In the mid nineteenth century, Liberal and Conservative forces fought a series of wars--later called the Reform--to determine the place the Roman Catholic Church would occupy in Mexican society. Liberal state builders, for their part, sought to curtail clerical power and influence in the young, politically unstable country. From 1855 to 1857, Liberal politicians enacted a series of anticlerical decrees designed to forcibly sell off ecclesiastical property and separate Church and state. Conservative rebellions erupted in response. This study examines the two largest and least understood Conservative uprisings in this period in an attempt to explain why thousands of men and women gave their lives in support of a Church many historians have reviled as elitist and oppressive. Essentially, these rebellions demonstrate two modes of popular Conservatism: a pragmatic and a clerical mode.The first rebellion took place in northwestern Jalisco along the western foothills of the Sierra del Nayarit. From 1855 to 1873, Manuel Lozada and thousands of supporters gradually pushed back Liberal forces from Nayarit and there constructed a Conservative quasi-state. In this pragmatic mode of popular Conservatism, rebels and the Church represented two more or less distinct entities that negotiated to reach a mutually acceptable compromise. After decades of conflicts with priests over property that belonged to local confraternities, or lay brotherhoods, parishioners rebelled in the mid 1850s and allied with Lozada, who promised to restore their lands. Meanwhile, faced with a radical Liberal government in power in Mexico City and an expanding insurrection in its own diocese, the Guadalajara See compromised with rebels. Lozada sought and received a number of important concessions for his followers, including restored communal lands, resident clergy for the remote rural areas under his control, and a de facto parish based in his hometown.The second rebellion took place in Querétaro, but had a much broader national impact. Invaluable during the first war from 1858 to 1861, Tomás Mejía and his troops from the Sierra Gorda rose even further to become the Conservative point men during the Second Empire from 1862 to 1867. Whereas rebels in Nayarit negotiated with the Church, in Querétaro the Church's alliance with militant Conservatism was an internal affair. Throughout the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, priests had developed close ties with sierra communities by lending money, erecting schools, and serving in politics. Local caciques, in turn, supported the priesthood with their own family members, sending men and women to join the clergy across urban and rural Querétaro. Rebels were fighting for their families as much as the institutional Church. And unlike in Nayarit, clergy in the Sierra Gorda explicitly supported rebellion. As a result, Mejía's rebellion left the Sierra and entered the national sphere. Fighters were not simply defending local religious practice, but rather the legal and moral position of the institutional Church in Mexican society.Drawing on a wide variety of archival sources--ecclesiastical as well as civil--this study finds that the rural men and women who supported mid-nineteenth-century Conservatism did so for the structure and protection that the Church provided in their communities. Popular Conservatism in these regions reflected rural parishioners' desires to maintain this structure, and more broadly to maintain a Catholic order.
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