The Cristero War in San José de Gracia

A Catholic uprising in a Catholic town

The Cristero War (1926 to 1929) followed President Plutarco Elías Calles's 1926 law tightening the Constitution's anticlerical rules. On 31 July 1926 the bishops suspended public worship, and the priests of Tepatitlán left to avoid arrest. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 14, PDF p. 3] Los Altos rose under the cry ¡Viva Cristo Rey! and fielded its own Brigada de los Altos. [per Wikipedia, Guerra Cristera and Batalla de Tepatitlán] San José de Gracia, still about 96.7 percent Catholic in the 2020 census, sat squarely inside that world. [per IIEG Jalisco, 2020]

Three reconcentraciones on Tepatitlán's ranchos

To cut the Cristeros off from the ranchos that fed them, the federal army ordered rural families into the towns three times. The first order ran from 23 to 29 April 1927. Families had three days to move, and anyone found in the countryside afterward could be shot as a rebel. Tepatitlán, a town of about 5,000, took in as many as 20,000 people. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 14, PDF p. 11]

The second order followed a failed federal encirclement near Mezcala de los Romero on 16 October 1927, and lasted fifteen days. The bulletin dates it 14 December 1929, almost certainly a typo for 1927. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 14, PDF p. 16]

The third began on 6 January 1928. Tepatitlán, then a town of about 8,000, swelled to some 20,000 people, with no food or sanitation to match. On 14 April 1928 General Andrés Figueroa ended it because smallpox and measles were killing people every day. Abandoned ranchos were looted and hunger followed. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 14, PDF p. 16] [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 13, p. 6]

The sources do not say whether San José de Gracia's families were marched to Tepatitlán or gathered in their own town.

Piedra Herrada and the fight for Tepatitlán

On 25 April 1927, Cristeros from across the region laid siege to Tepatitlán. Among the leaders the municipal archive names is Sotero Flores, of Piedra Herrada. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 14, PDF p. 11] The town held until the attackers withdrew. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 14, PDF pp. 11 and 12] Piedra Herrada had a chapel of San José de Gracia's parish, bordered on the west by the road to San José de Gracia. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 13, p. 25] [per Rincón Alteño, p. 54]

The Battle of Tepatitlán came on 18 and 19 April 1929. About 800 Cristeros under Padre José Reyes Vega lay in wait inside the town for some 500 federal soldiers and 1,500 agraristas under General Pablo Rodríguez. The Cristeros won, but Vega was killed. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 14, PDF pp. 23 and 25] On 2 June 1929, the Cristeros' top commander, General Enrique Gorostieta, was killed at the Hacienda del Valle, in Atotonilco el Alto. [per Wikipedia, Enrique Gorostieta Velarde]

The arreglos between the bishops and President Emilio Portes Gil were signed on 21 June 1929. On 23 June, the Cristeros of the Tepatitlán region surrendered their weapons at the Cine Morelos, facing the main plaza. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 14, PDF p. 25]

"Las Tormentas": the chronicle's memories

The chronicler Taurino Arámbula Vázquez called these years "Las Tormentas." Darío Gutiérrez López, of Lagos de Moreno, arrived as parish priest in July 1926 and soon had to stay away except for brief visits. In his absence the tabernacle stood empty, images were burned and the temple was used as a stable. [per Rincón Alteño, p. 61] Two carved archangels from the main altar were hidden and never recovered. [per Rincón Alteño, p. 55]

One day a General Márquez, with an escort of soldiers, rode in hunting the priests' helpers Jacinto Hernández, Emilio Ferreira and Arcadio Velázquez, to kill them. The teacher Tecla Hernández, her sister Mercedes, Margarita Aceves and other young women went out to meet him. Tecla laughed off each accusation, Margarita knelt and begged, and Tecla pleaded that the town's men were not to blame, they only obeyed, and invited him home to see the town's suffering. He relented and told the men to leave before he returned. He came back that afternoon, angry after a man found armed on the hillside was killed, but the three had already fled. [per Rincón Alteño, pp. 61 and 62]

Another memory predates the Cristero War. Archbishop Francisco Orozco y Jiménez once hid for days at the rancho La Esperanza, in the house of its owner, Justo Galindo, dressed as a rancher with a long beard and boots, and planned and sketched a chapel there to Our Lady of Hope. The book places this before 1918. [per Rincón Alteño, p. 58]

La Capellanía and a mediero's account

The tequila distillery stands on land of La Capellanía, a large hacienda that belonged to the parish of San José de Gracia around 1805. A general named Ibarra expropriated it, but the name stuck. By the end of the nineteenth century much of the land belonged to Lic. Ramón Rivera and then to David Hernández, worked by medieros, sharecroppers who split the harvest with the owner. Darío Gutiérrez renamed the El Buey parcel San Francisco; next to it is Santa Rosa. [per a typed page of local history, probably from the chronicler's later writing; it is not in the 1993 text of Rincón Alteño]

The same page sets down what Don J. Refugio Zavala, a mediero there married to Estefanía Velázquez, told its writer. He had already lived through the reconcentraciones with his family when he went back to farm the hillside around 1928. At the end of October that year, while he was watering a pile of cut cornstalks, two federal soldiers on mules called him a Cristero and asked where the rebels had gone. "Por qué no andas en la tropa con los tuyos," one demanded. Zavala said he had not seen them, and the soldier ordered him tied up. The page ends there, and the next one has not surfaced. [per a typed page of local history, probably from the chronicler's later writing; it is not in the 1993 text of Rincón Alteño]

After the arreglos: the 1932 temple register

The restrictions outlasted the war. In 1932 Tepatitlán opened a register of who was in charge of each temple. The handwritten entry for the Temple of San José de Gracia names Presbítero Darío Gutiérrez, 52, of Lagos de Moreno, son of Crisanto Gutiérrez and Anastasia López, registered on 24 July; he ceased on 31 October 1932. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 13, pp. 14 and 15 (scan of the register)] The bulletin's typed transcription misreads the name as "David." [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 13, p. 25] The details match the parish priest. [per Rincón Alteño, p. 61]

On 25 November 1932, a layman, J. Felipe Hernández, 42, married and a native of the town, took charge of the temple. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 13, p. 25] Under state decree 3742 of 28 October 1932, Fr. J. Jesús Reynoso took charge on 19 November, authorized to minister in this municipality and in Valle de Guadalupe and Cañadas. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 13, p. 24]

In the 1930s gunmen once fired on the teacher Anita Sandoval's house until Fr. Francisco Borruel rode in and calmed them. [per Rincón Alteño, p. 63] After the war the cedars and ash trees around the plaza were cut down, perhaps, the author suggests, to help people forget. [per Rincón Alteño, p. 40]

Darío Gutiérrez stayed until July 1944, when he was named a canon in San Juan de los Lagos. At his last rosary he spoke of his "15 años en esta tierra colorada." [per Rincón Alteño, pp. 63 and 64] Moments before they mounted to leave, the muleteer said "han pasado las tormentas." [per Rincón Alteño, p. 65] The parish's later history is told in The Parish of San José.

Martyrs and memorials nearby

On 5 October 1928, Fr. Tranquilino Ubiarco Robles was hanged from a tree in Tepatitlán's Alameda on the orders of Colonel J. de Jesús Lacarra, the morning after his arrest. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 14, PDF p. 21] He was vicario ecónomo of Tepatitlán's parish of San Francisco de Asís. [per Infovaticana, Catholic press] He was canonized with 24 other Mexican martyrs on 21 May 2000, and his shrine, built by the tree, was dedicated on 5 October 2023. [per Catholic.net and Infovaticana, devotional and Catholic press sources]

On 12 August 1928, ten men from the ranchos were hanged by federal troops at Los Adobes, near San Francisco de Asís (Atotonilco el Alto). Among them were a milkman, a barber and a Cristero soldier. The Atotonilco death record calls them peaceful day laborers. [per the Diccionario de Historia Cultural de la Iglesia en América Latina, a Church reference work] They were hanged by the Adobes river, and on 12 August 2000 local people raised a monument to Cristo Rey on the spot. [per a local devotional page transcribing Fr. Tiberio Munari in Semanario, 2001]

What the census shows, and what still isn't documented

The census counted 1,172 people in San José de Gracia in 1921, 756 in 1930 and 1,936 in 1940 [per the delegación development plan, IMPLAN 2021, p. 30, citing INEGI censuses]. That is a drop of about a third. A Tepatitlán bulletin notes that the conflict pushed rural families into towns, the better off to Guadalajara, León and Aguascalientes, and others to the United States. [per Tepatitlán archive, Boletín 13, p. 1] The census itself does not record why people left, so the war is context here. It may explain part of the drop, but no record proves it.

The archive confirms a Cristero leader from Piedra Herrada and the temple's caretakers in 1932. The rest, from the stable to Márquez and Zavala, rests on the chronicle and family memory. None has been checked against parish books yet. That is where this history currently stops.