Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest brings to life a classically misunderstood pícaro: liberal soldier turned Catholic priest and revolutionary antipope, "Patriarch" Joaquín Pérez. Historian Matthew Butler weaves Pérez's controversial life story into a larger narrative about the relationship between religion, the state, and indigeneity in twentieth-century Mexico. Mexico's Spiritual Reconquest is at once the history of an indigenous reformation and a deeply researched, beautifully written exploration of what can happen when revolutions try to assimilate powerful religious institutions and groups. The book challenges historians to reshape baseline assumptions about modern Mexico in order to see a revolutionary state that was deeply vested in religion and a Cristero War that was, in reality, a culture clash between Catholics.

This is the first and only comprehensive work to deal with a relatively unknown facet of Mexican social and religious history, the debates over the historicity of the Guadalupe apparitions and the historical existence of Juan Diego.

This book shows the centrality of religion to the making of the 1910 Mexican revolution. It goes beyond conventional studies of church-state conflict to focus on Catholics as political subjects whose religious identity became a fundamental aspect of citizenship during the first three decades of the twentieth century.

The Age of Revolution has traditionally been understood as an era of secularization, giving the transition from monarchy to independent republics through democratic movements a genealogy that assumes hostility to Catholicism. By centering the story on Spanish and Latin American actors, Pamela Voekel argues that at the heart of this nineteenth-century transformation in Spanish America was a transatlantic Catholic civil war. Voekel demonstrates Reform Catholicism's significance to the thought and action of the rebel literati who led decolonization efforts in Mexico and Central America, showing how each side of this religious divide operated from within a self-conscious intercontinental network of like-minded Catholics. For its central protagonists, the era's crisis of sovereignty provided a political stage for a religious struggle. Drawing on ecclesiastical archives, pamphlets, sermons, and tracts, For God and Liberty reveals how the violent struggles of decolonization and the period before and after Independence are more legible in light of the fault lines within the Church.

This book combines a bottom-up and top-down approach to the study of social movements in relationship to the development of constituent and constituted power in Latin America. The contributors to this volume argue that the radical transformation of liberal representative democracy into participative democracy is what colours these processes as revolutionary. The core themes include popular sovereignty, constituted power, constituent power, participatory democracy, free trade agreements, social citizenship, as well as redistribution and recognition issues. Unlike other collections, which provide broad coverage of social movements at the expense of depth, this book is of thematic focus and illuminates the relationships between rulers and ruled as they transform liberal democracy.

Este no es un libro de superación personal, pero me ha ayudado a ser mejor persona; no es un libro religioso, pero Dios es uno de sus protagonistas; no es un libro diabólico, pero el demonio hace de las suyas en varios capítulos; no es un libro triste pero logró arrancarme más de una lágrima; no es un libro de poesía, pero algunos versos susurran en sus páginas; no es libro de amor, pero definitivamente el amor es el centro del libro; en resumen, podemos decir que solo es una experiencia personal.