This work is the outcome of a 22-year study in the Tuscon-Magdalena corridor of the present Mexico-U.S. border. Donors offer milagros, small, mass-produced, allegorically shaped metal pieces, to the images of saints to thank them or to request divine intercession for health or personal problems. Eileen Oktavec aims to explain the customs associated with milagros so that “readers unfamiliar with this tradition might understand its value to the people who are part of the milagro-offering culture” (p. xix). Following the compelling title, the preface promises that the book will “take the reader well beyond [the milagros’] mere classification and catalogue presentation into a far more important realm: How they function in the lives of people who use them in their dealings with God” (p. xiv).
Oktavec, an anthropologist and photographer, combines field interviews with a statistical analysis of two large collections of milagros from important regional shrines. She describes the spaces in which acts of local piety take place; the most venerated saints; how milagros are elaborated, sold, and used; and their ultimate destiny as objects. The text offers vivid descriptions and colorful details pertinent to the social life of milagritos in this borderland region. Answered Prayers represents a remarkable effort written in a lively manner, and it offers insightful findings.
Still, a number of questions remain unanswered on a topic crucial to understanding borderlands religious culture. Oktavec fails to connect meaningfully the use of milagritos to broader local religious customs. James Griffith, for example, in his 1992 book on the same region (Beliefs and Holy Places: A Spiritual Geography of the Pimeria Alta), stresses the agency of lay people in reshaping official saints. People have even venerated their own unofficial intercessors, such as Juan Soldado and El Tiradito, despite ecclesiastical efforts to discourage those practices.
Oktavec makes it clear that the institutional keepers of religious spaces in the area (priests, nuns, friars) range in their perception of milagros from skeptical tolerance to mockery and open hostility. She refuses, nevertheless, to deal analytically with the conflicts, tensions, and accommodations that result from discrepancies between the Mexican, Mexican American, and Native American faithful and the mostly Anglo-American church officials.
In general, the text lacks coherence in integrating its stated goal and some of its contents. (What is the relevance of chapter 7’s full, tourist-oriented report on where to purchase nichos and milagros in Tuscon, including the store owners, addresses, and the range of prices?) Oddly, Oktavec’s work does not reflect a knowledge of relevant research on votive offerings along the border, such as Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey’s study of retablos by Mexican immigrants (Miracles on the Border, 1995).
