
Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934
Edward Wright-Rios
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.
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About Edward Wright-Rios
Reviews for Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934
Matthew Butler
Bulletin of Latin American Research
“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.”
Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval
Hispanic American Historical Review
“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. . . .”
SilverMoon
Ethnohistory
“Gracefully written and informed by a wide-ranging grasp of religion’s intersections with political and economic life, especially in Oaxaca’s Indian communities, this endlessly absorbing book sets a new standard for twentieth-century Mexican religious history and should inspire comparative regional research for years to come.”
Pamela Voekel
American Historical Review
“The text in Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism is undeniably a significant and laudable academic undertaking. . . . Wright Rios brings to life the complexities of faithful devotion in the regional Catholic communities, the dynamic and sometimes contentious relationship between clergy and laypersons, as well as the ongoing negotiation and evolving interpenetration of Catholic religious traditions and indigenous customs and understandings of faith and the Divine. . . .[C]ertainly it should be hoped that more work from Wright-Rios is on the horizon.”
Mark Noll
Missiology
“Wright-Rios’s meticulously researched, engaging, and cautiously argued study is a model of balanced scholarship and essential reading for anyone interested in Mexican religious history.”
Adrian A. Bantjes
Catholic Historical Review