Religious Culture in Modern Mexico (review)

Religious Culture in Modern Mexico consists of eleven excellent essays, including an introduction by the volume’s editor, Martin Austin Nesvig. Organized chronologically and focusing on the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the essays cover a wide range of actors, including indigenous peoples, women, liberal politicians, revolutionaries, Catholic clergy, Mennonites, and popular saints. All the essays, however, contribute to the overarching argument of the book: in spite of ongoing efforts by liberal and revolutionary governments over the course of a century to all but eliminate the social and political role of the Church, deprive it of its economic resources, exercise control over its personnel, and proscribe all forms of public worship, Mexico remains a profoundly religious and a predominantly Catholic place. Religious beliefs and practices continue to shape the daily lives of many Mexicans, as well as their understandings of gender roles, community, justice, and good (and bad) government.

Essays by Matthew D. O’Hara (“Miserables and Citizens: Indians, Legal Pluralism, and Religious Practice in Early Republican Mexico”) and Daniela Traffano (“‘Para formar el corazón de los jóvenes’: Processes of Change in Collective Religiosity in Nineteenth-Century Oaxaca”) consider the limited impact of liberal reforms on indigenous communities, where ethnic identity, religious and political authority, and communal economic resources tend to be intertwined in complex and enduring ways. Silvia Marina Arrom (“Mexican Laywomen Spearhead a Catholic Revival: The Ladies of Charity, 1863–1910”) and Edward Wright-Rios (“Visions of Women: Revelation, Gender, and Catholic Resurgence”) explore the role of women in propagating both orthodox and somewhat less than orthodox Catholic values and practices. In spite of official anticlericalism, not all liberals were antireligious, nor were the clergy uniformly antiliberal. Pamela Voekel (“Liberal Religion: The Schism of 1861”) looks at liberal (or constitutional) priests, and Alejandro Cortazar (“Priests and Caudillos in the Novel of the Mexican Nation”) looks at religious liberals. The essay by Mark Overmyer-Velázquez (“‘A New Political Religious Order’: Church, State, and Workers in Porfirian Mexico”) argues that Catholic and secular elites shared a common concern with the sobriety, hygiene, morals, industriousness, and frugality of the working class in the city of Oaxaca. Jason Dormandy (“Rights, Rule, and Religion: Old Colony Mennonites and Mexico’s Transition to the Free Market, 1920–2000”) shows how Protestants were often exempted from anticlerical laws, such as that prohibiting foreign clergy, because of the revolutionary government’s belief that Protestantism, unlike Catholicism, could act as an engine of capitalist economic development. In “Juan Soldado: The Popular Canonization of a Confessed Rapist-Murderer,” Paul J. Vanderwood presents a shorter version of his book Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (Durham, NC, 2004), explaining how a reviled criminal was transformed, through his brutal death, into a popular saint and exploring the relationship between this particular instance of popular religiosity and broader popular views of good government.

In the volume’s concluding essay, Adrian Bantjes (“Religion and the Mexican Revolution: Toward a New Historiography”) examines the relative dearth of scholarly studies of religion (as opposed to Church-state relations) during the Mexican Revolution, discusses some recent works that do focus on the connections between popular religiosity and revolutionary politics, and makes a convincing case for a good deal of further research on the subject.

All the essays are well written and rooted in considerable scholarly research. The book will, of course, be of interest to scholars of Mexican politics and religion, but it should also appeal to anyone concerned with the role of religion and the Catholic Church in the modern era.