Reconciling Modernity challenges the academic consensus of a simplistic Church-State reconciliation in postrevolutionary Mexico and reveals instead a cultural power struggle between entrenched elite factions, each intending to define Mexico's national identity. Using documents found in regional archives, Daniel Newcomer provides a new interpretation of how radically opposed conservative and revolutionary elites came to a political detente in the traditional Catholic stronghold of Leon, Guanajuato, during the 1940s. Leon's conservatives sought to limit the influence of the revolutionary...