UCLA

Twentieth century Mexico was a period of monumental shifts and changes. The century began in earnest with the Mexican Revolution in 1910 under the banner of free and fair elections without reelection. What proceeded were massive social upheavals and violence, ending with the new constitution of 1917. This new constitution guaranteed newfound rights as well as limited the power of millenarian institutions like the Catholic Church in Mexican lands. Tensions from the overt attack on religious freedoms culminated with the 1926-1929 Cristero War. During this short three-year period the Mexican Revolution was put into question, so much so, that it nearly ended the revolutionary process. The Cristero War was a moment in Mexican history in which religious freedom as well as community preservation were hard-fought. This process had massive consequences in the development of Mexico; yet it is seldom talked about in official narratives. It led to the creation of the PRI and the PAN, the centralization of power in Mexico City and other significant social changes. Yet there is a marked silence in political and social discourse when talking about the Cristero War, despite it being ever-present in literature.

“Memorias construidas, traumas colectivos, comunidades destruidas: la manifestación y mitificación de la Guerra Cristera (1926-1929) en Juan Rulfo, Agustín Yáñez y Jesús Goytortúa Santos” (Constructed Memories, Collective Traumas, and Destroyed Communities: The Manifestation and Mythification of the Cristero War (1926-1929) in Juan Rulfo, Agustín Yáñez and Jesús Goytortúa Santos) analyzes how Rulfo, Yáñez, and Goytortúa remember the Cristero War in their narratives. The dissertation argues that despite the strong censorship that the Cristero War received, to the point of not forming part of the official state narratives, authors such as Juan Rulfo, Agustín Yáñez, and Jesús Goytortúa Santos have participated in the preservation of the collective memory of the conflict through their narratives. This dissertation explores the connection between generational trauma, memory, and the impacts on community following the Cristero War and how it manifests in Juan Rulfo’s El llano en llamas (1953) and Pedro Páramo (1955), Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua (1955) and Las vueltas del tiempo (1973), and Jesús Goytortúa’s Pensativa (1945). The dissertation is structured around three guiding concepts: trauma, the impacts of trauma on people in communities (chapter 1), how community preservation and protection form part of the Cristero narrative (chapter 2), and how memories and collective memory are created and preserved through Cristero semiotics (chapter 3). My research utilizes five novels and a short story written in Spanish and published and/or written in the decades after the Cristero War. Ultimately, I claim that these fictions written in the post-war era have been fundamentally informed by the experiences of the Cristero War and bridge a vital gap in Cristero Studies and Mexican history in general: the human experience of the war and the diverse actors. I encourage a rereading of these works to bring light to a seldom talked about sociohistorical period in Mexican Studies.

The study and analysis of these works through the lens of the Cristero War offer an exceptional insight on the impact of the war on Mexican Culture. While the Cristero War has remained in large part housed within Mexican Regional Studies, most of the research has primarily focused on the historiographic work, while little has been done in the area of literary and cultural studies. Although most critics of Cristero Studies agree on the need to study the impacts of the Cristero War in cultural productions, the official narratives continue to argue that the war itself was not important or simply a reactionary footnote in the annals of Mexican history. Nevertheless, this dissertation argues that the Cristero War was an exceedingly important period in Mexican Development, providing nuanced readings of important literary works to demonstrate and prove how the Cristero War impacted each author and how each author contributes to how the Cristero War is remembered. My work fully centers the war, putting it into dialogue with other periods of Mexican history. My dissertation is, therefore, an original contribution to the ever-growing field of Cristero Literary Studies.