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  • Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio from Colonial Origins to the Present
  • Jesús F. De La Teja
Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio from Colonial Origins to the Present. By Timothy Matovina. [Lived Religions Series.] (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. xviii, 232. $60.00 hardcover, $22.95 paperback.)

From its founding in 1718, San Antonio, Texas, has been an ethnically mixed and culturally diverse community that has undergone numerous transformations to produce today's colorful and distinctive city. At its heart—literally—has been San Fernando parish, Timothy Matovina's focus area in his study of Hispanic Catholics in the Alamo City. The choice of San Fernando is natural, since it was Texas's principal Catholic parish from Spanish colonial times well into the nineteenth century. As San Antonio grew and new parishes opened, and even following San Fernando's elevation to cathedral in 1874, the parish remained firmly rooted in its Mexican ethnicity and its Guadalupan devotion. Over time the expression of that devotion changed in response to circumstances, including in the parish's ecclesiastic leadership, which included French and Spanish clergy before the appearance of Mexican American priests and bishops in recent times. [End Page 445]

Blending social and religious history, Matovina binds everything up in a sympathetic analysis of "lived religion" among San Antonio's Mexican Americans. In a useful introduction, he provides an overview of the controversy regarding the Virgin's 1531 apparition to the Indian Juan Diego, who subsequently brought Bishop Juan de Zumárraga proof in the form of the image venerated today at Tepeyac. While scholars may debate what the absence of any reference to the apparition in Bishop Zumárraga's writings might mean, "Millions of devotees have no doubt about the authenticity of the apparition narrative and the miraculous origins of the Guadalupe image" (p. 3). There follow discussions of how the Guadalupan tradition has evolved over the centuries and how it has manifested itself in San Antonio. A separate chapter frames the rest of the work through a description of the nationally televised, December 12, 2003, celebrations.

The real meat of the book is the four chronologically organized chapters that follow. Chapter 2 covers Spanish and Mexican Texas (1731-1836) and emphasizes how Guadalupan devotion became a central element in community life. The next chapter focuses on the remainder of the nineteenth century, a time when Texans of Mexican heritage became a minority population and the Guadalupe feast became a mechanism through which they could reaffirm their ethnic distinctiveness. In chapter 4, which treats the twentieth century up to World War II, the role of the Mexican immigrant community in the religious life of San Fernando comes to the fore. Chapter 5 brings the story into the twenty-first century, emphasizing the continuities and discontinuities of Catholic practices and devotion in the post-Vatican II world.

The increasingly prominent role of women, the growing presence of Protestantism among Mexican Americans, and the tensions between Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans are interwoven throughout the narrative. A more complete study would have resulted from fuller discussion of relations between San Fernando and other San Antonio Catholic communities, for instance the emergence of new parishes, particularly ethnic ones, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More attention to the challenges of discrimination within the parish would also have strengthened the work. These are minor quibbles, however, for in Guadalupe and Her Faithful we have a well researched and readable examination of a vibrant faith community that is a worthy follow-up to the author's earlier work Tejano Religion and Ethnicity: San Antonio, 1821-1860 (1995).

Jesús F. De La Teja
Texas State University-San Marcos
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