- Open Your Heart: Religion and Cultural Poetics of Greater Mexico by David P. Sandell
Open Your Heart, a study of St. Anthony Mary Claret Catholic Church in Fresno, California, is an often beautiful series of reflections about Mexican American life, history, religious narrative, and ritual. Not a typical ethnography (though certainly well-grounded in fieldwork), the book experiments with “an emancipatory epistemology” (5) that attempts to draw connections and educe meanings from Catholic ritual practices. Sandell, who is an associate professor of anthropology at Texas Christian University, argues that religious rituals provide a structure for the telling of stories. And since rituals are inherently repetitive, stories can be retold, not in identical ways, but such that slippages between the known and the unknown, the felt and the hoped for, the painful and the triumphant, can poetically gain salience in the lives of individuals and communities. This approach allows Sandell to range widely from the specific conversations he has with church members to economic analyses of migrant labor, to trenchant retellings of Mexican American history, to tracings among anthropological theories. The result is a collage of impressions, voices, and interpretations, which mostly works due to Sandell’s critical skill as a writer and observer.
The structure of the book is such that each chapter is rooted in a particular Catholic ritual, but the chapters are not so much about those rituals as about the collection of feelings, events, and characters that Sandell pulls together to illustrate the richness of Latino experience. So, for instance, chapter one begins with a discussion of the Matachines dance, a common historico-religious drama that rehearses the Spanish [End Page 82] conquest and evangelization of the Americas. In Sandell’s hands, the dance leads to an analysis of the vagaries of the migrant journey between California and Mexico as well as an exposition of the pilgrimage to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Subsequent chapters begin with the rituals of the daily Mass, the rosary, contemplative prayer, the Passion Play, and a return to the Guadalupan pilgrimage. On the way, these rituals provide opportunities to Sandell and the people he worked with to examine incarceration, violence, racism, the healthcare system and miraculous healing, and labor disputes between growers and pickers. Along the way, Sandell’s wide-ranging research helps him make the connections between the parishioners’ personal stories and these broader phenomena. For example, in chapter four, an examination of a ritual labyrinth leads into a historical and economic analysis of the labyrinthine frustrations of the wage labor system for migrant workers and the many levels of anomie and dislocation that it has produced.
When Sandell’s poetic approach works, it really works. For instance, when one of his consultant’s families is rocked by a double murder, the author’s discussion of how the communal act of saying the rosary suddenly became imbued with heavy suspicions is masterful and evocative. Here, Sandell’s contention that rituals give a skeleton to meaningful stories makes obvious sense. The shared experience of the rosary helps family members in a community of faith to overcome their fears and doubts in a context of violence. In other cases, the stretches he makes between Catholic practice and his subject matter are not as clear. When the author links the Passion Play with a man who ends up organizing migrant pickers against the United Farm Workers union feels forced; one ends up wondering if the anti-union organizer is the savior or the betrayer, and if these are the most appropriate metaphors. In other cases, the meanings that Sandell discovers in people’s stories and ritual acts seem to accrete far beyond the manageable – can one moment in a parishioner’s life indicate centuries of history and social problems? But all in all, Open Your Heart, in addition to being an often moving meditation on the joy and pain of Mexican American life, makes an important contribution to how ethnography is written and what it can achieve...