Counterrevolutionary Women: Race, Gender, and Mexico's Unfinished Religious Restoration, 1917-1946

Following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Mexico City's upper-class laywomen were at the helm of a formidable religious movement that strove to counter state-mandated secular education and its perceived corruption of Mexican society. Known as the Acción Católica Mexicana, or Mexican Catholic Action, these women used anti-communist discourses to counter the specter of youth and workers' radicalization. With a discourse that included an antisemitic construction of a "Bolshevik" Other, Acción Católica Mexicana also distrusted youth culture and feared the mobilization of Indigenous and mixed-race working women.

In Counterrevolutionary Women Ricardo J. Álvarez-Pimentel traces the evolution of Mexican church-state relations by examining transformations within laywomen's respective ideologies and political projects. He considers how relatively overlooked print-media sources--namely pedagogical materials and youth and women's magazines--became important sites of ideological production through which the women of Acción Católica Mexicana came to perceive a nation under siege and their role in "saving" it. Álvarez-Pimentel explores how women used these materials to construct new understandings of femininity that allowed for militant public activism while emphasizing "duties" in the home.

At the same time, Counterrevolutionary Women examines how religious language became a platform for racial discourse and uncovers how pedagogical materials couched projects of racial subjugation within the rhetoric of spiritual uplift, religious unity, and moral regeneration. Deepening scholarly understanding of political Catholicism as both a gendered and racial phenomenon, this innovative study uncovers how activists themselves were divided along class and generational lines, as well as between upper-class laywomen and Mexico's Indigenous populations.