Mexican Protestantism in the post-revolutionary era has been the subject of two major bodies of literature and one minor one. First to flourish, as of the 1950s, was the missionary memoir, penned by members of such US organisations as the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). As of the 1960s, while the Protestant proportion of Mexicans approached 2 per cent (it is now more than 11 per cent), anthropologists studied the phenomenon. At first they did so with sympathy – for missionaries were often educators – but between the 1970s and 1990s with antipathy, viewing Protestantism as a mark of cultural imperialism and a threat to the unity of the Indigenous towns that hosted its most rapid growth. Histories make up the smaller body of work. While scholars of Protestantism before and during the Mexican Revolution have occasionally ventured beyond 1920, sustained attention to twentieth-century church growth has only emerged over the past 15 years or so and many lacunae remain. On these grounds alone, Kathleen McIntyre's longue durée study, Protestantism and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca, is most welcome.

Moreover, it represents a well-wrought fusion of archival research, digging among periodicals (religious and secular) and ethnography. McIntyre spent time in towns across Oaxaca, getting to know both Protestant and Catholic communities, attending their services, interviewing elders, and even taking half of the book's pictures. In general she avoids partiality, another important asset in a study whose chief themes are the unsettling of Catholic traditions, the persecution of Protestant converts, and the clash between the collective rights upon which Indigenous identity is greatly grounded and the individual rights, especially freedom of worship, guaranteed by Mexico's Constitution. Her location is well chosen: Oaxaca was birthplace to Benito Juárez, whose 1860 Religious Freedom Act enabled foreign missionaries to evangelise in Mexico; it witnessed one of the earliest cases of Protestant martyrdom, in 1935; it became a hotbed of Pentecostalism in the 1970s; and today harbours one of Mexico's largest Protestant minorities.

Making for a pan-denominational richness, chapters focus by turn on Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, the SIL, Catholics and Pentecostals, but this is less an analytical device than a function of Protestantism's evolution. During the Porfirian era, it was the Methodists who first made inroads among Oaxacans. As early as 1896, Oaxaca's Methodist Mission was run by a Mexican – an early example of how labelling Protestants as imperialists (a common Catholic trope until the 1990s) is simplistic. After the Revolution the Baptists entered Oaxaca, and Chapter 2 tells the remarkable tale of Samuel Juárez García, a Zapotec itinerant pastor. His success as a horseback evangelist and his activism as an agrarista (advocate of land redistribution) apparently combined to cause his murder, along with that of five other Protestant agraristas, by Catholic assailants in 1935. McIntyre then relates his afterlife as a Baptist martyr, persuasively arguing that reverence for Juárez García and transnational awareness of persecution in general helped create an ‘imagined community’ of patriotic Protestants parallel to that of the Catholic majority. Since it has become de rigueur to cite Benedict Anderson's concept in social histories, it is refreshing to find the term employed in a more-than-token fashion.

In 1914, the bigger US churches divided Mexico into spheres of influence, to minimise duplication of effort, and the Presbyterians were accorded the south (perhaps the Baptists did not get the memo). From the 1940s to the 1960s they constituted Oaxaca's most active denomination and Chapter 3 shows how Presbyterian expansionism met resistance from authorities arguing that ‘custom is law’ and ‘everyone is Catholic here’ (pp. 68 and 84). In a theme resumed in Chapter 6, regarding Pentecostals and Jehovah's Witnesses in the 1980s, the ensuing conflicts pitted Protestants appealing to regional and federal authorities against Catholics appealing to local tradition (and in the 1980s, with some success, to President Miguel de la Madrid). In the short term the Catholics usually won, in that they stalled church construction and sometimes expelled converts, for the state declined to intervene beyond sending a stiff letter to the mayor. In the long term the Protestants won, in that their numbers increased. How they did so is another of the book's main themes, and the answer is as much a matter of politics and economics as it is of proselytism. Converts and would-be converts tended to resent the power of caciques (town bosses) and the imposition of traditional Catholic duties. Protestant defiance of the ancient cargo system, whereby selected men had to finance and organise lengthy festivals honouring a town's patron saint, is well attested in the literature (missionary, anthropological and historical), but McIntyre puts equal emphasis on the less discussed tradition of tequio (collective work), whereby townsfolk were expected to devote Saturdays to projects from road construction to church repair. Many Protestants considered the latter obligation an affront to personal liberty.

Less successful are Chapters 4, on the SIL, and 5, on the resistance of the Vatican and Mexico's prelates to challenges to their hegemony. Discussion of the SIL includes two engaging case studies which show how, for some, ‘indigenous identity was strengthened by conversion’ (p. 104). Yet the larger story, summarised at unnecessary length, has been better told by Todd Hartch in Missionaries of the State (University of Alabama Press, 2006); McIntyre is too ready to take Marxist-inflected criticisms of the SIL at face value. Chapter 5 is the ungainly grab bag that its title suggests (‘Liberation Theology, Indigenous Rights, and Nationalism’). Its first half covers Pope John Paul II's 1979 visit to Oaxaca, a tangential episode better suited to a journal article. Its second half repeatedly refers to Pentecostals and non-Trinitarian churches with the derogatory Catholic term sectas, an unfortunate choice of shorthand that leads to the awful phrase ‘the onslaught of new sectas’ (p. 166). A thorough explanation of Pentecostalism's rise in Oaxaca would have produced a more useful chapter.

Told in functional if somewhat repetitive prose, this monograph covers a great deal of ground, and it brings the story to the near-present with its account of how Protestants supported embattled governor Ulises Ruiz (2004–10) in his long-running conflict with a militant teachers’ union and its sympathisers; Ruiz apparently reciprocated by facilitating a festival headlined by Argentine evangelist Luis Palau. McIntyre has set a high standard for broad-scope histories of Protestantism in Mexico's states. Religious histories of other regions where Catholicism has lost much of its monopoly – Chiapas, Tabasco, the Yucatán peninsular, and the border states – await similarly adventurous scholars.