Crossing Borders with Santo Niño de Atocha (review)

In Crossing Borders, Juan Javier Pescador explores the history of institutional as well as popular devotions to the Holy Child of Atocha. Beginning with the saint's sixteenth-century Spanish origins, Pescador shows how this saint is a shapeshifter whose history, image, and devotions have been made by borderlanders. This saint, as Pescador convincingly shows, has morphed from "folk" to "royal" to "wandering saint." Today, Santo Niño, also known as the Baby Jesus and Holy Child, has been "transformed into a transnational symbol of hope and redemption" and is a saint to whom Mexican migrants turn to in times of need (xviii).

On one level, Crossing Borders is a history of devotions to the Baby Jesus and how these devotions are made by people. Relatedly, it is an ethnographically informed study of how men, women, and children relate to saints and how they turn to them in times of need. The book is also a deeply personal account of the reciprocal relationships that form between humans and saints — Pescador includes his family's devotions to the Holy Child and how their lives have been shaped by their relationship to Santo Niño. The blend of historic, ethnographic, and personal methodologies makes for a great read and an excellent contribution to the various subfields of American religious history, borderlands religion, Catholic studies, Latino/a religions, and ethnographies of religion.

The history of this saint is a fascinating one as the Spanish Baby Jesus was originally associated with three different Virgin Marys: Our Lady of Atocha, Our Lady of Antigua, and Our Lady of Pregnancies. In chapter one, Pescador details the history of how these three representations of the Virgin Mary were collapsed into one Virgin, Our Lady of Atocha, by sixteenth-century Dominicans, who preferred this Virgin for her more royal stature and comportment. Over time, Spanish men and women no longer related to this royal Virgin but they did turn to her son, the tender and vulnerable Baby Jesus. They made him into Santo Niño, the Holy Child, who cared for them and who watched over them. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was Santo Niño, not his mother, who broke free from the royal and colonialist associations and became a saint for the people. It was also at this time that emigration to the United States escalated, in tandem with the expansion of the U.S.-Mexican Transnational Railroad network, 1880-1910. Mexican migrants embraced the infant Jesus as their own; he became a wandering saint who wore sandals like them, and who travelled carrying few possessions like them. By the twentieth century, the Holy Child of Atocha became "a completely separate and autonomous religious icon in the Borderlands and the formation of its singular devotional system for local families and communities . . ." (80). Pescador provides ethnographic evidence from the Southwest and Midwestern United States that details current public and private devotions to Santo Niño. The photographs add to the historic and ethnographic texture of the book.

Crossing Borders with Santo Niño de Atocha is a rich, ethnographically informed case study of saint devotions. It is a much welcome addition to American Catholic Studies and borderlands religion in particular as it shows Iberian origins of American Catholic expressions of faith. It would be a good choice for upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level courses in American religious history, American Catholicism, and Latino/a religions.