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  • La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands
  • Lois Ann Lorentzen
La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. By Luis D. León. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 320. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $55.00 cloth; $21.95 paper.

Luis D. León argues in this ambitious book that major Chicano religious traditions such as devotion to Guadalupe, curanderismo, espiritualismo, and evangelical/Pentecostal traditions all reflect symbols, myths, and practices found in the ancient Mesoamerican world and thus have much in common. His study asks, "How do people survive and make meaning under conditions of discrimination, poverty, and deprivation?" (p. 5). León's thesis is that the religious beliefs and practices of the borderland provide a "creative and often effective means to manage the crisis of everyday life" (Ibid.). He analyzes seemingly disparate religious phenomena through the lens of "religious poetics" which he defines as performed and narrated strategies by which "social agents change culturally derived meanings and, indeed, the order of the phenomenal world by rearranging the relationships among symbols and deftly inventing and reinventing the signification of symbols" (p. 4). León begins by reviewing Mexico's postcolonial history to argue (as have others) for the persistence of pre-Christian beliefs and practices in contemporary mestizaje and Chicano consciousness. He adopts Gloria Anzaldúa's borderlands thesis, which emphasizes the symbolic and material cultural production that occurs between Mexico and United States.

León is most compelling in the chapters devoted to Guadalupan devotion, curanderismo, espiritualismo, and Pentecostalism. He argues that for working-class Mexicans and Mexican Americans, devotion to Guadalupe provides historical memory, with Mexico City serving as a "sacred center of memory" (p. 61). When devotion to Guadalupe "migrated" to Los Angeles, Guadalupe became a transnational symbol and Los Angeles a new sacred space. León analyzes significant movements such as PADRES, an organization of Chicano priests and Las Hermanas, a group of Chicana nuns, to demonstrate how "religious devotionalism unfolds into creative social activism" (p. 114). León carefully describes the history of curanderismo, healing practices such as the limpia, and the lives of three borderlands healers, Don Pedrito Jaramillo, Santa Teresa Urrea, and El Niño Fidencio, to explore curandera/o practice and meaning. His thesis is that curanderismo emphasizes the body and "restructures the order of the world through gifting, reciprocity, and exchange" (p. 130). León next explores espiritualismo (Mexican spiritualism) and its movement from Mexico City to the borderlands. Two traditions of spiritualism developed during the nineteenth century throughout Europe and the Americas; Mexican spiritualism resembled the hierarchy of the Catholic Church more than its U.S, counterpart. León describes the largest Mexican spiritualist denomination, Mediodía, its teaching that Mexico City will emerge as the "sacred center of the world" (p. 173), spiritual gifts such as sight, clairvoyance, hearing and prophecy, and the central role of spiritual healing in Mexican spiritualism. Both curanderismo and Mexican spiritualism "create/enact an epistemology of the body" (p. 198), according to León. [End Page 474]

Evangelicalism would seem to share little with curanderismo and spiritualism. Yet, León effectively makes the case that Pentecostals continue "religious and ecstatic modes of being that existed in Mesoamerica prior to Spanish colonization" (p. 204) that are also found in curanderismo and Mexican spiritualism. Based on extensive fieldwork at the evangelical organization Victory Outreach and its Spanish churches Alcance Victoria, based in east Los Angeles, León argues that evangelical congregations function as "mechanisms of cultural brokerage" (p. 235) for marginalized immigrants and Mexican Americans.

León concludes that these seemingly disparate Chicano, Mexican American, and Mexican religious traditions share "an alternative mode of knowing based on knowledges of the body" (p. 248), which is especially evident in healing practices, sacred centers, sacred conceptions of time, prophecy, spiritual transnationalism and a sacralizing of the "returns" experienced by Mexican migrants. By combining ethnographic skill with U.S. and Mexican history, culture studies, border theory, Chicano studies and religious studies, León provides a critical look at religion in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. The volume is a significant contribution...

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