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This valuable, if occasionally disparate, collection brings together many young, and some established, historians, notably Silvia Arrom and Paul Vanderwood. The generic title deserves a caveat, however, as this is really a book about Mexican Catholicisms, not religion per se. In fact, only Jason Dormady's account of the Mennonites' arrival in 1920s Chihuahua, deals with Protestant forms of religious expression. Still, the book is no less welcome for its Catholic (more than catholic) biases, given the insights it provides and the diversity of settings, constituencies and perspectives - urban, rural, gendered and indigenous - that it incorporates. Though pitched as a study of 'modern' Mexico, the book has most to say about nineteenth-century religion (explored in six out of ten substantive essays). Only three empirical studies - and Adrian Bantjes's illuminating historiographical essay - deal with the revolution; and only one (Dormady again) takes us near the present.
These caveats aside, the collection coheres around two broad themes which are set out in a rather concise introduction: the dialectical affinity between religion and politics in Mexico (what Martin Nesvig here describes as 'the intersection of the political with the religious' p. 5); and the myriad dynamics of local religion. This combined localised/dialectical approach is, nonetheless, cumulatively effective in terms of decoupling a grand, linear view of secularisation, on the one hand, and processes of political and economic modernisation, on the other. The essays here show that the impact of modernisation in the religious sphere has not been disenchantment but the constant evolution and diversification of religious identities and practices.
Matthew O'Hara's useful essay, for example, explores the intricacies of secularisation from a legal/canonical perspective and shows how ecclesiastical categories of 'Indianness' survived the colony, contradicting ideas of universal republican citizenship....