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  • In the Country of Empty Crosses: The Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico by Arturo Madrid
  • Kathleen Holscher
In the Country of Empty Crosses: The Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico. By Arturo Madrid. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2012. 240pp. $24.95.

In the Country of Empty Crosses is a lovingly compiled, elegantly narrated collection of family stories. Beginning with his great-grandfather’s birth, and passing through the lives of maternal and paternal relatives into his own childhood, Arturo Madrid offers an intimate portrait of the shared experiences of a nuevomexicano family. [End Page 72] Accompanied by Miguel Gandert’s evocative, black-and-white photography, Madrid’s storytelling gently and powerfully reveals the layered intersections of kinship and landscape, and the emotional palate created from presence and absence, that have characterized northern New Mexican communities for over a century. For religion scholars, Madrid’s stories are also finely textured evidence of what he describes as a “historical movement” – the departure, beginning in the late 1800s, of Spanish-speaking New Mexicans from the Catholic Church to become protestantes (53).

Madrid’s narrative moves fluidly across time. In one episode, readers meet the author in the near-present, searching a ruined cemetery for familiar gravestones. In other vignettes, a young Arturo accompanies his grandfather as the man peddles crops and tends the acequia that irrigates their farm. The author shows care in preserving his ancestors’ stories, but In the Country of Empty Crosses is also about Madrid himself, his early formation, and (so he acknowledges) his adult regrets. Because Madrid slips often into the voice of a boy raised among Protestants, trained to keep “a respectful distance” from the Catholic doings of his neighbors, his book isn’t the place to find accurate descriptions of New Mexican Catholicism (179). The author imagines his Protestant kin as modern and historical, while relegating Catholic ancestors to folklore and prehistory. He recalls his Catholic great-grandmother and her companion, for example, through the eyes of a twelve year old – as “the wizened women that populated the fables and tales of my storybooks” (130).

Madrid’s stories do offer remarkable insights into the generations of Spanish-speaking Protestants who made their way in Catholic New Mexico. Protestantes “found themselves between two worlds,” one Anglo Protestant and one Hispano Catholic, “one that was hostile to them because they were apostates and another that kept them at arm’s length because they were manifestly the ‘other’” (71). Glimpses of daily life speak to the complexity of this position – made up, as it [End Page 73] was, of experiences of alienation from, but also sympathy with, both worlds. Madrid remembers, for example, the icy greeting his mother gave the Presbyterian pastor’s wife one morning as she dutifully delivered crates of produce to share with her. Interactions with the Hispano Catholic culture and community were just as complicated. When Madrid’s grandmother became a Protestant, she relinquished the treasured santos carved by family members. Her protestante children, however, attended schools taught by Catholic sisters and took part in the burial processions of Catholic acquaintances. Madrid’s account of the burial of a pair of Catholic schoolmates is poignant. “The bell tolled as the caskets were rolled out of the Santo Niño church and placed in the hearses,” he writes. “My father and I joined the long line of vehicles to the camposanto [. . . and] listened as Father Austin intoned the final prayers” (179). As the book’s title suggests, gravesites loom large in Madrid’s memory and storytelling. For the author, the Protestant and Catholic cemeteries of his childhood are telling symbols of the communities that maintained them – each cautiously distinct from the other, but always adjacent and, over the course of generations, thoroughly entwined.

Kathleen Holscher
University of New Mexico
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