Church and Revolution in Mexico: The Cristero War

June 18, 2012 - 4:00 pm

“During the 1920s, Mexico was thrust into civil war when President Plutarco Calles (Rubén Blades) outlawed Catholicism, banned religious activity, confiscated all church property and exiled clergy… Rebel factions formed by schoolboys to farmers to artisans rose up and thus started the Cristero War. Andy Garcia gives an excellent performance as the legendary General Gorostieta, a militaristic mastermind hired to lead the directionless rebels against Calles.”
— Justin Craig, FoxNews.com

Claudia Nemer is Producer of Cristiada/For Greater Glory (Mexico – U.S.) 2009 – 2012. She is Director of Dos Corazones / New Land Films at Dos Corazones. Her projects include La Leyenda del Tesoro 2009 – 2011; El Gran Milagro/The Greatest Miracle (Mexico – U.S.) 2008 – 2011.

Seth Fein is Director of Graduate Studies of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia, where he teaches. His book Transnational Projections: The United States in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema will be published by Duke. He is now working on a new book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and a documentary, Our Neighborhood, about Washington’s mobilization of Latin American TV to contain Castro across the 1960s. He is also making with Sophie Ziner, Radio Controlled, a documentary about the subculture of RC car and plane enthusiasts in NYC. He consulted on and appeared in the BBC’s The Thirties in Colour about documentary film culture and Mexico in the 1930s. Professor Fein also teaches at Barnard, where his courses include The Idea of the Western Hemisphere and Projecting American Empire on Film.

Jerry W. Carlson is a specialist in narrative theory, global independent film, and the cinemas of the Americas. Professor Carlson is Director of the Cinema Studies Program in the Department of Media & Communication Arts at The City College and a member of the faculties of French, Film Studies, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has lectured at Stanford, Columbia, Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (Cuba), the University of Paris, and the University of Sao Paulo, among others.

Araceli Tinajero is Associate Professor of Spanish at The Graduate Center and City College of New York. She is the author of Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano; El lector de tabaquería (Eng. El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader); and Kokoro, una mexicana en Japón. Tinajero is the editor of Cultura y letras cubanas en el siglo XXI; of Exilio, cosmopolitismo y globalización en el arte y las literaturas hispánicas (forthcoming); and the co-editor of Technology and Culture in Twentieth Century Mexico (U of Alabama Press, 2013). She is the founder of The City Reading Club and the co-founder of the Mexico Study Group at the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies. Tinajero is the Book Review Editor of Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World.