"Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos" Annual Lecture: Separation of Church and State in Mexico
Since 2021, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos (MS/EM) has celebrated cutting-edge research on Mexico by the holding of an Annual Lecture. Held in the Fall, the Annual Lecture serves to showcase the new or ongoing research of a distinguished Mexicanist working in the humanities and social sciences. The lecture is delivered both in person and as a webcast. To date, speakers have worked in the fields of ethnohistory, cultural and media studies, linguistics, and history.
Previous speakers have included the historian John Tutino (Georgetown University), who gave the inaugural lecture; ethnohistorian Kevin Terraciano (UCLA); literature and film scholar Paul Julian Smith (CUNY); and sociologist Víctor Zúñiga (Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León) and educationalist Tatyana Kleyn (CUNY), who gave a joint presentation.
In 2025, to mark the move of MS/EM’s editorial office to the University of Texas at Austin and the support given to MS/EM by UT Austin’s Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS), a Texas-based scholar, Pablo Mijangos y González, was invited to give the fifth MS/EM Annual Lecture. The talk was held on October 17.
Dr. Mijangos (Southern Methodist University) holds a PhD from UT Austin and is a preeminent historian of the Catholic Church and the law in Latin America. In his lecture, “Mexico Seen from Rome: Or the Peculiarities of the Mexican Path toward Church-State Separation (1821-1867),” Dr. Mijangos showed that Rome saw Mexico as a bastion of Latin American Catholicism and therefore adopted a more hardline policy towards the liberal regime emanating from Mexico’s Reform movement than it did towards national governments in other Latin American republics. As a result, Dr. Mijangos argued, nation- and state-builders in Mexico were paradoxically driven to enact Church-State separation decades before this became the norm in Latin America. Dr. Mijangos therefore showed how the Roman imaginary with regard to Latin American churches became a significant differential in Church-State relations in the nineteenth century.
From 2026, it is expected that the MS/EM Annual Lecture will alternate between Mexican and U.S. host institutions.