This book is a rich regional history of Mexican Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Partly as a response to the recent call by historian José Andrés-Gallego to revisit the history of Mexican Catholicism both “as a complex organization and as a way of life,” Edward Wright-Rios brings together the religious perspectives of ecclesiastical authorities, parish priests, and laypeople around the promotion of local devotions (p. 6). He argues that, in the wake of the anticlerical “reform laws” of the 1850s and 1860s, clergymen and parishioners in the Archdiocese of Oaxaca sought to spur a revival of Catholicism through “their common interest in founding, fueling and managing devotions” (p. 4). Religious revitalization in Oaxaca took place at the institutional and popular level. In this view, the Oaxacan Church witnessed two “revolutions,” one administered by Catholic pastors and the other one sustained by women and indigenous peoples.

Wright-Rios...

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