentric scholarship on Santa Muerte, we posit that both the Skeleton Saint's origins and contemporary devotional framework cannot be comprehended without considering the significant influence of Indigenous death deities who formed part of holistic ontologies that starkly contrasted with the dualistic absolutism of European Catholicism in which life and death were viewed as stark polarities. We also demonstrate how across time the liminal power of death as a supernatural female figure has proved especially appealing to marginalized socioeconomic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1920s, conflict over schooling prompted the exodus of nearly 8000 Mennonites from the Canadian prairie provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan to Mexico and Paraguay; this is the largest voluntary exodus of a single people group in Canadian history. Mennonites—whose roots are found in the 1520s Reformation—are an Anabaptist, pacifist, isolationist ethnic, and religious minority group, and victims of a fledgling Canada's nation-building efforts. It is estimated that approximately 80,000 descendants of the original emigrants have subsequently returned to Canada, where tensions over schooling have persisted. The tensions—then, as now—are rooted in a fundamentally different understanding of the purposes of education—and it is this tension that interests me as an ethnographer and education researcher. My research is concerned with assessing attitudes towards education within the Low German Mennonite (LGM) community in both Canada and Mexico. Too often academic research is presented as a tidy finished product, with little insight shed into the messy, highly iterative process of data collection. The purpose of this article is to pull back the curtain and discuss the messiness of the process, including security risks involved with methodology, site selection, research participants, and gaining access to the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]