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This chapter examines the expropriation of American and Los Angeles-owned properties in Mexico between 1920 and 1940. As the Mexican Revolution shifted Mexico toward economic nationalism, Los Angeles investors faced the process of expropriation and profit loss. Under the Mexican Constitution of 1917 and from the presidency of Álvaro Obregón through the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, rural Mexicans pushed the Mexican state to confiscate foreign-owned investment properties, including agricultural land and oil properties. Harry Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, led many of the efforts to prevent the expropriation of American-owned investment properties under Article 27 of the Mexican constitution. Ultimately, however, American investors lost control of their properties through the expropriation process, adjudicated by the U.S.-Mexican Claims Commissions in the 1930s. Despite these economic losses, efforts to prevent expropriation and win compensation continued to link an urban core in Los Angeles to a Mexican periphery.

This chapter examines the political crisis in Mexico under the administration of Adolfo de la Huerta. In 1920 a new era in relations between Mexico and the U.S. began. But as American and Mexican officials sought a working relationship satisfactory to both sides, their respective publics continued to pressure them. Special committees representing American interests continued to negotiate with the Mexican government while Mexican workers sought the realization of their rights as written in the Constitution of 1917 and demanded that foreign companies accept national laws. During this period, nationalism was growing among the general Mexican populace and the elites, and they began pressing for the Mexicanization of all national assets.

This chapter provides the historical background for the Church-state conflict in Mexico, contextualizing Mexico’s popular culture with its long history of tension between the institutional Catholic Church and the Mexican state. It also narrates the events that led to the outbreak of the Cristero War and describes the development of the war itself. Additionally, it offers a detailed discussion of the two intersections between the Cristero War and Mexico’s “Great Migration” of the 1920s. The first was chronological: the Cristero War occurred at the same time as an unprecedented number of Mexican emigrants began leaving Mexico in order to work in agricultural jobs in the United States. The second intersection was geographic: many of these emigrants came from Mexico’s west-central region, where the war was fought most intensely. The overlap between emigration and the Cristero War set the stage for the development of the Cristero diaspora.