William B. Taylor offers an engaging, detailed narrative of the lives of two wayward men who faced the Inquisition for impersonating priests in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New Spain. He examines the turbulent lives of Joseph Aguayo and Juan Atondo through Inquisition reports, witness testimony, and their own confessions. Against the backdrop of the Inquisition's waning power and increasingly revolutionary political ideology, inquisitors were “intensely interested in these two men because their crime was both a mortal sin and an intolerable affront to the integrity and prestige of the Holy Office and the Church” (23).
Yet, Taylor cautions that elite perceptions do not represent the intentions of the many vagabundos and beggars seen as threats to the social and political order. Thus, he reads documents against the grain and contextualizes them through a close reading of picaresque literature to discover the intentions and motivations of these two figures. Taylor finds the differences between them to be more important than the similarities: “Atondo's fitful religious ‘inclination’ bordered on a mystical sense that he had been chosen by God to defend the Church. For Aguayo, the Catholic liturgy and doctrine were part of a practice he had grown up with and found to be useful cultural knowledge” (137). The unique structure of the book permits a steady, suspenseful unfolding of Taylor's larger arguments and judgments in its second half.
The first impostor, Aguayo (b. 1747), faced poverty and mistreatment during his childhood in Guanajuato, which he invoked as a rationale for his misdeeds. He spent nearly 20 years in jail or penal servitude for repeated theft and impersonating a priest on multiple occasions, celebrating the mass and hearing confessions for small fees. This audacious escape artist with an aversion to manual labor repeatedly outwitted authorities, even pretending to be a representative of the Inquisition and a royal collector of tribute. He was recaptured, tried, and punished on multiple occasions and exiled to Cuba.
The second impostor, Atondo, was born in Mexico City in the early 1780s; he also celebrated the mass and heard confessions. This vagabond with a penchant for fine clothes appeared in Inquisition reports during his incarceration from 1815 to 1818. Atondo leaned toward religious devotion his entire life, impersonated a priest briefly, and had affiliations with insurgents during his time served in the royalist army as punishment. In his rambling confession, Taylor sees the recurring “thread of fervent, sometimes ecstatic religiosity that he called his ‘propensión religiosa’” as key to unlocking the meanings behind his erratic behavior (74). He speculates that Atondo suffered from what modern medicine would later label bipolar disorder.
Central to his methodology is an intensive examination of the pícaro genre of literature, filled with rogue characters on the fringes of society. Taylor delves into the plots and characters of several novels from Spain and the colony, published over centuries, to examine similarities between the lives of his subjects. He concludes that the pair “tried to dodge the Bourbon reformers’ old and new institutions of order, rather than oppose them head on” and that their “freedom was closer to that of the early literary pícaros than to that of French philosophes and revolutionaries” (145).
Nevertheless, Aguayo emerges much closer to a true pícaro than Atondo in Taylor's estimation: the first exploited his knowledge of Church practices to better his own lot, while the latter likely believed he was saving souls in the midst of tumultuous change. The author takes the reader on his intellectual journey of discovery and frustrations, carefully pondering the motivations and inner feelings of the vagabond impostors while meticulously detailing the process of historical research. Although some may feel uneasy with aspects of psychological analysis and candid admissions of uncertainty at times, this master historian offers a refreshingly honest account of where the written records fall short and allows one to consider multiple possibilities.
