Contentious Secularism: The Politics of Religious Violence in 20th-Century Mexico

Description

Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, an assistant professor of history and international affairs specializing in Latin America at George Washington University, will give a talk titled "Contentious Secularism: The Politics of Religious Violence in 20th-Century Mexico" as part of the Johns Hopkins Latin America in a Globalizing World works-in-progress seminar series, hosted by the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies.

This is a hybrid event; to attend virtually, please email Assistant Professor Casey Lurtz at lurtz@jhu.edu for a copy of the paper and the Zoom link.

Abstract:

The aim of this paper is to examine the multifaceted drivers behind Catholics' recourse to violence against Protestants in mid-20th century Mexico. While previous literature has emphasized the role of the Mexican Church's hierarchy in instigating anti-Protestant sentiments and actions during this period, in this paper I will account for both the transnational and more local dimensions of this violence while bringing to the fore the weight that politics and intra-community conflicts had in this violence's occurrence. Furthermore, I will highlight the role of the Mexican secular state in enabling and in many ways escalating sectarian violence in the 1940s and 1950s decades. Following Saba Mahmood's critical intervention into the ways in which we conceptualize the modern secular state, I will examine the ways in which the political, partial, and interventionist model of secular governance advanced by the Mexican state contributed to engender, rather than lessen, religious conflict.