The Lawyer of the Church: Bishop Clemente de Jesús Munguía and the Clerical Response to the Mexican Liberal Reforma by Pablo Mijangos y González (review)
What was the impact? In the public sphere, Buffington proposes that the penny press played a considerable role in the transition from a Tocquevillian associate life, rooted in civic Catholicism, to a liberal populism (rather than a popular liberalism); and that it provided a way station on the road to a more combative, oppositional, and eventually revolutionary working class. The fiestas patrias, a favored subject for assorted scholars, made earlier associations self-consciously Mexican—and Mexican in a rowdy, popular, even rebellious way that was drawn as more patriotic than the carefully restrained celebrations of the bourgeoisie. The pejorative and racist moniker ‘pelados’ was—as with sans culottes—proudly adopted as the hallmark of a subversive, oppositional social class. In private life, meanwhile, the penny press reflected and fostered a pragmatic adaptability, a model for culture, practice, and gender relations that was an alternative— and a superior one—to that of the elites.