UC Press Blog

UC Press is pleased to announce the appointment of Matthew Butler as the incoming editor for Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos. He officially assumes MSEM's editorship role on March 15, 2025, at the conclusion of outgoing editor, Christian Zlolniski's term. Butler's first issue will publish in August 2025.

Butler is professor of modern Mexican history at The University of Texas at Austin. He researches and writes about the history of modern Mexico, the history of Catholicism in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, and rural and indigenous history. He also directs the Hijuelas Project, a digitization and research project on the history of indigenous communities in nineteenth-century Michoacán, Mexico. He is currently completing a monograph on the history of liberal Catholics in Mexico (working title: Liberty in the Church: Catholic Dissent in Modern Mexico) and an edited volume on Mexican American Catholic historian, Carlos E. Castañeda and researching two new projects: one is on the history of the modern Mexican bullfight and the other on English novelist Graham Greene’s odyssey in 1930s Tabasco and Chiapas. He is the author of Mexico’s Spiritual Reconquest: Indigenous Catholics and Father Pérez’s Revolutionary Church and the co-editor of Tras las tierras comunales indígenas. Los libros de Hijuelas y el liberalismo decimonónico en Michoacán and México y el primer concilio Vaticano.

We asked Matthew to tell us more about his scholarly background, his ideas about editing, and his goals for the journal.

What are your research interests and areas of expertise?

I started off as a Languages student and was pulled into studying history through my love of Mexico—I didn’t train as a historian and then specialize in modern Mexico. I am especially interested in historical topics that carry emotional resonance in Mexico: religious devotion, Church-state conflict, indigenous land histories, taurine history. Like many Mexicanists in the US, I also have a historiographical patria chica, which in my case is Michoacán. And because I now live in Texas, I have become interested in Mexican American Catholicism.  

My guiding theory, an intuition, really, is that religion has played a formative role in modern Mexico. Not as modernity’s eternal antagonist, but actually as a modernizing agent. Independence-era priests like Fray Servando—I am writing a chapter about him now—defended a concept of religious liberty that was very different to what people in the US imagine that phrase to mean. In the 1920s cristero war, which was the subject of my first book, I discovered that women had acted as de facto priests, decades before they could vote. Catholicism was the culture, everything went through it, and it gave meaning and projection to many people’s lives. My career has been spent trying to discern what the meanings in those lives might be. 

My interest in editing grew out of my research. When I started out, there was no concerted effort to work on topics that interested me, so I convened a group of scholars in Belfast, where I then worked, and edited a book. Twenty years and seven edited or co-edited books later, plus the occasional special issue, I am still editing. I think that the role of an editor is creative: to help authors to bring out the best of their writing selves and to develop their research insights, but also to develop collective contributions that move a field forward. It sounds solitary, but really you have to enjoy language and working with other people. It’s fun to edit the work of young scholars, especially, and in that sense editing can be a form of mentorship.

What drew you to the editorship of MSEM?

I have been a reader of MSEM since my graduate school days and an occasional contributor, both as a reviewer and author. So, I am a long term fan! More than that, I am drawn to MSEM because it is unique in terms of its vision and scope. MSEM is the journal of scholarly greater Mexico, with a remit to bridge linguistic as well as disciplinary borders. Where else under one roof can you find articles on Mexican history, cultural production, and social and political science, written in English or Spanish? MSEM is an important journal because it is one of very few outlets to provide a multidisciplinary, multilingual forum for the discussion of major Mexico-related topics. It encourages scholars to think about problems from outside the confines of their disciplines. MSEM has also made a commitment in recent years to disseminating the work of younger scholars and bringing it to a wider audience, and that can only be a good thing. I feel honored to become only the fourth editor of MSEM as the journal enters its fifth decade.

What are your aims for the journal?

From a historian editor, you should probably expect some continuity as well as change. As MSEM’s mission statement says, the journal is “a bilingual, international scholarly journal dedicated to providing a unique and essential forum for the dissemination of cutting-edge research relating to Mexico, broadly defined.” My first aim is to continue the journal’s foundational mission, not for its own sake but because it makes MSEM more encompassing than peer journals and vitally different to them. As editor I am lucky that there will be a bumper crop of anniversaries in the next few years, not least centenaries of the cristero war, the founding of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and the Great Crash. I would like to commission special issues on these topics and others that combine historical pieces with wider-ranging, interdisciplinary reflections—in the above mentioned cases, say, of authoritarianism and religious violence in Mexico now. And I hope, too, that MSEM can make a fitting tribute to the memory and exemplary scholarship of Eric Van Young.

I would also like to find new ways to increase MSEM’s visibility throughout Mexico, especially its accessibility to scholars in regional research institutes and public universities. Scholarly landscapes are not flat and an international, bilingual journal such as MSEM has a key role to play in publishing and reviewing the full breadth of scholarship produced in, as well as about, Mexico. Last, I would like to intensify interdisciplinary dialogue within the pages of MSEM. I would be interested in publishing more experimental research methods essays, where scholars from different disciplines can discuss ongoing projects and their methodological concerns. A journal like MSEM should be a toolkit for researchers and graduate students. 

            You can find out more in MSEM’s new Call For Papers.