The Penitente Brotherhood: Patriarchy and Hispano-Catholicism in New Mexico (review)

A gifted, lucid writer and a great narrator of fiction, the Canadian sociologist Michael Carroll takes a revisionist orientation in examining an often misunderstood group, the Penitente Brotherhood of New Mexico. Notoriously characterized for "public flagellation," the Penitente Brotherhood's practices have been sensationalized, objectified, and labeled deviant. Revisiting history by using secondary sources of data, Carroll presents the Penitentes anew; a final chapter is devoted to a psychoanalytic interpretation of masculinity, repressed desire, and angst among the Brotherhood.

  While most researchers acknowledge that the Penitente Brotherhood, a community of Hispano men who gathered based on common religious interests, arose out of the lack of priests in the Southwest during the 1800's, Carroll challenges this finding. Carroll asserts the emergence of Penitente activities reflect a search for patriarchal authority in response to changes brought about by Bourbon Reforms. In this vein, he contradicts the long-standing view that the Penitente Brotherhood either emerged as a product of Spanish Catholic settlers or was a carryover of the Franciscan Third Order. Suggesting the Penitente Brotherhood spontaneously emerged from economic and social changes, this compelling political-economic perspective contradicts existing literature, and boldly claims that Penitente rituals were not deeply religiously motivated and further, that Penitentes were not particularly religious at all. Carroll claims that moral guilt has prevented other researchers from attaining the same finding.

  Perhaps the biggest shocker in the colorful text comes toward the end. Carroll warns readers prior to embarking on that final chapter: "Anyone for whom a good cigar is always and under all circumstances only a good cigar might want to skip the next chapter. . ." (p. 188). Here, Michael Carroll suggests that what fuels the behaviors of the Penitente Brotherhood is a latent homoerotic urge, and that Padre Jesus is the paternal figure in the Freudian analysis of oedipal guilt and rage. The perspective recalls Carroll's theoretical addiction (evidenced by Carroll's former books): psychoanalytic interpretations of religiosity. Given that Carroll makes such suggestions of those Penitentes from generations past, and does not utilize primary sources of data to support such assertions, his ideas can only be interpreted anecdotally, as they are both non-verifiable and lacking substantiation. Carroll acknowledges this limitation and also states, ". . . I am not suggesting that Penitente males were predisposed to overt forms of homosexual behavior involving genital penetration" (p. 205).

  Presenting his interpretation as "a story" (akin to "ethnographic fictions" popular among some contemporary cultural anthropologists), Carroll's approach refreshes the literature. In this case, however, and different from other contemporary scholarly writing which attempts to hear the perspective of the subaltern, the Penitente Brotherhood has no voice in the text. Given the lack of empirical evidence, and reliance on conjecture, the story reads as flamboyant melodrama. The consequence of such a textual approach positions the Penitente Brotherhood as a monolith, in precisely the same exoticized terms Michael Carroll claims to challenge in the Epilogue.