20 Am I Not Your Mother? The majority of the texts gathered here come from the period after Martínez was named Archbishop of Mexico City in 1937. Although Calles’ presidency ended in 1928, he continued to be the puppet-master behind the scenes. Hostilities to the Church reemerged in the 1930s, and Calles assumed that his successor in 1934, Lázaro Cárdenas, would also be easy to control. About this he was mistaken, and Cárdenas exiled Calles from Mexico in 1935. In 1937 he took steps to heal the deep rift between Church and state through an amnesty law, and in 1938 he suspended the anticlerical legislation throughout the country. The pain the Church in Mexico suffered over these years can be seen in the fact that the number of priests serving in Mexico had declined from over four thousand before the Cristero War to 305 in 1935 (well over a ninety-percent decline). A number of the states in Mexico did not even have one priest remaining by this date. The works from this period repeatedly emphasize the special grace given to the Mexican people. The anticlerical forces of the Revolution and their predecessors in the 19th century had tried to sever the ties between the Church and the Mexican people in a bid to “modernize” and “liberate” the multitudes. Martínez’s preaching underscores the great privilege given to the Mexican people. The
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