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On 16 April 1938, the school teacher of the Mixtee village of San Andrés Dinicuiti reported that the Easter week procession had taken place, despite government regulations prohibiting public displays of worship. During the event, the faithful had marched through the streets shout- ing "Long live religion, death to bad government, death to the state governor, death to the president of the republic." When they arrived at the local school, they yelled "Death to the masons, long live religion" before denigrating the teacher's parentage.1 During the 1920s and 1930s, devout Catholic peasants throughout Mexico repeatedly denounced the presumed link between gov- ernment, school teachers, anticlericalism, and the masons. The popular con- demnation obviously emanated in part from the ecclesiastical hierarchy's fre- quent anti-masonic pronouncements. The Apostolic Delegate's charge that masons were "the cause of our persecution and almost all our national mis- fortunes" was reiterated in countless bulletins, manifestos, and pastoral let- ters throughout the country.2 In 1934, the Bishop of Huajuapam de León, which controlled the parish of San Andrés Dinicuiti, reminded local priests that they were to refuse to accept masons and members of the government party as godparents for baptisms, confirmations, or marriages.3 A year later, Mexican Catholic Action argued that government policies of socialist educa- tion and agrarismo were the "impious work of anti-Christian masons."4 However, despite this popular cross-class conviction, there is little historical work on the actual role of the masons in modern Mexico. By examining the archives of the Grand Lodge of Oaxaca, this article posits that Masonic lodges were key to the process of post-revolutionary state formation.5 As the state sought to assert control over a divided country, freemasonry's anticlericalism not only offered a model for cultural practice, masons also formed a vanguard of willing political emissaries. However, the institution's influence should not be overstressed. It was often curtailed by internecine disputes, political infighting, and an essentially conservative leadership.
The historiography of Mexico's masons displays a fruitful interaction between amateur and professional historians. On the one hand, a handful of masons, including Luis J. Zalee y Rodriguez, José María Mateos, Richard E. Chism, and Thomas B. Davis have written a series of extensive monographs on the development of freemasonry during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.6 However,...