Martin Nesvig's edited collection offers a detailed and theoretically sound cross-section of essays dealing with the concept of popular religion in colonial Mexico. The volume offers great breadth of chronological variety from the immediate post-conquest period to the late eighteenth century of the Bourbon Reforms, the latter period being featured especially strongly here.
Nesvig's cohesive introduction lays the groundwork for an exciting and forward-thinking volume that will be a boon for both scholarly work and advanced classroom discussion. In the Introduction, Nesvig recognises and celebrates the diversity of approaches contained in the volume (‘functional’, ‘regionally focused’), which, on the whole, adds richness to the discussion. He details the influence of cultural history on the field of colonial studies, describing its trajectory in both the Mexican and North American academies. In my opinion, the essays most informed by directions in this field constitute the most compelling contributions. Tarvárez's piece, in particular, marries his detailed case study to a wider analytical perspective which offers an important view of the intersection of religious practices and community formation among Zapotec villagers in the seventeenth century. I appreciate the attention that Nesvig pays to the different trajectory of the study of Mexican religious history in Mexico and in North America, presumably referring to scholarship produced within the United States and Canada. Too often, US-based scholars presuppose a monolithic locus of enunciation and omit to acknowledge scholarly trends within Latin America.
Many edited volumes consist of a disparate set of essays connected by a loosely conceived general theme and synoptic introduction. Nesvig has successfully avoided this pitfall by commencing and closing the volume with theoretical essays by two leading scholars in the field. These pieces lend cohesion and clearly articulate the theoretical underpinnings for the case studies. Carlos Eire provides an extremely useful overview of the dense and complex field of popular religion. His detailed but clear essay outlines the methodological and theoretical paradigms of the last 50 years, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses, and indicating the richness of the field, but showing too how this has resulted in ‘murkiness’. It all appeared a lot less murky to me after reading the essay, which provides an excellent point of departure for the rest of the collection. William Christian Jr.'s important 1981 book, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, provides the conceptual framework for Nesvig's volume, and thus it is fitting that Christian's essay, ‘Catholicisms’, ends the collection. The essay cogently discards the notion of monolithic Catholicism and instead proposes the need for a study of comparative ‘Catholicisms’ that would recognise the force of popular custom on official doctrine. He addresses the importance of studying Catholicism in dialogue with the other religions with which it has coexisted, and offers some illuminating information on this aspect with regard to Protestantism in Europe and indigenous religions in the Americas. I was impressed by the way in which the collection literally functions as a conversation among contributors. One wonders just how this was achieved logistically, as the essays by Eire and Christian refer to the other contributors' work to illustrate their theoretical and analytic points, and the contributors themselves refer back to the framing essays to exemplify ideas presented in their case studies. This aspect greatly strengthens the volume, rendering it a forum for the exchange of sometimes divergent views on popular religion. Larkin's essay, for example, discards the notion of ‘the popular’, elaborated originally by Christian to illustrate the influence of the liturgy in so-called local practices. My only complaint would be that this dialogue is somewhat patchy in places – a few essays do not engage in the conversation, and are the weaker for it.
Eire and Christian are both principally scholars of Spain, while the contributors are Latin American specialists. This helps to promote one of the strongest elements of the collection as whole: the emphasis on transatlantic crossings and religious modifications which take the reader beyond the simple idea of a transplanted monolithic version of Christianity. For example, Rubial García reveals the presence of indigenous agency in the acceptance and adaptation of Christian saints; Nesvig shows how the singular early dominance of the mendicant orders helped to impart a particular New World flavour to the Mexican Church; and several authors – Eire, Rubial García, Osowski – address the dialectical appropriation of pagan symbols and the early Church by both indigenous worshippers and Catholic officials to achieve resonance with the specificity of the Mexican environment as late as the eighteenth century.
Less strong is the attention paid to the conjunction of identity politics and popular religion. While the contributions offer information on many different demographic groups, some important factors seem to lack nuance and cohesion. Osowski's essay offers a fascinating account of the role of female alms collectors among the Nahua and provides a wealth of archival information, but I would have liked to have seen him draw some more concrete conclusions regarding the gender of alms collectors. The same applies to the essays of Nicole von Germeten and Brian Larkin, who make reference to the existence of female confraternity members but do not specifically discuss whether gender affected their participation. The other identity problem, for me, comes up in the issue of Afro-Mexican popular practices. Neither the Introduction nor the two framing essays substantively address the issue of African practices, and the authors of these pieces (Nicole von Germeten and Javier Villa-Flores) do not engage in dialogue with the theories outlined in the essays by Eire and Christian. The contributions themselves are illuminating and, taken together, offer very different, and important, windows onto Afro-Mexican religion and culture. Von Germeten details how confraternities gave Afro-Mexicans the socio-economic power to negotiate the hierarchies of colonial society, while Villa-Flores describes how slaves manipulated the Inquisition's attention to blasphemy to attempt escape from the horrors of the obrajes. I believe that the editor might have incorporated them more fluidly into the volume as a whole, however, and this crucial area of study for popular religion therefore appears to be something of an afterthought in this collection.
In conclusion, the volume offers a wonderful contribution to the growing field of religion and cultural history within colonial Latin American studies. It strikes a fruitful balance between theory and practice and offers a fascinating view of the multifaceted popular practices contained within the more general rubric of Mexican Catholicism.
