Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla by Frances L. Ramos (review)

Frances Ramos examines civic and religious ritual performances sponsored by the town council of Puebla, colonial Mexico's "second city," from the late-seventeenth to the late-eighteenth centuries. She extends recent historiography on grand ritual in colonial Latin America, which tends to focus on ceremony's socially integrative function. Ramos does not deny this role. She investigates how the participation of various corporate groups from Puebla's racially diverse population in the city's rites honoring the king and Catholic holy figures served to solidify New Spain's inclusive but highly stratified social hierarchy. Also like other authors, Ramos studies the political messages embedded in ritual action. She particularly highlights the metaphors of king as head of the body politic and king as patriarch. She builds upon this historiography to argue that the city council used public ceremony to exalt the king and simultaneously to promote its own local authority as head of Puebla's political body and as father of the city's populace. More significantly, Ramos carefully unpacks numerous cases of ritual conflict. Generally dismissed as aberrations or instances of baroque obsession with honor and precedence, Ramos looks to the personal, economic, and jurisdictional tensions that underlay disputes occasioned during rituals. This line of investigation leads her to argue that ritual did not simply reflect the political environment, but rather that ritual engagement functioned as a form of politics, a realm in which competing groups vied for authority and on occasion reordered power arrangements.

The book can be divided into three sections. In the first (chapters 2-4), Ramos examines three types of ritual—ceremonies to honor the monarch, the viceroy, and saints—and their intended meanings. She argues that, despite the fact that the Bourbon monarchy sought to heighten the importance of royal rites and diminish festivities in honor of viceroys, the city council of Puebla continued to celebrate the entrance of new viceroys lavishly. The viceroy's power in New Spain was simply too great for the council not to curry his favor. In her chapter on religious festivals (chapter 4), Ramos seeks to complicate William Christian's concept of local religion. Whereas Christian posited two levels of religion for early-modern Spain—that of the universal Church based on the liturgy and that of the locality based on images and relics—Ramos suggests a three-tiered system for urban centers. Between universal/imperial and local/neighborhood religious practices, she inserts a middle level of citywide devotions. In the case of Puebla, these centered on the city's patron saints, especially Ss. Michael and Joseph. The book's second section (chapters 5 and 6) examines the economic base and local politics of ceremony in Puebla. Here, Ramos argues that the city council resisted later Bourbon attempts to reduce ritual extravagance in the name of economic rationality. It did so in part because ritual was a vital economic activity that allowed council members to enrich themselves and to dispense patronage to clients. The book's last section (chapters 7 and 8), which examines incidents of ritual conflict, is the most rewarding. The conflicts involved the city council and Puebla's cathedral chapter. Ramos argues that during the first half of the eighteenth century, individual and familial interests fueled most of the disputes between these two bodies. By 1750, however, the council and chapter fought over corporate status. The Bourbon monarchy's introduction of professionalized militias into the colonies and their entrance into ritual performances upset traditional arrangements and led to bitter disputes between jurisdictions. In Puebla's case, the city council lost cultural capital at the expense of the cathedral chapter and militia.

Scholars of ritual and colonial Latin America will welcome this fine addition to the historiography. Moreover, Ramos writes clearly and concisely and she tells many engaging stories, which make the book suitable for undergraduate classes.