This book takes Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of spiritual mestizaje as its starting point, a concept that received little development in her groundbreaking Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) but which is understood as central to the development of an oppositional borderlands consciousness offering transformative possibilities in terms of subject and identity formation. The book opens with Anzaldúa's reference to the subject: “Nuestra alma el trabajo, the opus, the great alchemical work; spiritual mestizaje, a ‘morphogenesis,’ an inevitable unfolding. We have become the quickening serpent movement” (1). Expansive and challenging, such pronouncements by Anzaldúa do little to clarify the precise meaning of a term like spiritual mestizaje and its role in the formation of transformative oppositional consciousness. It is in its rich ambiguity, however, where its potential as an interpretative tool becomes so apparent and Delgadillo embraces the concept as the analytical framework for her readings of a diverse range of Chicana narratives, including fictional testimonio by Demetria Martínez and Denise Chávez; the trilogy of historical novels by Kathleen Alcalá; Norma Cantú's fictional autobioethnographical work Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood on the Frontera; and documentary films by Lourdes Portillo, the Colectivo Feminista de Xalapa and Judith Gleason. Examining the ways in which these narratives engage with the lived experiences of spirituality in innovative and frequently empowering ways, Delgadillo seeks to continue the tradition of many women-of-colour scholars, like Toni Cade Bambara, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston, who explore the connections between religion and feminist activism from non-Western spiritual traditions. The book is to be commended for its bold approach in tackling the issue of spirituality and confronts head-on the continuing unease with the subject within traditional feminism (with its emphasis on secularity and the patriarchal nature of organized religion), with the lived realities of women outside the metropolitan centres of the First World.

Chapter 1 offers a detailed examination of how the concept of spiritual mestizaje might be interpreted and explores Anzaldúa's notion of autohisteoría as a model for critical consciousness informed by spirituality. In the context of probing the roots of such spirituality in the Americas, the chapter also looks closely at the changing historical meaning of the Virgen de Guadalupe and evolving conceptualizations of her by Chicano writers including Mary Pat Brady, Cherrie Moraga and Ana Castillo. Delgadillo maintains that this reimagining of Our Lady of Guadalupe is deeply embedded in an assessment of the icon's Mesoamerican roots and illustrates “a woman-centred popular religiosity that is critically conscious of paradigms of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and race” (32).

Chapter 2, entitled “Bodies of Knowledge,” offers an examination of two novels, Denise Chávez's Face of an Angel (1994) and Demetria Martínez's Mother Tongue (1994). According to Delgadillo, these novels show how their central protagonists, Soveida and Maria, utilize their historically situated difference to create a new spiritual praxis that is anchored in an activist framework committed to social justice. Embracing notions of the sacred, figures of female divinity, processes of healing and a diverse range of spiritual sources, the novels look at the ways in which the characters reinterpret existing religious texts and icons to shape a new consciousness, a new way of being. The chapter includes a close consideration of genre examining the definitions and limits of testimonio as fiction. This close consideration of genre is to be welcomed, as is her insistence on the transnational as the basis for understanding the context for Chicano subject formation. However, the notion of the transnational itself (and indeed its connection to related ideas about the concept of the binational) might have been explored in more depth and perhaps problematized further. Central to the notion of the transnational is its subversive potential to undermine traditional notions of nationhood and indeed sovereignty. There is little evidence in the texts explored here that this particular dimension of transnationalism has been realized, and indeed notions of nationhood and national struggle – El Salvador in Mother Tongue is a good example – remain unchallenged on the whole.

Chapter 3, “Sacred Fronteras,” analyses Norma Cantú's Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (1995) and the documentary films Flowers for Guadalupe/Flores para Guadalupe by Judith Gleason with the Colectivo Feminista de Zalapa and Señorita Extraviada (2001) by Lourdes Portillo, in which, she maintains, the spiritual and the political are “wedded in transnational visions of justice” (93). The focus in this chapter is on the popular religiosity of women's spiritual practices in what she terms transnational spiritual communities of healing. Central to her argument here is the way these particular texts frame women's relation to the divine as a key aspect, but not necessarily separate from other aspects, of their identities (99). In her discussion of the use of photography in Cantú's formally innovative work, Canícula, Delgadillo deploys a range of theoretical sources including Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. At times their integration in the argument is not quite effective and there is an absence of detailed readings of the images themselves, highlighting one of the shortcomings in the book's approach. Aside from the centrally important concept of spiritual mestizaje, the book refuses an overarching theoretical framework and indeed, in many ways, this is one of its primary strengths. However, at certain points in the discussion, the author marshals a somewhat overwhelming range of theoretical and critical sources to illuminate the argument at the expense of a greater and closer degree of textual analysis of the primary sources.

The discussion of Flowers for Guadalupe is less revealing than the interpretation of Canícula, and her assertion that it disrupts the testimonio form by including moments of transcendence and revelation can hardly be sustained when you consider that Hasta no verte Jesus mío, Elena Poniatowska's celebrated testimonial intervention into the representation of the life of Jesusa Rodriguez, included many pronounced moments of transcendence and revelation alongside a particular concern with the relationship between the protagonist and the sacred. If there is a wealth of evidence in the text to support this assertion, it is not cited or referred to in the discussion. Furthermore, when the author states that “transnational consciousness of the women in Brooklyn emerges in their discussions of the political and social issues they encounter and their religious community life” (125), there is no insight given as to how this actually happens on-screen. Here, as elsewhere, then, there is a less than satisfactory textual illustration that might back up such generalized (and potentially problematic) assertions.

Again, towards the end of this section on Flowers for Guadalupe, Delgadillo asserts that it may be seen as part of a growing trend in documentary toward polythesis: “an understanding that comes out of the interplay of voices rather than merely their co-presentation” (127). She goes on to invite the reader to consider “for example what emerges in the interplay between the voices of Ariel Martinez and Eduarda Campos (a conversation about the role of religion in social change), or between the voice of Dona Irene Martínez and Margarita Zires (a conversation about spirituality in women's lives)” (127). However, there is no consideration given to how this is actually played out on-screen and the reader is left to imagine how this panoply of voices might support McDougall's ideas. The logic underpinning much ethical documentary making has always been to present a multiplicity of voices, but the simple coexistence of two voices in the documentary, without further exegesis or testing, is not sufficient to demonstrate polythesis along the lines that McDougall suggests. In the final section of this chapter, Delgadillo turns her attention to the acclaimed documentary Señorita Extraviada, by Lourdes Portillo, on the femicides in Ciudad Juárez. Here, as elsewhere, her aims are ambitious:

The textual analysis here is more detailed and focusses on where visual scenes of the altars are linked to the testimonies of the women among other religious instances, subtly present in the film. It also considers Señorita Extraviada's footage of the personal effects of the murdered women recovered from the desert that show primarily sneakers, work boots, and oxfords, in contrast to the fetishized “high-heel” depictions of hyperfemininity that frequently accompany lurid media coverage of the murders. For me the poignancy of the images of shoes is also derived from their connotations with mobility – literal as well as economic and social – one of the key battlegrounds of debates about globalization and one central to the tragedy of the Juárez femicides.

Chapter 4, “Border Secrets,” looks at Kathleen Alcalá's border trilogy, Spirits of the Ordinary (1998), The Flower in the Skull (1999) and Treasures in Heaven (2000). This chapter offers a very comprehensive examination of the complex, multifaceted set of tales that spans the lives of three families over the course of more than a century and, in doing so, reveals much about ethnic, religious and political conflicts in the borderlands. A central concern of the three novels is the exploration of Jewish Mexican identity alongside the story of the indigenous Opata. Concha, the protagonist of Flower in the Skull, states,

This story of exile and forced displacement emphasizes, in particular, the “other” position of the indigenous woman as racialized, gendered and sexualized subject, defined and controlled on multiple levels. These novels, according to Delgadillo, unsettle the ways in which the Opata are usually registered in histories of American indigenous communities. Together, Delgadillo suggests, the novels assert the continuing legacy of the conquest and colonial moment in religious and racial formation in the Americas, where Jews and Indians are figured as racial Others (176). The chapter offers a compelling reading of the trilogy in its representation of the frontera as a transnational space of identity negotiation. It is also, however, characterized by an overcrowding of secondary sources that occasionally lessen the impact of the persuasive textual analysis. For example, in the introduction to the discussion on the novel, on only one page (148), Delgadillo cites an interview with the author, followed by references to and quotations from critics, José David Saldívar, Haydn White and Robert Scholes, as well as historians James F. Brooks and Emma Pérez. While this scholarly depth is commendable on one level, it does produce an overly dense reading experience at times when some of the more illuminating insights are overshadowed by the wealth of secondary detail, some of which is unnecessary.

Chapter 5, “Bad Religion,” is essentially a conclusion to the preceding chapters and includes a brief consideration of Anzaldúa's work within the broader context of postcolonial theory. Here she focusses in particular on the Indian critics Ranajit Guha and Ashis Nandy, and notes that both sets of theory recognize explicitly the role played by religiosity as it prevails in the different geopolitical spaces. The rest of the chapter revisits the narratives analysed previously, drawing them together through their shared interest in the shaping of collective consciousness through spirituality. The chapter ends with some personal reflections on the role of the critic with an interest in religiosity and/or spirituality, and is revealing for the way in which it draws attention to the ongoing ambivalence with which the theme or subject matter is still treated in the related areas of anthropology and ethnography, or Chicano studies more generally. She ends by drawing attention to scholarship on César Chávez that focusses on his Buddhist philosophies, concluding that the legacy of hybrid spirituality in the Americas is vibrant and dynamic and worthy of further study. Overall, then, Spiritual Mestizaje represents a rich and nuanced contribution to scholarship in Chicano studies as she meticulously uncovers hitherto unexplored facets of spirituality and popular expressions of religiosity as central to gendered processes of identity formation. It is to be hoped that feminist analyses of Chicano culture will further embrace this dimension of scholarship in future studies.