Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism

In Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, Edward Wright-Rios investigates how Catholicism was lived and experienced in the Archdiocese of Oaxaca, a region known for its distinct indigenous cultures and vibrant religious life, during the turbulent period of modernization in Mexico that extended from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Wright-Rios centers his analysis on three “visions” of Catholicism: an enterprising archbishop’s ambitious religious reform project, an elderly indigenous woman’s remarkable career as a seer and faith healer, and an apparition movement that coalesced around a visionary Indian girl. Deftly integrating documentary evidence with oral histories, Wright-Rios provides a rich, textured portrait of Catholicism during the decades leading up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and throughout the tempestuous 1920s.Wright-Rios demonstrates that pastors, peasants, and laywomen sought to enliven and shape popular religion in Oaxaca. The clergy tried to adapt the Vatican’s blueprint for Catholic revival to Oaxaca through institutional reforms and attempts to alter the nature and feel of lay religious practice in what amounted to a religious modernization program. Yet some devout women had their own plans. They proclaimed their personal experiences of miraculous revelation, pressured priests to recognize those experiences, marshaled their supporters, and even created new local institutions to advance their causes and sustain the new practices they created. By describing female-led visionary movements and the ideas, traditions, and startling innovations that emerged from Oaxaca’s indigenous laity, Wright-Rios adds a rarely documented perspective to Mexican cultural history. He reveals a remarkable dynamic of interaction and negotiation in which priests and parishioners as well as prelates and local seers sometimes clashed and sometimes cooperated but remained engaged with one another in the process of making their faith meaningful in tumultuous times.

“Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism is an important and much-needed exploration of the evolution of religion, both popular and ecclesiastical, from the late nineteenth century to the coming of Lázaro Cárdenas in 1934. Shrewdly avoiding stark dichotomies in favor of understanding how popular needs and practices interacted with church projects, Edward Wright-Rios offers multifaceted insight into the religious experience of turn-of-the-century Oaxacans.”—Terry Rugeley, author of Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876, “Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism is original, important, and deeply and creatively researched. A pioneering regional study of church and religion in the early twentieth century, it makes an important contribution to the literature on negotiated modernity in Latin America and to an understanding of the local reworking of Catholicism in Oaxaca in a time of troubles for the church and the Mexican polity. It is a rare achievement.”—William Taylor, author of Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishoners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, “[A]n imaginative, complex, and valuable work. With ample sources, it offers a powerful portrait of institutional revival. With few sources, creatively worked, it eloquently recovers the elusive heartbeat of Indian Catholicism and women’s ever-evolving sense of devotional place. By connecting these realms, Revolutions provides fresh and sophisticated insights into the interactions of Catholicism and modernity. Students of Mexico and religion must read it.”, “Wright-Rios’s ability to weave together church documents, popular accounts, and oral histories, as well as to engage contradictory sources, leaves us with a refreshing institutional and cultural portrayal of Mexican Catholicism.”, “Faith is a difficult thing to research. However, in his work Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, Edward Wright-Rios does a wonderful job exploring just this topic. . . . Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, and its well-researched and presented stories, are invaluable to anyone interested in religiosity in contested spaces, gender-faith-power relationships, and the power of popular devotions in the midst of cultural encounter zones (border spaces). . . . It also serves as a powerful instructional tool with stories that are compelling and at times surprising. . . .”

Edward Wright-Rios is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.