Like all human environments, city spaces are never static but change over time. Shifting tastes and needs, the growth or decline of populations, natural and man-made disasters—all can effect transformations upon urban environments. In effect, a city is a constantly changing terrain, a palimpsest upon which remnants of older incarnations may sometimes be visible, or exist only in memory, or show themselves only through the historian's patient labors. In this book, Alena Robin recovers from the archives part of the lost devotional landscape of Mexico City, the chapels of a via crucis that, from the late seventeenth century until the mid nineteenth century, stood alongside the city's fabled Alameda Park.
Through a careful sifting of the available documentation, the author reconstructs the now vanished collection of small buildings: their establishment and devotional use, their wealthy patrons, their oversight by the Third Order of St. Francis, and their eventual demolition by the city council—all with an eye toward “el entendimiento de la devoción del Vía Crucis por medio del estudio pormenorizado de las diferentes manifestaciones de este ejercicio piadoso, en sus múltiples componentes y variantes” and the recovery of “cómo las capillas del Vía Crucis fueron elementos que establecen una relación entre una ideología religiosa y la planifacación urbana” (40).
These aims are pursued over the course of an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction grounds the practice of the via crucis in early modern travel and devotional literature on the Holy Land and imaginary pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and the first chapter offers a detailed chronology of the origins and construction of Mexico City's own via crucis. Robin's attention to the varied funding sources for the project is developed further in the second chapter, which explores the role of a key sponsor, the merchant Domingo Ferral. Although not the sole wealthy patron to devote funds to the via crucis, Ferral's interventions shed light on the role of donors in shaping both the structures and the cult.
In the third chapter, the book's strongest, the author explores the connections between patrons and the Third Order and the artists and architects chosen to work on the chapels, and the relationship between the via crucis and the surrounding environs. The sections on the overlap between recreational and devotional space and on the “Franciscanization” of the urban environment are particularly insightful and call out for further development. A fourth chapter explores the ornamentation and maintenance of the chapels over the course of the eighteenth century. The fifth considers the changes suffered by the via crucis during the nineteenth century, including the litigation between the Third Order and the city council and the slow process of the chapels’ demolition.
The author has done an admirable job of excavating the lost via crucis, its institutional support, and its patronage network from the archives. At times, the documentation overwhelms the analysis, and the reader is lost in an overly detailed recounting of expenditures, repairs, and other minutiae. Even though suggestive, much of the analysis could have been taken further and contextualized more broadly within a wider consideration: changing contemporary devotional practices, for example, or changing urban environments and municipal priorities. Did the growing impoverishment of the Third Order and the eventual demolition of the chapels relate to the slow decline in Christocentric devotions and a growing preference for Marian piety? How did the neighborhood around the via crucis change during the eighteenth century? Were the city council's charges that the chapels’ walls sheltered malefactors and prostitutes a credible reflection of the surrounding area? Where did the demolition orders fit in a larger push to modernize the city?
Preferring to focus closely on the chapels themselves, the author does not pursue such questions, but attentive readers will find many ideas ripe for future development elsewhere. Readers may also find useful the appendix of transcribed documents related to the chapels, their patrons, and their eventual disappearance.
