Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present (review)

The basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City is the most visited pilgrimage site in the Western Hemisphere. After Jesus of Nazareth, her image is the most reproduced sacred icon in the Americas. Increasingly today the exuberant veneration of Guadalupe is spreading beyond Mexico to the United States and other places throughout the American continent. Shrines dedicated to her are as far north as Johnstown, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. A growing number of Latino Protestant congregations celebrate the December 12 Guadalupe feast; Protestant pastors and theologians like Lutheran Maxwell Johnson have deemed Guadalupe a source of "hope and strength to a people wandering in despair." Most importantly, she continues to appear in the daily lives of her faithful in Mexico and beyond: on home altars, t-shirts, tattoos, murals, parish churches, medals, refrigerator magnets, wall hangings, and in countless conversations and daily prayers.

Guadalupe and Her Faithful is the first book that illuminates the core of the relationship between Guadalupe and her devotees as Guadalupan devotion evolved from its origins following the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica to become a regional, national, and then an international phenomenon. Focused on the parishioners of San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas, whose congregation has sustained their Guadalupan devotion for nearly three centuries and under five different national governments, this volume is a tour de force of religious history, with a deeply theological soul. One of the great contributions of this book is that it by-passes the debates on the historicity and focuses on the history of the devotion as it has spread through generations. There is no other book in any language which traces the development of Guadalupan devotion in this manner.

Throughout the book Matovina grounds his analysis in the social forces and historical contexts which shaped congregants' lives and religious experience, while also offering magnificent insights on the Guadalupe-devotee bond which linked heaven and earth in ways that transformed parishioners' faith and everyday struggles. He shows, for example, the historical circumstances which led to Guadalupe's emergence as San Fernando's primary patroness in the century following the 1731 establishment of San Antonio as a rural settlement on the northern edge of New Spain. But in the process he also illuminates the theology of divine providence mediated in Guadalupan devotion, a fluid theology adaptable to devotees' physical environment, economic conditions, longing for security, racial mixing, and aspirations for social advancement, particularly in the settlements of what is now the Southwest like San Antonio, where isolation and the quest for survival bound residents more closely to one another, to God, and to celestial companions like Guadalupe. Furthermore unlike many studies of popular faith expressions which apply pre-determined theoretical constructs to people's everyday prayer, Matovina emphasizes "the insights, convictions, sentiments, and ritual actions of San Fernando Guadalupan devotees," stating explicitly that the goal of the volume "is to offer insofar as is possible a depiction of the subjects under study in which they would have recognized themselves" (21). He does this as only a devotee himself could do, and this is one of the great merits of this work. It is an insightful and truly objective view developed by an insider—a great work of theologian as organic intellectual.

Subsequently, Guadalupan devotion at San Fernando was a significant public expression of group pride and identity in the tumultuous decades following the U.S. takeover of the Southwest; in the context of their increasingly subordinate social status the brown-skinned Guadalupe and public processions in her honor were also a visible reminder of ethnic Mexican devotees' ongoing dignity as the daughters and sons of the one they acclaim as God's own mother. As successive waves of Mexican émigrés dramatically increased San Antonio's Mexican-descent population during the early twentieth century, the newcomers refashioned San Fernando's annual Guadalupe feast day...