The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 102, July 1998 - April, 1999 Page: 250
559 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
o08, 153). Novices will no doubt wonder why Catarino Garza had to editorialize
and agitate against the lynching of Mexicans in the 188os (p. 131), but the re-
production of the postcard showing three Texas Rangers on horseback dragging
four dead, lassoed Mexicans (p. 146) might provide an answer. A few sentences
had to suffice to deal with the repatriation of thousands of Mexicans in the
192os but the photo chosen captures the poignancy of the moment (p. 171).
Thompson has provided an excellent picture book which will appeal to both
historians and the general reader. Almost every South Texas community can
find its origins and some glimpse of itself. Much of the visual record was unavail-
able before and the textual descriptions are bound to convince readers to delve
further into the exciting history of South Texas.
Texas A &M Internatzonal University JosE ROBERTO JUAREZ
Mexico's Hidden Revolution: The Catholic Church in Law and Polztzcs since r929. By
Peter Lester Reich. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.
Pp. x+193. Preface, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0-268-
01418-3. $28.95, cloth).
Peter Lester Reich is a member of the faculty at Whittier Law School in Los
Angeles, California. In addition to his credentials earned for the world of law,
which include aJ.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, Reich possess-
es a doctorate in Latin American history from the University of California at Los
Angeles. It is from that scholarly background that he wrote Mexzco's Hidden Revo-
lution: The Catholic Church in Law and Politics since 1929. His is a fascinating study
that offers a revisionist view of Church-State interaction in Mexico worthy of seri-
ous consideration. In Mexico's Hidden Revolutzon, Reich focuses on the period im-
mediately following the Cristero War of 1926-1929 through 1942. But, he sees
his interpretation emerging from Church-State cooperation evidenced through-
out the early decades of New Spain and applicable forward, even beyond 1942,
to the present day. He argues that the Mexican Church and government have
historically drawn upon a legacy of accommodation with each other: one that
characterized the Spanish colonial era and in modern times worked to negate
the official anticlerical character of the State. At the same time it acted to mar-
ginalize pressure against the government from Catholic extremist factions.
In the process, an environment of unofficial extralegal institutional coopera-
tion between the two matured, contradicting the perception of much of the con-
temporary scholarly academy that the modern Church and State consistently
operated in an antagonist manner toward one another. Such was, Reich main-
tains, a heritage set deep in history. Relying heavily on primary resources-much
of the material never before studied-Reich makes a convincing case for his per-
spective.
Specifically, Reich asserts that from the anti-Church nature of the Mexican
Constitution of 1917 came the "current scholarly interpretations and official
Mexican government ideology [that] portray the postrevolutionary period, par-
ticularly the 1930s, as a time of intense Church-State conflict, when the Consti-October
250
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 102, July 1998 - April, 1999, periodical, 1999; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101219/m1/293/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.