The separate chapters in this book, according to the author’s avowal, are fugitive pieces from the research that led to his earlier Yucatán’s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War (Univ. of Texas Press, 1996). Presented as a composite sketch of salient aspects of Yucatecan popular culture during a 75-year time span, the discussions often arrive, in one way or another, at the Caste War, although the book by no means completely orbits around that major historical spasm of nineteenth-century Yucatán. Neither, on the other hand, is it a unified exposition of religion. Rather, it is a more dispersed exhibition of nineteenth-century Yucatecan manners.
Sources include a substantial number of archives, but also local ethnographies, secondary accounts, and more theoretical treatments of Latin American and European history. Stories are everywhere, as specific cases punctuate more generalized discussions. Treatments of religious beliefs and practices abound, their intertwined Spanish and...
