Searching for Madre Matiana: Prophecy and Popular Culture in Modern Mexico by Edward Wright-Rios (review)

The cultural history of Mexico has come into its own in recent years. This was evident in Edward Wright-Rios’s 2009 history of religious culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Oaxaca, which combined the analytical rigor of social history with a close attention to the discursive construction of personal and public narratives. It is more notable still in his latest book, which explores the many lives of colonial-era prophetess of doom, Madre Matiana, from her discovery—most likely in the literary imagination of a mid-nineteenth-century Catholic pamphleteer—to her current status as a minor popular culture icon.

Each of the book’s seven chapters tackles a different incarnation of the Madre Matiana phenomenon, carefully situating it in historical context. Indeed, as far as Madre Matiana is concerned, context is everything. The result is a charmingly idiosyncratic and often revealing take on modern Mexican history that foregrounds the unexpected, including (among many other things) the contribution of Catholic-endorsed “apocalyptic feminism” to nineteenth-century political discourse and the centrality of a reactionary religious icon to the gendering of the twentieth-century national imaginary. Idiosyncratic or not, Madre Matiana’s periodic appearance as a harbinger of national catastrophe has coincided—although not coincidently—with some of the most epochal events in post-Independence Mexican history: the US invasion of Mexico, the Reform wars, the French intervention, the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero Rebellion, and the turbulent 1960s. And as Madre Matiana predicted as early as 1847, the most disastrous years in Mexican history often end in the number 8.

A short review can hardly do justice to this book’s astonishing range, Chapter 1 offers an overview of the colonial-era narratives of female piety that provided the literary model and cultural backdrop for the 1847 “discovery” of the prophetic musings of an eighteenth-century beata (holy woman); Chapter 2 visits Mexico City to survey its vibrant religious print culture from the late colonial period to the mid-nineteenth century, Chapter 3 (a personal favorite) ranges from the construction of national types in costumbrista literature to an illuminating history of the popular calendario (almanac), and Chapter 4 examines the impact of changes in Catholic doctrine and culture in Europe on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mexican Catholicism. Chapter 5 finds Madre Matiana in a new twentieth-century role as the acerbic female voice of traditional Mexico in the capital city’s satiric penny press during and after the 1910 Revolution. Chapter 6 explores the ambiguous representation of religious figures in the photography of Lola Álvarez Bravo, and Chapter 7 analyzes the centrality of traditional female religiosity in the novels of Agustín Yáñez. In each instance, Madre Matiana is present as a leitmotif, glimpsing events out of the corner of her eye (mirando a soslayo) and weaving disparate historical threads into an alternative history of modern Mexico that will surprise, delight, and enlighten scholars, students, and general readers alike.

Along with its impressive range and unexpected insights into modern Mexican history, Wright-Rios’s book makes an important contribution to the historical literature on religious conservatism in Mexico before and after the ascendancy of the nineteenth-century liberal “reforms” that sought to diminish the political, economic, social, and cultural influence of the Catholic Church. Previous studies have much to tell us about the liberal rationale for reform, conservative resistance (reaching all the way to the papacy), and the bloody political struggles that resulted from these efforts to curb Church power, but we know much less about popular Catholicism during this fraught period. There is of course much more to the story than the regular appearances of Madre Matiana in the Catholic press but the exceptional breadth of this study lays a solid and suggestive foundation for future work.

Less apparent...