Mother's Day in Mexico

Government of Álvaro Obregón imported the holiday from the US in 1922, with the newspaper Excélsior making a massive promotion campaign that year. The conservative government tried to use the holiday to promote a more conservative role for mothers in families, which was criticized by the socialists as promoting an unrealistic image of a woman who wasn't good for much more than breeding.

In the mid-1930s the government of Lázaro Cárdenas promoted the holiday as a "patriotic festival". The Cárdenas government tried to use the holiday as a vehicle for various efforts: stressing the importance of families for national development, benefiting from the loyalty that Mexicans had towards their mothers, introducing new morals to Mexican women and reducing the influence that the church and the Catholic right had on them. The government sponsored the holiday in the schools. However, the theatre plays ignored the strict guidelines from the government and they were filled with religious icons and themes, and the "national celebrations" became "religious fiestas" despite the efforts of the government.

Soledad Orozco García, the wife of President Manuel Ávila Camacho, promoted the holiday during the 1940s, making it into an important state-sponsored celebration. The 1942 celebration lasted a whole week, including an announcement that all women could reclaim their pawned sewing machines from the Monte de Piedad at no cost.

The catholic National Synarchist Union (UNS) started paying attention to the holiday around 1941, due to Orozco's promotion. The members of the Party of the Mexican Revolution (nowadays PRI) that owned shops had a custom where women from humble classes could go to their shop in mother's day, pick a gift for free, and bring it home to their families. The Synarchists worried that this promoted both materialism and the idleness of lower classes, and in turn reinforced the systemic social problematics of the country. While nowadays we see those holiday practices as very conservative, the 1940s' UNS was viewing the holiday as a part of the larger debate on modernization that was happening at the time. This economic modernization was inspired by US models and was sponsored by the state, and the fact that the holiday was originally imported from the US was only seen as one more piece of evidence that it was an attempt at imposing capitalization and materialism in Mexican society.