Literature on colonial religion in New Spain is vast but often focused on Marian shrines and their images. Fewer studies exist for statues of Jesus Christ, even though there were more of them in the viceroyalty than the Virgin Mary. Derek S. Burdette offers a corrective vision to our understanding of the devotional landscape by describing the role the Christ of Ixmiquilpan played in the urban geography of Mexico City. Beyond highlighting the hybridity of colonial art, Burdette sheds light on the economics of religious devotion and the intimate links between popular piety and viceregal politics.

Burdette organizes the book in a chronological fashion, which allows the reader to follow both the material evolution of the Christ of Ixmiquilpan and its movement between Indigenous and Spanish-Criollo communities. In the first two chapters, Burdette’s story is rooted in the Mezquital Valley of the modern state of Hidalgo. Here he recounts the sixteenth-century origins of the image and its claimed miraculous renovation in 1621. By explaining how the image was not imported from Spain but instead made in New Spain according to the tradition of the Cristos de caña (cornstalk statues of Christ), Burdette draws attention to Indigenous artists and their use of local materials and ancestral traditions. Additionally, by detailing the eventual transfer of the image to Mexico City at the behest of the archbishop, Burdette offers a reflection on the extractive nature of Spanish colonialism and the “rhetoric of responsibility” (64). Much like many other Indigenous cultural objects, the Christ of Ixmiquilpan has never been returned to its original community.

In the next three chapters, Burdette’s analysis concentrates on the “bustling miraculous economy” (105) of Mexico City in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of many images with a prodigious reputation, the Christ of Ixmiquilpan was eventually placed under the care of the nuns of the Discalced Carmelite Convent of San José. Burdette describes how these religious women promoted its devotion through prints, processions, and a persuasive fundraising campaign for the construction of a new chapel. At every point in his narrative, Burdette complicates the centrality of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the “devotional typography” (120) of Mexico City. He demonstrates that Christocentric and Marian devotion worked together as the Christ of Ixmiquilpan became an important divine intercessor – especially during the typhus epidemic of 1736-37 – even as the Virgin of Guadalupe was rising in prominence.

Burdette offers a well-balanced mix between the pious practices of everyday devotees and the efforts colonial churchmen made to control them. In his study, Indigenous artists create Catholic icons, the faithful use prayerbooks to the “point of destruction” (98), tobacco workers drop coins into collection boxes, and people from all ethnic backgrounds follow elaborate processional paths in search of healing. Beyond this, the nuns of San José are not simply cloistered women engaged in prayer. They take bids from architects, sell raffle tickets, manage their rent payments, and leverage their social capital through letters, appeals, and gifts to the viceroy and other high-ranking officials. By highlighting monastic agency, Burdette provides a fascinating example of how the nuns of San José used their connections to circumnavigate the restrictive measures of the Bourbon Reforms.

At the end of his study, Burdette includes a brief epilogue on the Christ of Ixmiquilpan’s transition from the centre to the margins of Mexico City life and devotion. His reflections are an important reminder of the transient nature of “miraculous celebrity,” which is why we need to turn to an array of primary sources to assess what was spiritually meaningful to the people we study. Art historians and historians of colonial religion will be interested in Burdette’s book because it serves as a good model for writing a “biography” of a miraculous image. But scholars interested in other aspects of New Spain will also want to read his book for the ways he connects devotional practices to colonial economics and political culture.