RT Journal Article
T1 One Cross, Two Continents: How Catholic Women’s Resistance in Mexico Inspired Their Spanish Counterparts (1926–1936)
A1 Rodríguez López, Sofía
A1 Cazorla Sánchez, Antonio
AB The Mexican Cristero experience constituted a political laboratory and a school of resistance providing blueprints of action later exercised in Spain. With barely ten years between their own countries’ conflicts, the ladies of Catholic Action—in Mexico and then in Spain—organized themselves, first, as a passive resistance, and then both used the same justifications to support the use of political violence. News of the Mexican Catholic women’s experience had arrived across the Atlantic in the chronicles of Spanish newspapers beginning in the late 1920s and in the edifying, right-leaning novels that were spread, above all, in Spanish Catholic schools during the 1930s. This helps us understand the parallels between the actions, liaisons, informants, and weapons suppliers of the Brigades and other Catholic organizations in Mexico and the members of the women’s fifth column in Spain. Perhaps the contemporary presence in the public sphere of European fascists resonated more among young urban Madrid or Barcelona women during the Spanish Civil War, but, without a doubt, the social origin, experience, and cultural heritage of Mexican women was more in line with the efforts of conservative Spanish women all over the country during the conflict. In both cases, the defence of religion and their Catholic identity was at the forefront of their efforts and gave coherence to what might, at times, appear to be diverse political projects.
PB Cambridge University Press
YR 2025
FD 2025
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/124962
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/124962
LA eng
NO Cazorla-Sánchez A, Rodríguez-López S. One Cross, Two Continents: How Catholic Women’s Resistance in Mexico Inspired Their Spanish Counterparts (1926–1936). Comparative Studies in Society and History. Published online 2025:1-22. doi:10.1017/S0010417525100212
NO © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Society for the Comparative Study of Society andHistory. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
NO Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
DS Docta Complutense
RD 30 dic 2025