Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present (review)

Jennifer Scheper Hughes' first book makes an important contribution to the burgeoning field of Latin American popular religion. Inspired and guided by subaltern theorists and liberation theology, Hughes, a theologian, employs an interdisciplinary methodology to create a biography that spans five centuries of the Cristo Aparecido (Christ Appeared) of Totolapan, a small town in the central state of Morelos. In relating the often surreal story of the appearance of the crucifix in Totolapan in the early sixteenth century, its three- century abduction in Mexico City, and its triumphal return home in the mid-eighteenth century, the author sets out to prove two interrelated theses. First, in accord with her subaltern and liberation-theology orientation, Hughes goes to great lengths to show that during the Spanish conquest and colonization of Mexico the Nahua people of Totolapan negotiated their own form of popular Catholicism, which to a large extent remains intact today. Second, Hughes posits that Totolapanenses, both past and present, express their devotion to their local Cristo Aparecido not in terms of suffering, as many scholars have argued, but through the motifs of beauty, tenderness, and power.

Proceeding chronologically, the author first develops her theses in the socio-religious context of colonial Mexico. In the first four chapters she makes a compelling argument that while the Nahuas of Totolopan converted to Christianity rather rapidly, they did so on their own cultural terms. Unlike Spanish Catholicism of the time, Mexica (Aztec) religion didn't value suffering per se, so much of the missionary emphasis on Christ's affliction fell on deaf ears. Moreover, the first generation of Catholic evangelists made little if any connection between the suffering of Jesus and the holocaust visited upon the indigenous peoples, even though the latter were victims of one of the greatest demographic collapses in the history of humankind. Fray Antonio de Roa, the Augustinian missionary who first cultivated devotion to the Christ Appeared, serves as a prime example. The ascetic's theatrical self-flagellations in public stressed both the affliction of Jesus and his own without making any kind of connection to the misery of a people who were dying at unimaginable rates from smallpox and typhus and other diseases brought over by the Spanish and their African slaves. Thus, the lack of an evangelistic connection between the suffering of Christ and the trials and tribulations of the indigenous peoples, coupled with the Totolapanenses' own interest in Jesus as a powerful thaumaturge and a divine figure connected to their sacred staple of corn, resulted in an indigenous Catholicism in which the theme of suffering was secondary at most. The abduction of the three-foot crucifix at the hands of Augustinian friars based in Mexico City marks the advent of an endless cycle of contempt and disregard on the part of both church and state for the folk Catholicism practiced in Totolapan and much of the country.

It is in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Totolapan that Hughes fully expounds her thesis of devotion to Cristo Aparecido as rooted in beauty, tenderness, and power. And it is here that this innovative study of lived religion evidences minor flaws. While the author presents solid evidence to demonstrate that devotion to the local Christ figure is indeed expressed in such terms, she fails to explore the layered meanings and interconnectedness of beauty, tenderness, and power. Hughes tells us that Totolapanenses and working-class Mexicans in general frequently employ the adjectives "bonito" and "feo" (beautiful and ugly, respectively) to characterize the people, places, and things that are part of their lives. This is indeed the case, but without any discussion of why this is so or the definitions of the words, it isn't so clear why or how devotees perceive the Christ as beautiful and thus primarily express their sentiments toward him in terms of tenderness. In my own recent...