Biography of a Mexican Crucifix examines a broad range of issues in Mexican history and religion through the lens of devotion to the Cristo Aparecido (Christ Appeared), a graphic carved image of the crucified Christ enshrined in the village of Totolapan. The volume is distinguished in the author's expansive study of an evolving religious tradition over the nearly five centuries since its inception. Jennifer Hughes examines the initial “appearance” of the Cristo when a mysterious Indian visitor presented it to Fray Antonio de Roa in 1543, the early Augustinian friar attempts to employ the image in the evangelization of native peoples, the Augustinians' removal of the Cristo to Mexico City in 1583 to promote Roa's growing acclaim as a saintly figure, and the triumphant return to Totolapan in 1861. Hughes then goes on to explore relations among contemporary devotees, clergy assigned to pastor them, Catholic bishops from the local diocese of Cuernavaca, and government-employed cultural preservationists, all of whom alternatively collaborate and compete to advance their understanding of the Cristo and its significance.

Hughes draws on a wealth of archival and ethnographic sources, though extant documents are relatively scant for several eras of the study, such as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the century and a half between the 1583 Inquisition investigation into claims of miracles associated with the Cristo and the sacred object's subsequent role in initiatives to combat the deadly Mexico City typhus epidemic of the 1730s. The weakest documentation is for the nearly three centuries the Cristo was absent from Totolapan. Hughes states that during this time local devotees “preserved a memory of their absent Cristo” (127) focused on the empty cross from which the Cristo had been removed, but the contours of veneration associated with that memory are obscure.

The broadly contextual approach employed in the volume enables Hughes to examine wider topics in their relation to the Cristo. She notes, for example, that Mexico's gaining of independence from Spain in 1821 and the Mexican Revolution a century later had little discernible influence on the history of the Cristo, revealing that the standard political periodization of the Mexican past does not always correspond closely with the historical trajectory of religious and cultural phenomena. Exploring the complex question of how the religious worlds of Spanish Catholics and native peoples intersected during the conquest and its aftermath, Hughes contends that “religion is not only about belief and embodied practice but also about affect and emotion” (244). She asserts that the case of the Cristo Aparecido directs scholars to assess more deeply the religious feelings that persisted beyond indigenous adoption of Christian beliefs and practices. While her contention that “the broken Christ most readily evoked their tender regard for the fragile cosmic order” (80) remains a speculative assertion about the psyche of conquered natives, she cogently insists that attention to native-Iberian religious sentiment augment both the frequently dichotomous scholarly interpretations of their colliding religious systems, on the one hand, and, conversely, the arguments that the two groups had closely analogous religious beliefs and practices. Extending her analysis through the baroque period, the “Bourbon Church” and its modernizing reforms, Mexican church-state conflicts and the rise of liberalism, the emergence of liberation theology, Catholic liturgical renewal fostered through the Second Vatican Council, and divergent contemporary views about the meaning and implementation of the Council, Hughes traces the variable and ultimately ambivalent relationship of Mexican clergy to popular piety in the history of Mexican Catholicism.

Hughes's most extended contestation of previous historical, theological, and sociological studies is their “largely unchallenged” presumption that “devotion to the suffering Christ necessarily causes resignation to suffering” in devotees (204). She contends that the earliest native worshipers of the Cristo in Totolapan were reluctant to imitate the sanguinary self-discipline of Fray Roa, though this claim is largely based on indigenous testimony given to Inquisition officials, proceedings for which she herself states witnesses “were carefully selected, and their testimonies rehearsed and orchestrated” (96). Nonetheless, she argues persuasively that the pride and gratitude of Totolapan natives at their Cristo's providential appearance to them overshadowed their acceptance of Roa's teaching that the crucified Christ revealed that their fundamental human condition was to be suffering. Rather than seeing their agonized Cristo primarily as a sign of God's suffering with them in their conquest and in the widespread death that European diseases wrought in their communities, the natives tended to see their Cristo as a miraculous intervener whose power defended and uplifted them. Numerous subsequent devotees have spoken more energetically about the beauty of their Cristo than about his anguish, and their emotional response to the Cristo tends to be more affection than pity. In recent decades when Franciscan pastors accused their flock of focusing their worship too narrowly on a dead Jesus rather than the resurrected and living Christ, many Totolapans understood their priests' statement to be an insult to their Cristo. They retorted that their Cristo is alive and active: he continues to abide among them and sustain them, even in the face of clergy they contend are antagonistic to their traditions.

Such claims underscore the conviction of the Cristo's faithful that his survival and ongoing vitality are intricately linked to their own. Hughes's masterful interweaving of their story and that of their Cristo, along with the wider history of other social groups in Mexican church and society, make her volume an important addition to scholarly analyses of religion in Mexican history and, more broadly, to studies whose authors systematically attempt to examine the interrelations of religious traditions with their social and historical contexts.