Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions in U.S. Catholicism (review)

As Hispanics have become the largest U.S. minority group, scholars of American religion are increasingly being asked to reflect upon the Latino contribution to religious history and experience. This volume is an important contribution to American religious studies since it is the first edited book dedicated entirely to the Mexican religious experience in the United States. The editors organized four case studies and two theological reflections.

Timothy Matovina offers a rich historical account of Mexican religious practices in San Antonio, Texas, from 1900 to 1940. He details the life of the San Fernando Cathedral, which has been the central parish for Mexican-descent Texans since its founding in 1731. In the time period studied by Matovina, he highlights the role that exiles from the Mexican revolution (1910-1920) and the later Cristero period played in the life of San Antonio, which became the primary center for exiled Mexican bishops, clergy, and religious. These exile groups reinforced a Mexican shape to religious life among the established Mexican Americans and excluded a U.S. (Protestant) religious orientation. Next, Karen Mary Davalos examines the Via Crucis in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood and the ways a traditional Catholic and Mexican practice of Good Friday Stations of the Cross became a hybrid social justice and religious practice. Lara Medina and Gilbert Cadena, who were early founders and participant observers in the cultural and religious construction of Día de los Muertos in Los Angeles, discuss how this traditional Mexican celebration of All Saints and All Souls Days was not observed in a particularly Mexican way until 1972, alongside the emergence of a Chicano spirituality that was more culturally and socially oriented than one based in an institutional Catholicism. Both studies illustrate the shaping of Mexican tradition in an American setting and a kind of Americanization of the devotions through their social justice and cultural orientations. Finally, Luis León's study of curanderismo (faith healing) in Los Angeles is more of a narration of one curandera's contribution to the spiritual ecology of urban Mexican immigrants looking for traditional sources of religious consolation and help, but within the almost anonymous setting of a botanica or religious goods store. Hortencia, the curandera, is a purveyor of trabajos or works that she sells to Spanish-speaking clients looking for advice, consolation, healing, good luck, and other objectives, in a Los Angeles far removed from homeland and family. She operates in a market of spiritual options and helps her clients navigate the contradictory worlds of Catholicism and the botanica.

The concluding two chapters by Roberto Goizueta and Orlando Espín provide theological reflections upon the case studies. Both authors utilize a Latino theological perspective that privileges the religious and spiritual experiences of the poor and the immigrant, which thus highlights the Catholic option for the poor in relation to Mexican religious experience in the United States. Both authors privilege "Mexican" practices in a nepantla or indigenous "in between" sense that supposedly provides the immigrant coherence for lo cotidiano or daily life. However the authors do not provide evidence for this kind of transference of consciousness among Mexican immigrants to the U.S. since they have not done in-depth interviews.

In my own comparative ethnographic work among similar Mexican "urbano-campesino" migrants in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Oakland, California, I have been struck by the loss of transferable cultural and religious practices and concepts. Most often these migrants carry but fragments of a past, and would not be able to reproduce most Mexican religious devotions on their own. Thus, Mexican immigrants to U.S. cities are often offered new sources for seemingly "Mexican" religiosity through the new Chicano and Mexican American spiritual and cultural constructions of Via Crucis, Días de los Muertos, and the botanica. These new practices began without the institutional Catholic Church and as the case studies in Chicago and...