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Reviewed by:
  • Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint
  • Christopher R. Boyer
Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint. By Paul J. Vanderwood (Durham, Duke University Press, 2004) 352 pp. $79.95 cloth $22.95 paper

Juan Soldado narrates the unlikely saga of a Mexican army soldier who was executed in 1938 for raping and murdering an eight-year-old girl in Tijuana but who has been venerated as a saint ever since. The story is as fascinating as it is gripping, and Vanderwood recounts it with great historical rigor and literary skill. The book's first section describes the girl's death and the arrest of twenty-four-year-old soldier Juan Castillo Morales for the crime. The townspeople of Tijuana worried that the army would cover up the incident and rioted overnight, destroying public buildings and forcing federal authorities to perform a bizarre military execution in the local cemetery. The second section surveys the history [End Page 492] of Tijuana and explains the sort of social tensions that gripped the town by 1938. The third and final section provides an ethnographic discussion of how the historical Juan Castillo Morales became the popular (that is, not canonized) saint, Juan Soldado (Juan the Soldier), as well as a brief overview of other borderlands saints.

Juan Soldado continues Vanderwood's journey into narrative history. It has no theoretical apparatus or pretense of analyzing the historiography on riot, popular religion, or postrevolutionary Mexico. Instead, Vanderwood brings the skills of a professional historian to the telling of a remarkable drama in three acts. The result is both liberating and frustrating. It is liberating, because the rich texture of historical detail, combined with Vanderwood's skill as a writer and his willingness to speculate modestly about his subjects' motivations and mental states, offers a vision of borderlands life and religion that is both finegrained and compelling. How many historical monographs can keep historians (and their students) turning pages deep into the night?

In some places, though, the book's freeform style of using historical association in lieu of academic exposition is frustrating. Vanderwood does an exemplary job of providing the historical background of Tijuana that helps to contextualize the riots and, to some extent, the willingness of townspeople to consider Castillo Morales a saint. In some places, however, the book draws comparisons between the expression of religious faith in Tijuana and other parts of the world that bear little resemblance to each other. In the space of three pages, for example, the book contemplates the nature of religious suffering by discussing Corpus Cristi celebrations in present-day Guatemala, the popular use of the term Calvario (calvary) in Oaxaca, and Franciscan monks' self-flagellation in colonial Mexico (186–188). A dozen pages later, Vanderwood introduces the idea of popular sainthood via Andrib's fictional account of the torture and death of a heroic and soon-to-be-venerated Slav in sixteenth-century Bosnia (200–204).1 The relationship between these cases and the Mexican border in the first half of the twentieth century is tenuous at best. These leaps contrast with the historical specificity and well-honed sense of place that characterizes most of the book, seemingly implying that popular religiosity does not vary in any meaningful way over time or across space.

Such universality does not seem to be Vanderwood's message, though readers might have various ideas of what exactly his message is. Those interested in historiography may interpret the book as an ideal example of the (resurgent?) power of narrative history. Students of Mexican and religious history will learn of the interrelationship among Tijuana's urban history, the borderlands, and popular religion. The faithful may understand it as an exploration of redemption and the [End Page 493] power of faith. What is particularly remarkable about the book is that it can convey all of these ideas in a respectful and, in come cases, tender way, without diminishing the others.

Christopher R. Boyer
University of Illinois, Chicago

Footnotes

1. Ivo Andrić (trans. Lovett F. Edwards), The Bridge on the Drina (Chicago, 1977; orig. pub. 1945).

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