Photographic Postcard Commemorating Antonio Verástegui

Along with this contextual information, the postcard provides insight into the first decades of the twentieth century in Mexico as a phase of religious as well as sociopolitical upheaval. While anticlericalism generated new forms of militant Catholicism, the closure of churches encouraged lay actors to embrace experimental modes of piety such as spontaneous peregrinations to sites of purported miracles and unofficial martyr cults.1  Lay Catholic organizations such as the ACJM not only diverged from canonical definitions of martyrdom by venerating militant Catholics but also adapted methods of martyr memorialization to the age of mechanical reproduction. During the conflict and its aftermath, photographs of Cristero “martyrs” circulated widely in Mexico, the United States and Europe.2  These images, which ranged from funerary-style photographs of dead priests and combatants lying in repose to graphic portrayals of executions and mutilated corpses served an important religious purpose by establishing an audience for the suffering of these martyrs while also functioning as sensational forms of anti-state propaganda.3  The most durable example of this photographic tradition relates to the Jesuit priest Miguel Pro who was executed in 1927 for his alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate former president Álvaro Obregón. The photograph of Pro with his arms outstretched in the form of the crucifix as he faced the firing squad remains the defining image of the conflict and is still sold as a collectable print at the Sagrada Familia Church in Mexico City where his shrine is located. A photograph held at the CEHM Archive in Mexico City dating from 1927 shows this iconic image of Pro (located to the right of the crucifix’s shaft) and other martyr photographs assembled in the form of a makeshift altar, confirming that they possessed a strong devotional value. It is important to acknowledge however, following Matthew Butler, that religion and revolution were not “monolithic and irreconcilable” concepts, but were rather interlinked in complex ways.4  Just as Catholicism was “revolutionized” as a result of these decades of conflict, revolutionary action often assumed sacred dimensions.5  Emiliano Zapata, who was also posthumously celebrated as a martyr, led his soldiers into battle under Guadalupan banners and post-revolutionary politicians frequently appropriated religious concepts to articulate their transformative societal vision.6

• 1
  Matthew Butler, “Trouble Afoot? Pilgrimage in Cristero Mexico City,” in Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico, ed. Matthew Butler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 149-163.
• 2
  As with most martyr images, the geographical circulation of this postcard is poorly documented. We know however that other images memorializing Verástegui preserved in the AHUNAM archive were printed in Barcelona. Others are held in the Knights of Columbus archive in New Haven, Connecticut.
• 3
  As Tessa Rajak explains, martyrdom “demands a public, a response, and a record. In the Christian tradition, the terminology itself is a clue, for the deaths of the martyrs bear witness (martureisthai) to their faith in front of an assumed audience immeasurably greater than the immediate one at the scene.” Tessa Rajak, “Dying for the Law: The Martyr’s Portrait in Jewish-Greek Literature,” in Portraits: Biographical Representations in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire, ed. Mark J. Edwards and Simon Swain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 40.
• 4
  Matthew Butler, “Introduction: A Revolution in Spirit? Mexico, 1910–40,” in Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico, 2.
• 5
  Butler, “Introduction: A Revolution in Spirit? Mexico, 1910–40,” 11-18.
• 6
  For historical context on the mobilization of the Virgin’s image for political purposes, see Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “The Virgin of Guadalupe: Symbol of Conquest or Liberation?,” Art Journal 51 (1992): 39-47. An example of the iconography that developed around this revolutionary martyr cult is Diego Rivera’s mural Blood of the Revolutionary Martyrs Fertilizing the Earth (1927) at the National School of Agriculture at Chapingo. On the use of religious metaphors to visually articulate the redemptive nature of post-revolutionary educational and agrarian reform, see Lucy O’Sullivan, Diego Rivera and Juan Rulfo: Post-Revolutionary Body Politics 1922-1965 (Cambridge: Legenda, forthcoming), 159-204.

The postcard dedicated to Verástegui belongs to a rarer variety of martyr image that communicates martyrial sacrifice through the presentation of a relic, rather than a corpse or execution scene.1  The image encapsulates the religio-political concerns of the ACJM, functioning as both a form of contact relic and a piece of visual propaganda. Verástegui’s bloodstained textile evokes a long-standing Christian tradition of contact relics bearing miraculous bodily imprints dating back to the Turin Shroud, St. Veronica’s veil and, most notably in the Mexican context, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Fig. 3) who appears in the ACJM logo at the center of this composition. According to the legend, when Mexico’s first archbishop Juan de Zumárraga demanded that the Nahua shepherd Juan Diego provide proof of the Virgin’s apparition on the hill of Tepeyac­ in 1531, she projected her luminous image onto the peasant’s tilma (cloak). The photographs of Verástegui’s burial shroud serve a comparable function by authenticating a miraculous event. The forensic quality of these grainy close-up photographs and the captions identifying the “front” and “rear” views of its surface underline their evidentiary purpose, encouraging the viewer to read the photograph as a mechanically produced “vera icon.”2  In harnessing the medium’s documentary power to register death, these photographs recall the grisly images of executions, mutilated corpses, and remnants of war that circulated in the illustrated press and in postcard form during the revolution as proof of the conflict’s latest casualties. Particularly striking comparisons can be drawn between the content and testimonial purpose of the postcard’s imagery and a photograph of Agustín Víctor Casasola and other photojournalists holding forth the blood-stained clothing of the recently assassinated Francisco Madero and José María Pino Suárez in February 1913.3  As in the case of acheiropoieta (images not crafted by human hands) such as the Guadalupan tilma, the photograph’s claim to authenticity derives from the assumption that it is produced by the indexical agency of light rather than the creative intervention of an artist. In El guadalupanismo mexicano (1953), art historian Francisco de la Maza explicitly compared the creation of the Guadalupana to the photo-chemical process of photography (literally “drawing with light”), likening the Virgin to a camera and Diego’s cloak to film.4

• 1
  Another example of this variety of martyr image is a photograph depicting the perforated heart of José de León Toral, another ACJM member who was sentenced to execution in 1929 for assassinating Álvaro Obregón.
• 2
  In its photographic imagery and dual functions as relic-like memento and evidentiary document, this postcard powerfully recalls the Carte-de-visite photograph depicting the execution shirt of Maximilian von Habsburg who ruled as Emperor of Mexico between 1864 and 1867. See Eleanor A. Laughlin, “Carte-de-visite Photograph of Maximilian von Habsburg’s Execution Shirt,” Object Narrative, in Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (2016), doi:10.223322/con.obj.2016.1.
• 3
  Laura Levitt suggests that such evidentiary traces which are “bound up in visceral bodily connections” and offer testimony to violent traumas already function in a manner akin to contact relics. Laura Levitt, The Objects that Remain (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2020), 4. On the relic-qualities of this photograph from the Casasola archive and that of Maximilian’s execution shirt, which is specifically mentioned by Levitt, see Andrea Noble, Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 90-91. On photography and the Mexican Revolution, see also Olivier Debroise, Mexican Suite: A History of Photography in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001) and John Mraz, Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).
• 4
  Francisco de la Maza, El guadalupanismo mexicano (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1953), 58.