Spanish Jesuit Churches in Mexico’s Tarahumara

Paul Roca, a Phoenix attorney and history aficionado who died in 1979, spent a good part of his last twenty years traveling the paths of colonial Jesuit missionaries in Sonora and Chihuahua. This book describes the surviving Jesuit mission churches of the Tarahumara area which the author visited during a succession of trips between 1968 and 1976. The narrative combines a strong dose of geography, architecture, and construction techniques with a smattering of history and ethnography. Using colonial Jesuit accounts, Roca traversed the barely accessible Sierra Madre mountains of western Chihuahua trying to locate cabecera and visita churches, and much of the story consists of his own often harrowing exploration. The descriptive account and the photographs are further testimony to the persistence of Rarámuri culture which has been so favored by inhospitable geography. The book offers brief, intermittent historical glimpses into the Jesuit mission enterprise in the Tarahumara.