Standard histories of the nature of Catholic resistance to the construction of the Mexican state have placed it within a long process of intertwined Church–state relations, a question of high politics. Nevertheless, the rise of revisionist regional history between 1970 and 1990 gradually drew attention to the importance of the religious dimension to our understanding of post-revolutionary society.
In the case of the Archdiocese of Oaxaca between 1887 and 1934, this study by Edward Wright-Rios goes a step further than its predecessors in incorporating regional history. Moving beyond the dominant reductionist tendency in dealing with Church–state relations, the author aims to ‘remake the history of Mexican Catholicism itself (as a complex organization and as a way of life)’ (p. 6, quoting José André-Gallego). Treating the Church as a sort of state with its own internal power struggles, the work explores the changes and continuities within Mexican Catholicism and attempts to understand the efforts of indigenous peoples, lay leaders and clerical activists to reinvigorate Catholicism in the face of secularisation and the Mexican state. This is focused on three major movements which arose between 1880 and 1930: the implementation, in the Archdiocese of Oaxaca, of a reform instigated by the Vatican to ‘rechristianise’ Latin America (1887–1911), and two cases of indigenous devotional apparitionism.
Inspired by authors who sparked the new cultural history (especially James Scott and his insights relating to strategies of dominance and resistance, Eric Hobsbawm and his concepts of ‘invented tradition’, and Victor Turner and his typologies of apparitionism), Wright-Rios argues that the higher clergy inflicted dogmas and dictates on the community of believers in an attempt to impose its reforms, but adopted a flexible stance when dealing with clashes over specific issues relating to rural communities. The study considers the institutional role of the clergy as a body that aimed to define cultural meanings, identities and beliefs in the context of the sacred and the profane. But it also deals with the negotiations, interactions and confrontations between communities of believers and the Church that were part of the reinvention of a religious culture from below.
Between 1887 and 1911 the archbishop of Oaxaca, Eulogio Gillow, favoured a conservative and Hispanicist form of urban piety and institutional Catholic culture centred on the city. Gillow's religious reformism culminated in the coronation of the Virgen de la Soledad in 1909. This event was conceived by the Church hierarchy and the social elite of the provincial capital as a ‘civilising mission’ in the face of the spontaneous, and dubious, indigenous religious outpourings centred on local Virgins. This is a case in point, whereby the dominant groups deployed their symbols to justify their authority over a predominantly rural society (or also as the imposition of an ‘invented tradition’). Nevertheless, for the people, especially in the countryside, this may have been seen as a ‘one-time blockbuster feria’.
It is within this context of ecclesiastical reform that two indigenous apparitionist movements appeared. In April 1911 Bartola Bolaños, a Nahua healer from San Mateo Tlacoxcalco (in the Tehuacán Valley, Puebla, but part of the Archdiocese of Oaxaca), had a vision of Christ requesting worship in night-time rituals in a new chapel. The region's Catholicism was centred on mayordomías (brotherhoods) and fiestas, sometimes of a sacramental character. The indigenous people did not regard the clergy as their opponents, however, but rather as part of their religious world. For their part, the local clergy considered the people to be ‘Catholics in their own way’. By June the movement had grown widely in the region. The formation of an hermandad was proposed, along with the building of a chapel, the celebration of nocturnal rituals, and recognition by the Church hierarchy. The latter was withheld for several years, during which the ecclesiastical authorities tried in vain to dismantle the movement. Finally a new archbishop in the 1920s opted to come to a modus vivendi with the movement, despite its heterodox origins.
In the spring of 1928 a nine-year-old indigenous girl, ‘Nicha’, experienced an apparition of the Virgin in a waterfall in front of a small cave. Nicha, who was prone to hysterical trances, said that the Virgin spoke of her wish for a sanctuary to be raised there for her adoration. Between 1928 and 1930 the number of believers, mainly Chatinos speaking only Chatino, began to grow. Doña Matilda Narváez, a devout mestiza with a close relationship to the local priest, supported Nicha, moving to organise her defence in the face of the Oaxacan ecclesiastical authorities and advocating for the recognition of this new devotional movement. In Wright-Rios' view, however, the movement erred in not including men among its leadership as it attempted to establish itself in the community. This would have enabled it to institutionalise itself, as occurred in Tlacoxcalco.
One of Wright-Rios' major contributions is his insight that the years between 1910 and 1934 provided broad opportunities for the emergence of new rituals, given the increased social inclusiveness that was taking place. Hence, lay people could create resistance strategies and cleave to rituals in defiance not only of the ongoing process of secularisation, but also of the Church hierarchy itself. However, one of the principal weaknesses of the book, due largely to its overall approach to the subject, is the failure to pay sufficient attention to the interrelationship between Catholicism on the one hand and the state and its agrarian clients on the other, when the latter, as regional studies have shown, conditioned to a great extent the power games within the Church. The state and its clients appear in the work merely as distant shadows.
Despite this criticism, this post-revisionist study opens up a promising approach by virtue of the fresh angles from which it considers ‘religious culture’ and its role in the social order that emerged with the Mexican Revolution.
