The online gallery of century-old photographs commemorates the Cristero War as part of a ‘right to memory’ initiative by Mexico’s main national archive.
A new, nationally important online exhibition, curated by Dr Lucy O’Sullivan, has gone live this month, commemorating one of the most significant internal conflicts in Mexico’s recent history.
The Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico’s main national archive, invited the Assistant Professor in Modern Languages at the College of Arts and Law to work on the digital exhibition, ‘Images of the Cristero War’, for Memórica. México, haz memoria – a digital repository established by the Mexican government in 2020 with the aim of promoting the ‘right to memory in Mexico’.
Based on 40 photographs drawn from nine national and regional archives, the exhibition represents the first attempt to commemorate the Cristero War at a government level as we approach the centenary in 2026.
The Cristero War (1926-1929) erupted when thousands of Catholics rebelled against the country’s anticlerical government, installed following Mexico’s famous revolution from 1910-1917. The war had profound regional and national repercussions for the country, but despite this, it remains poorly understood in Mexico and is largely excluded from school syllabi.
Rubén Amador, Head of Digital Content for the Archivo General de la Nación, explains that: “one of the aims of our digital repository is to disseminate the voices of memories which, for various reasons, have been marginalised within official discourses and historical narratives.
“The exhibition ‘Images of the Cristero War’ provides us with an opportunity to understand a historical process which, although largely unknown and rarely explained, defined various aspects of contemporary Mexico.”
Dr O’Sullivan also worked with historian and secondary school history teacher Yves Solís Nicot to design a learning resource in Spanish to accompany the exhibition. The didactic guide aligns with the new framework for history introduced by Mexico’s Ministry of Education, with its emphasis on the development of critical thinking and ‘historical consciousness’.
The exhibition stems from Dr O’Sullivan’s current book project, which re-examines this period of religious conflict in Mexico from the perspective of visual culture and particularly photography.
Assistant Professor in Modern Languages
Biographical and contact information for Dr Lucy O'Sullivan, Assistant Professor in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham.
