For the past two decades, scholarship on Mexico after the Revolution of 1910 has often focused upon the centralizing state and its hegemonic attempts to propagate preferred narratives of the revolution and define an orthopraxis for the performance of Mexican identity. Any acknowledgment of the persistent presence or influence of religion in the later twentieth-century Mexico has been limited to discourses on the political tensions between church and state or the popular hybridization of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican and Catholic religious traditions. Jason Dormady seeks to amend the deficiencies of both avenues of investigation by illuminating the ways in which everyday Mexicans experienced life after the Mexican Revolution and utilized religion to negotiate divergent definitions of communal identity and the memory of the revolution. Primitive Revolution examines how three distinct religious communities wove the performance of Mexican authenticity throughout their divergent yet religiously contextualized practice of community, local, and revolutionary identities while negotiating the authority and doctrine of the federal, state, and municipal government. This text offers a concise and focused historical analysis of these religiously motivated communal movements, as they were formed in the wake of the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution and shaped throughout the tumultuous era of 1940–1968. Dormady employs these religious communities as case studies to demonstrate that Mexican peoples used religion to negotiate between themselves and state authorities by embracing the practice of “religious primitivism,” or the simultaneous revival and integrated restoration of Christianity and Mexican citizenship to an imagined earlier, purer form. Each religious community engaged in conversation with governmental authorities on the history and significance of the revolution and the proper way to express the ideals of the revolution as a religious community as it struggled to define itself and realize its vision of religious authenticity. This insightful work reveals the dynamic relationship between religious and national identities in the lives of religious practitioners and consequently challenges the historiographical reification of the Mexican state by complicating monolithic views of the memory of the revolution and the motives of its participants.

The text begins by situating this work relative to explicitly stated historiographical trajectories and source theories that the author will use to frame his evaluation with clearly defined terms and methodological precision. The following three chapters are each dedicated to the analysis of the history, intent, and experiences of one of three religious communities. The first chapter details the emergence and settlements of the Evangelical Pentecostal movement known as La Luz del Mundo (LDM). The second case study examines Iglesia del Reino de Dios en su Plenitud (IRDP), a Mormon religious community in southeastern Mexico State. The third community is the Maria Auxiliadora project promoted by the conservative Mexican and Catholic movement called Union Nacional Sinarquista (UNS). In the fourth chapter, Dormady draws conclusions and comparisons between the three communities, invites scholars to fertile venues for future study, and positions his book as an aid to coax religious toleration from the ongoing negotiation of the legacy of the Mexican Revolution. Throughout the work, the author repeatedly expresses concern for excavating the intents and understandings of the common citizens of these groups. However, stymied by the paucity of first-person accounts and entrenched suspicion of outsiders, the text presumes that participation in these religious communities evidences a conscious critique of the Mexican society that resulted from the Mexican Revolution. Thus, in order to exposit the religious worlds and experiences of these communities and define their cultural critiques, Dormady instead draws from biographies and extensive archival research to present a study of the life and mission of a central patriarchal founder within each tradition. Although the investigation is framed with sensitivity to the resulting methodological tension and acknowledges the difficulty in attributing individual motivations, it nonetheless must minimize the significance of individual practitioners' nuanced, varied, or conditional acceptance of communal objectives and norms.

This welcome contribution to the scholarship on Mexican popular religion demonstrates that each of these religious movements understood the revival of the primitive, essential forms of Christianity and Mexican citizenship as an integrated process and posited their communal formations as part of a spiritual revolution that was reflected and affirmed in the revolution of 1910. The religious identity of each community was intertwined with their regional and revolutionary identities and thus the task of establishing the salvation of their local community was tethered to the perception and redemption of the Mexican nation. By accepting or contesting various state programs, propaganda, and social ideals, each group sought to express their self-identity as a divinely chosen people and restore an idealized order for Christianity within the Promised Land of post-revolutionary Mexican society. By focusing on the local level of cultural dialogue, Dormady highlights three variations that suggest the infinite, dynamic ways that Mexican citizens define their nation and their social memories. Despite state efforts to standardize Mexican identity and the meaning of the revolution, different segments of Mexican society, including the officials crafting the national narrative, embraced a spectrum of interpretations. Such insights provide welcome nuance to the historical presentation of the religious lives and national participation of modern Mexican peoples that inspiration for future historical investigations. Moreover, Dormady brilliantly illuminates differing conceptions of justice at various governmental levels and examines the ways in which constituents of Mexican society with criminalized religious practices negotiated and redefined the nation and the law within local communities. His scholarship encourages further study of local justice and deconstructs the monolithic view of a reified state by presenting such variation not as condemnable corruption but a valid window to the influence of regional and communal identity and the agency enabled by modern Mexico's oft-perceived lack of uniform legal application. Primitive Revolution gratefully ameliorates the scholastic void over the complex realization of social identities and law among religious groups that challenge traditional depictions of mainstream Mexican culture.