Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934 (review)

As a fascinating laboratory of hybridity, Mexico has long attracted the attention of cultural historians and anthropologists, the founders of a rich historiographical tradition that focused on the complex syncretization of Roman Catholicism and indigenous cosmologies since the “spiritual conquest” or encounter. Oddly, until recently such historical studies largely petered out in the national period, as if in 1821 Mexicans had suddenly entered an era of enlightened modernity, in the process shedding their superstitious religious beliefs. Consequently, we still have relatively few detailed studies of Mexican faith during the Porfirian and revolutionary years, despite a few notable exceptions, for example, the pioneering work of Jean Meyer on the Cristero rebellion. Historians of the United States mostly avoided the topic, focusing instead on church-state relations. The reason for this bizarre lacuna may be twofold. In the first place, sources were rather scarce due to a reluctance on the part of the Church to open its archives for fear of opening up old wounds dating back to the church-state clashes of the Revolution and the nineteenth-century Liberal Reform. However, one might also argue that the lacuna was caused by the professional biases of many social scientists, to whom religion was an epiphenomenal factor of little analytical interest. While one could fruitfully interpret the colonial Mexican subject (and the Mexican Indian) as homo religiosus, the same was not true of the modern Mexican, who instead was analyzed in terms of class, especially from the perspective of peasant studies. This theoretical prejudice resulted in an overwhelmingly secular view of modern Mexican history. However, with the rise of postmodernism and the new cultural history, historians have begun to reconsider modern Mexico from a postsecular perspective, taking advantage of the greater accessibility of church archives. The result of this sea change has been the emergence of a rich and sophisticated new history of Mexican Catholicism.

One of the best examples of this promising trend is Edward Wright-Rios’s study of Oaxacan Catholicism during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Focusing on the articulation of popular indigenous and female religiosity, as expressed in two fascinating visionary movements, with a vibrant archdiocesan establishment, Wright-Rios has ably reconstructed a complex provincial religious culture. What he finds is not a sharp dichotomy between popular religion and orthodoxy, but instead a realm of mutual interdependence. The modern, Romanized, revivalist, almost triumphalist Church is epitomized by the fascinating character of Eulogio Gillow, the urbane and well-connected archbishop of Oaxaca, who maintained a personal friendship with the Liberal dictator Porfirio Díaz. On the other hand, the author traces the histories of Bartola Bolaños, a Nahua Indian from Tlacoxcalco, whose visions of Our Lord of the Wounds sparked a popular cult; and of the poor Chatina girl Nicha, who regularly communicated with the Virgin Mary in a cave near Ixpantepec. What Wright-Rios unearths in this lovingly detailed account is a halting, selective, and improvised process of “negotiation” between the clergy and the faithful, and between modern Ultramontane Catholicism and a persistent popular piety in which women played an essential role. Far from a clash between tradition and modernity, or between folk religion and orthodoxy, this was a struggle “within the Church and among avowed Catholics” (p. 281). Wright-Rios’s meticulously researched, engaging, and cautiously argued study is a model of balanced scholarship and essential reading for anyone interested in Mexican religious history.