Victory on earth or in heaven : religion, reform, and rebellion in Michoacán, Mexico, 1863-1877

This dissertation examines the origins, internal logic, and political trajectory of the so-called “Religionero” rebellion of 1873-1877 in Mexico’s central-western state of Michoacán. A widespread, popular Catholic uprising against the anticlerical government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, the Religionero movement mobilized thousands of plebeian, indigenous, and ranchero rebels in loose, mobile bands organized by leaders of rural middle-class extraction. By turns amorphous and strategically sophisticated, the rebellion proved difficult to suffocate, and it only subsided when a coup by the more moderate liberal strongman, Porfirio Díaz, toppled the Lerdo government in 1877. The first comprehensive study of the rebellion in English, this dissertation situates the Religionero movement in its larger political and institutional contexts and—through three local case studies—it examines the impact of religious change, agrarian pressure, and political polarization on the development of the revolt. It argues for the importance of the rebellion to the rise of the more conciliatory government of Porfirio Díaz, and it demonstrates that at the local level, the rebellion was as much as struggle within Catholicism for the soul of the faith as it was a traditional Church-state conflict