The Catholic Historical Review

Primitive Revolution: Restorationist Religion and the Idea of the Mexican Revolution, 1940–1968, examines the histories of three religious communities founded in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution. The book follows the life of each community’s founding patriarch from early in the century through the 1960s. The author argues that each community attempted its own restoration of an idealized Christianity, seen as a basic way of life for its members; in doing so, they charted out a particular and idealized form of modern citizenship in revolutionary Mexico. Through case studies, Dormady argues that community building in the context of weak or inconsistent rule of law can work in different ways: sometimes the victim of a centralizing state, but also capable of engaging the law, taking advantage of its uneven dominion, and molding it to fit particularist objectives or ideals.

The material is organized around three case studies and a final interpretive chapter. The central themes of these studies focus on the origins of each church; the problems confronted by founders in establishing community; relations with government and ecclesiastical authorities; and those resulting from the establishment of a religiously grounded community. Chapter 1 reconstructs the history of the Light of the World, an Evangelical Pentecostal church in Guadalajara. Its history follows the life story of its founding patriarch, Eusebio Joaquin Gonzalez, known to his faithful as Aaron. Chapter 2 examines the Mormon-based Fullness of the Kingdom of God Church, established in Mexico state. Margarito Bautista founded the church and, with it, a community known as New Jerusalem in the small market town of Ozumba. Chapter 3 follows the history of the Our Lady, Help of Christians colony, a Catholic community established in southern Baja California. Its founder, Salvador [End Page 402] Abascal, led a faction of the conservative lay-Catholic political group known as the National Synarchist Union and founded a short-lived religious community in the desert. The final chapter ties the three cases together through a series of overarching themes examining the stress points between local practice and the sphere of law; the absence of law and its effect on religious devotion and citizen’s rights; and the tension between “informal” religious, corporate identity and “formal” secular identities (p. 131). The discussion echoes James C. Scott’s scholarship on community resistance and work by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent on state formation. It moves the discussion forward by placing religiosity in the center of local identities.

Gathering the sources used for this book was a difficult task. These communities were formed at the edge of civil society, resisted publicizing their inner workings, and left little written testimony. For the Light of the World church, Dormady made creative use of its official histories. He reconstructed the story of New Jerusalem through testimonial writing by several community members; his interpretation compared the writing of rival members, and complemented it with Bautista’s own religious writings. The history of Our Lady, Help of Christians colony was limited by a paucity of sources. Abascal’s own autobiography dominates the chapter, complemented to some extent by sources culled from Mexico’s National Archive. Here, Dormady might have included histories of Abascal’s rivals—Juan Ignacio Padilla and Antonio Santa Cruz—as well as Abascal’s own vast writing. Furthermore, the intelligence community in Washington was familiar with Abascal due to his philo-fascist views, and it is surprising that Dormady did not follow this line of research.

Despite these minor criticisms, Primitive Revolution is a fascinating read for historians of Mexico, religion, and utopian societies. It will be popular in undergraduate classrooms, but scholars should also be interested in its case studies. The book argues successfully that postrevolutionary Mexico was a diverse society, and that this ostensibly Catholic nation was host to many devotions, each deeply invested in citizenship and the politics of revolution...