Indios, curas y nacion: La sociedad indigena frente a un proceso de secularizacion: Oaxaca, siglo XIX (review)

This book makes a significant contribution to the study of how the liberal attempt to secularize Mexican society played out in the lives of believers, a subject which has received much less attention than it has deserved. Daniela Traffano spent several years organizing Oaxaca's Episcopal archive, and here she combines the material she gleaned there with other primary sources to explore the meaning of the Reform for the state's indigenous inhabitants.

In chapter 1 Traffano begins with the large body of national level legislation on Church-state relations that began to appear in 1856. Her interpretation of the origins and content of this legislation follows conventional wisdom and serves as a necessary prelude to the local study that interests her. The second chapter is also largely introductory, but this chapter introduces the local environment and the basic actors in her work. Thus she lays out the education and role of parish priests as well as the various ways in which communities dealt with religious authorities before the Reform.

The most original research begins with the third chapter, in which she explores reactions to liberal legislation on clerical fees, the tithe, and church property. In all three cases liberal legislation posed a problem for the activities of the Church. The liberal laws on clerical fees provided communities and individuals with a new set of tools they could employ in the long process of conflict and negotiation over fees that stretched back into the colonial period. Here it is clear that even indigenous people in remote villages were quite aware of the legal environment in which they pursued claims. The tithe was an even bigger problem for the Church, as many oaxaqueños eventually stopped paying it, leading to strenuous Church efforts to maintain this source of revenue right through the end of the nineteenth century. The liberal drive to break up Church property impoverished the Church even though the institution was able to hold on to some property through various forms of overt and covert resistance.

In the fourth chapter Traffano explores the stories of the many individuals caught between Church and state. Both demanded the loyalty of individuals, and both had ways to penalize those who refused to follow their dictates. Individuals who took up local civil office, an important duty that governed social life within indigenous villages, had to swear to uphold the liberal constitution and laws. Doing so led to their being denied sacraments that were also crucial to their culture and life cycles. Thus they found themselves petitioning the state government and, especially, the Church for relief, something that neither was willing to grant without conditions. Those who bought alienated Church property faced the same dilemma. Traffano makes very effective use of the often poignant documents individuals produced in their efforts to reconcile their community roles and economic aspirations with their desire for eternal life.

Chapter 5 explains the effect of the liberal laws on the system of community service and religious associations that was central to life in indigenous communities. Traffano lays out the nature and functions of the religious offices filled in communities, and shows how they continued despite the Reform laws. Generally in this chapter the available documentation is less satisfactory, and Traffano must often fill in the gaps with recourse to colonial era research, twentieth century ethnographies, and informed speculation. Still, she argues convincingly that cofradías were extinguished or impoverished, and that eventually this led to a personalization of the responsibility for sponsoring religious celebrations through the institution of mayordomía. Traffano also explores the relatively new phenomenon of religious associations, a reaction to the problem of financing religious life that brought some of the features of urban cofradías to the rural environment.

Overall Traffano argues that communities used the...