It has become something of an article of faith that extant sources are the foundation, beacon, and litmus tests for serious historical inquiry. Without them, devotees argue, there is no real way into the past. But in a dazzling new book focused on another set of devotees—Indigenous and Black confraternity members in colonial Lima—art historian Ximena Gómez proves otherwise.

In the Hands of Devotees opens with a seventeenth-century painting of a Good Friday procession in Lima. Gómez expertly guides us through the various elements of the monumental scene, from the composition of the crowd to the various acts of ceremonial worship and daily life on display. Thanks to Gomez’s keen eye, we see the Spanish clergy, military officials, and lay people carrying sacred images and sculptures of Christ and the Virgin on gleaming litters, as well as peripheral tableaux of an Indigenous man falling to his knees in reverence, and a Black child and his mother offering alms. The anonymous painting conveys a vivid sense of the city’s religious life and culture, but it is also incomplete. Gómez attributes this to the circumstances of its creation: commissioned by the members of the elite Spanish Nuestra Señora de la Soledad confraternity to depict their own ceremonial traditions, it overrepresents Spaniards in a city where they were outnumbered by Indigenous and Black people. “While Indigenous and Black Limeños are present,” Gómez notes, “they appear primarily as passive or apathetic onlookers of the religious festivities carried out before them.… That is to say, the painting does document confraternal devotion and visual culture in Lima but only for the city’s small population of elite Spanish people” (2).

Given that the painting is one of the only extant visual sources of its kind, a reader might reasonably expect Gómez to make as much use of it as possible for a study of the visual culture of Indigenous and Black confraternities—zooming in on the Indigenous man and Black mother and child to extract any and all details of their religious life. But in a clever sleight of hand, she moves beyond the image almost entirely. Instead, Gómez mines the sources left by members of the confraternities themselves. This includes legal disputes, artistic commissions, and financial records, all of which help to fill in this lacuna; while the actual sculptures, altarpieces, and paintings may no longer exist, there is an abundance of written documentation that tells us exactly what they were and just how much they meant.

Part I of In the Hands of Devotees focuses on the active roles that Indigenous and Black cofrades played in shaping Lima’s religious landscape. In chapters 1 and 2, we see them commissioning retablos (painted altarpieces) as well as sculptures of Christ and their namesake Virgins for their chapels, engaging prominent local artists to make, restore, or paint over devotional objects according to the confraternities’ own detailed specifications (often with accompanying illustrations). “Such examples, common in the archive, aptly illustrate how confraternal statues were not created once by carefully trained artists but rather many times at the hands of the Indigenous and Black collectors who cared for them and put them on display” (39). These practices were visible among confraternities with ample financial resources to undertake ornate commissions as well as more cash-strapped ones who could only afford patchwork repairs. The third chapter takes cofrades “out of their chapels and into the mist-filled open air of Lima,” as they took part in feast days and processions (of which the city held up to three hundred a year) (61). Indigenous and Black confraternities took tremendous pride in these gatherings, where they held aloft insignias, statues, and carefully adorned litters that communicated their status, collective pride, and piety.

What is so remarkable about these devotional acts is that they took place within a context of racial hostility. Gómez details a particularly stark episode in 1608, when the mulato confraternity of Santa Justa y Rufina was displaced from their chapel by a group of Spanish blacksmiths who were contemplating starting a confraternity of their own. That an already established confraternity had to give up space to a group that was only considering formalizing their association was the first in a series of insults; a complaint later filed by the Santa Justa y Rufina cofrades included testimony from someone who overheard a priest “‘bragging that he was the first to strike the arch of the virgins’ chapel with a wooden beam in order to tear it down’” (48).

Part II focuses on case studies involving specific Indigenous and Black confraternities. Chapter 4 explores how the concept of kamay, from the Quechua term meaning “to charge” (83), can allow us to see how an Indigenous confraternity endowed the sculpture of their namesake Virgin with Andean meanings through their interactions with it. Chapters 5 and 6 explore how Black confraternities drew upon their Iberian connections and West African origins in their use of textiles adorning their devotional sculptures to produce distinctly Afro-Catholic expressions.

Among its many contributions, including placing Lima’s Indigenous and Black populations in the same analytical frame and placing Lima alongside Cusco as a center of colonial artistic production, In the Hands of Devotees offers a model method. In the book’s conclusion, which returns to the beginning by looking back to the anonymous seventeenth-century painting of the Good Friday procession, Gómez imagines what a more representative scene would have looked like, replete with the kinds of sculptures and paintings Indigenous and Black confraternities commissioned in their time. The exercise not only provides an enormously satisfying payoff for Gómez’s approach to mining written sources where visual ones are no longer available, but it also (indirectly) insists upon itself as a necessary approach even when visual sources are extant. Indeed, as Gómez observes, “appearances are deceiving” (155).