Founded in 1531, Puebla de los Ángeles was the second largest and most important Spanish urban center in colonial Mexico, only surpassed by the viceregal capital Mexico City. Strategically positioned midway between the Caribbean port of Veracruz and the capital city, Puebla soon thrived economically and demographically as a trading center integral to the Spanish Atlantic commercial network. The city stood out for its prosperous textile and ceramics industries as well as its ostentatious baroque Catholicism. In colonial Puebla, like in other urban centers in the Hispanic world, economic, political, and religious powers—the three pillars of Spanish colonialism—negotiated and contested their space. However, despite its prominence, the city entered decline in the eighteenth century, when waves of deadly epidemics ravaged its citizens and enlightened reformers raised taxes to increase imperial revenue.

Frances L. Ramos's award-winning book Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla examines Puebla's political culture through the display of public civil and ecclesiastical ceremonies during its economic decline. The book provides a thorough analysis of the ways public spectacles of ritual contributed to the formation of a local and imperial identity and were used by colonial officials to leverage power. Ramos argues that “[i]n late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puebla, ritual permeated all aspects of political life. It helped councilmen legitimize church and state, cement corporate and civic identities, stimulate the local economy, develop patron-client relationships, and vie for power” (xviii–xix). Borrowing from anthropologist Clifford Geertz, she further contends that public ceremonies shaped the political culture and identity of Puebla's citizens. However, Spanish colonialism was far from monolithic—Ramos illustrates how both Puebla's civil and ecclesiastical powers struggled to assert supremacy. The book ends with administrative changes brought during the apex of the Bourbon reforms in the 1760s and 1770s.

The book's organization is thematic. After setting the historical context of colonial Puebla in the first chapter, the following three chapters center on various types of public ceremonies that range from royal oath ceremonies, funeral rituals, and the viceroy's entrance into Puebla to a variety of Catholic festivities. Ramos demonstrates how civil and ecclesiastical spectacles developed loyalties to the crown and to the Catholic church amidst Puebla's ethnically and socially fragmented society. For example, chapter 4, “Universal Religion in a Local Context,” shows how members of Puebla's cathedral chapter and cabildo (municipal council) used religious devotions to create a local as much as a trans-colonial and trans-Atlantic Catholic identity. Here, Ramos expands on William Christian's classic work Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989) to suggest a three-tiered model to study urban religiosity: neighborhood religious practices characterized by the cofradías or sodalities, city practices encouraged by Puebla's cabildo and cathedral chapter, and universal devotions to encourage collective membership to the Catholic church and Spain. In this sense, Ramos significantly examines local devotions to patron saints as well as trans-Atlantic religious observances such as Corpus Christi.

The following chapters focus on the socioeconomic aspects of public spectacles. Ramos illustrates the ways elites employed ceremonies to create, reaffirm, and justify class belonging and social inequality in chapter 5. The next chapter examines the economic value of rituals, highlighting the economic stimulus and patronage ties created by ceremonies that supported local businesses such as butchers, artisans, bakers, firework makers, and carpenters. Patronage and fiscal restraint in the second half of the eighteenth century eventually led to corruption and conflict, the themes of the last two chapters. Here, Ramos vividly illustrates the power struggle between Puebla's municipal council and the cathedral chapter—two of the pillars of Spanish imperialism. Ultimately, Bourbon reforms of the 1760s and 1770s reshaped the balance of power in Puebla, as new actors entered the local political arena: the governor and the militia. At least in late colonial Puebla, Ramos shows how two unlikely allies, the governor and the cathedral chapter, joined forces to challenge councilmen's power.

Ramos's research in Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla rests on a solid examination of minutes and the books of expenditures and income from Puebla's municipal archive, the cathedral chapter's proceedings, and other sources from archives in Spain and Mexico. While Ramos's extensive primary research opens the gates to a plethora of vivid examples of local political culture, her mastery of secondary bibliography further proves that Puebla was not alone in the use of the public arena to shape and consolidate authority and identity. In this sense, Ramos fits within recent studies on eighteenth-century political culture and popular religious practices in the Hispanic world and Europe.

This is a long-awaited book and a much needed English study of Puebla during the Spanish colonial period. The book is exquisitely written, full of details, and nicely presented. Ramos transports the reader into Puebla's colonial political culture through vibrant accounts of viceregal entrances, acrimonious disputes, and corruption cases. These vivid descriptions of political corruption as well as internal conflict in Puebla make the book particularly noteworthy and a pleasure to read. This book is essential for students interested in colonial Latin America, popular culture, or Mexican history.