In his most recent book, Edwin David Aponte sets out to provide his readers with an entrée into the diverse and complex worlds of U.S. Latino/a spiritualities. While the pluralistic religious landscape of the United States has been well documented by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists alike, Aponte notes that there have been relatively few studies of lived religion and spirituality of Latino/a communities (9). ¡Santo! is a direct response and attempted corrective to this oversight; Aponte's primary aim in the book is to uncover the diversity of spiritual and religious practices within U.S. Latino/a communities (9–10).

Aponte organizes his book chapters into the following themes: “Santo and Spirituality,” “Santo: Beyond the Usual Expectations,” “Latino/a Peoples and the ‘Holy,’” “Rituals and Passages of Life,” ‘Rhetoric and Traditions,” “Sacred Places and Spaces,” and “Exploring Spanglish Spirituality.” Within each theme, Aponte provides examples of the ways that Latinos/as (including men and women of Ecuadorian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and Mexican descent) live their beliefs in everyday life—lo cotidiano. Aponte's examples, culled form his own as well as other scholars’ research, have a geographic diversity as well—examples form the Southwestern United States, Midwest, East Coast, and Southeast are included in the book's chapters. Latino/a Buddhist and Muslim voices are featured alongside a range of Latino/a Christian voices (including Catholic, Pentecostal, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Mormons) as well as a variety of “African religious-cultural metaphysical” traditions. Aponte aims to show the breadth of Latino/a spiritualities in the United States and he presents the various traditions in a way that made this reader wanting to know more about each of the groups he mentions and briefly covers in the book.

Aponte's aim of uncovering varieties of beliefs and practices is tempered by the lack of depth in the examples he provides as well as by his use of two tropes: Santo (“holy”) and Sagrado (“sacred). Both santo and sagrado are used as “collective concepts” which, according to the author “includes Latino and Latina perspectives on traditional religion, life interpretation and explanations (sense-making), health, wholeness, understandings of existence and the future, and balancing relationships at all levels of existence” (10). The author's stated goal of showing the diversity of Latino/a spiritualities is ambitious indeed, as the majority of books on Latino/a religion and spirituality are focused on Christian traditions, and he is to be commended for his desire to open up Latino/a spiritualities. But his desire to showcase some non-Christian beliefs and practices comes into conflict with the Christian-laden concepts/tropes of santo and sagrado.

¡Santo! is a good primer into some of the varieties of U.S. Latino/a spiritualities and could foreseeably be used in first and second year undergraduate classrooms because of its accessibility. Yet because the author uses the tropes of sagrado and santo as a way of separating Latinos/as from the broader U.S. religious landscape, an unintended but direct result of this framing is to essentialize and/or romanticize a particular group of people—in this case Latinos/as. There are many instances in the book where this reviewer found herself making connections between U.S. Latino/as' experiences and white, non-Latinos/as' experiences of identity formation, community building, experiencing otherness, experiencing multiple consciousness, and so forth. The book would have been more compelling and relevant to a wider readership if the author would have drawn on the very real, multiple connections Latinos/as have with non-Latinos/as. Non-Latinos/as want to understand Latinos/as spiritualities but have little point of reference and/or empathy if the histories and genealogies of Latino/a spiritualities are posited as culturally and qualitatively distinctive from their own.

Showing places of connections and intersections between Latino/a and non-Latino/a spiritualities would not diminish those unique characteristics of Latinos/as but would serve as a bridge (and one that exists) between various cultures. A greater contextualization of Latinos/as with their non-Latino/a neighbors but would help non-Latinos/as see the places of intersection and just how Latinos/as are part of the broader U.S. spiritual landscape—and how, importantly, they share experiences and stories. This greater context would be welcome and appropriate, given Aponte's stated aims in his introduction. He begins the book with an introduction into “contexts for spirituality” and provides an overview of late twentieth-century to the present spirituality in the United States (1–7). The way Latinos/as spiritual histories are laid out in the book posits them as outsiders and on the margins—always on the outside and not quite at the center. Yet Latinos/as multiple consciousness and hybridity—as the emergent “Spanglish” realities detailed in chapter seven show us—are an important link to a larger U.S. spiritual history and makes them more at the center of U.S. religious and spiritual history than on the margins.

In the final book chapter, “Exploring Spanglish Spirituality,” Aponte provides important evidence for an ever-emerging hybridity in spiritual beliefs and practices among U.S. Latinos/as. These Spanglish spiritualities are, he writes, “the articulation in words and actions of individual and communal experience of navigating and making sense of the world” (146). He goes on to assert that “Spanglish spirituality is ‘not just about them’ and ‘is important for all of us’” (147). Aponte ends the book on this strong, compelling note, but because he does not draw deeper connections between Latinos/as' spiritual hybridities with non-Latinos/as, his message of relevance does not have the wide-ranging impact that it could have had.