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  • Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present
  • Brian Larkin
Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present. By Jennifer Scheper Hughes. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. Pp. xvi, 312. $99.00 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-195-36706-5; $29.95 paperback, 978-0-195-36707-2.)

Combing both historical/critical and theological perspectives, Jennifer Scheper Hughes has written a captivating five-century history of the Cristo de Totolapan, a crucifix carved from the woody trunk of the maguey cactus. The story begins with the miraculous appearance of the image in 1543 to Antonio de Roa, an Augustinian friar who labored to convert the Nahuatl-speaking Indians of Totolapan (modern state of Morelos, Mexico). It continues through the removal of the Cristo to Mexico City in 1583 and its eventual repatriation to its home three centuries later. The author then carries the narrative into the twentieth century, when she addresses how Sergio Méndez Arceo, the famous “red” bishop of Morelos, ambivalently reconciled his liberationist faith with the renowned crucifix and concludes with a study of how contemporary local devotions to the Cristo uneasily coexist alongside a modernizing clergy. This broad historical arc allows the author to broach a range of topics in the historiography of Mexican Catholicism: the methods of missionary friars and indigenous reactions to evangelization, baroque piety and subsequent attempts to subdue its “excesses,” nineteenth-century Liberal efforts to secularize society, the rise and fall of liberation theology, and contemporary indigenous Catholicism. Although the book addresses many topics, not all receive the same consideration. Due to the weight of available sources—documentation generated by the appearance and later removal of the image to Mexico City and the author’s interviews with the faithful of Totolapan and their clergy—most of the work is devoted to the sixteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Hughes sustains two overarching arguments. First, she contends that scholars have overemphasized the prominence of the Virgin and undervalued [End Page 612] the importance of Christ in Mexican (and more generally in Latin American) piety. The author supports this argument not simply by telling the fascinating story of the Cristo of Totolapan but also by placing it in the context of devotions to other Christocentric images. This contextualization allows Hughes to reconstruct the complicated relationship between the Cristo of Totolapan and the Cristo de Chalma, currently the most popular Christocentric devotion in Mexico. She argues that the Augustinians first promoted veneration of the Cristo of Totolapan, but changed course in the eighteenth century to focus on the Cristo de Chalma. The author notes that the Cristo de Chalma’s sacred narrative borrows much from that of his earlier counterpart. Hughes posits that the Cristo de Chalma succeeded in the long run whereas the Cristo of Totolapan did not, largely because the Augustinians removed the latter from his original environment to bring him to Mexico City whereas they maintained the Cristo de Chalma in his local context.

Second, Hughes argues against the widespread notion that battered, tortured, and bloody crucifixes are prominent in Mexican devotions because indigenous and mestizo devotees see in them a representation of their own suffering—a shared anguish that allows them to identify intimately with Christ’s passion and death. Rather, she insists that the local faithful approach their beloved images, not primarily with compassion, but with affection and tenderness, often viewing images through the aesthetic lens of the beautiful. Building on this insight, she contends that contemporary indigenous Catholicism, although composed of European Catholic content, retains indigenous affective dispositions toward the divine. She argues that in pre-Columbian practice, home images were treated with the same care and affection that permeates image-based piety in Mexico today.

Hughes has crafted a cogently argued, well organized, and clearly written work. Its compelling story and broad historical span will appeal to a wide audience, both scholar and student alike.

Brian Larkin
St. John’s University
Collegeville, MN
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