Protestantism and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca

by Kathleen M McIntyre

In this fascinating book Kathleen M. McIntyre traces intra-village conflicts stemming from Protestant conversion in southern Mexico and successfully demonstrates that both Protestants and Catholics deployed cultural identity as self-defense in clashes over local power and authority. McIntyre's study approaches religious competition through an examination of disputes over tequio (collective work projects) and cargo (civil-religious hierarchy) participation. By framing her study between the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Zapatista uprising of 1994, she demonstrates the ways Protestant conversion fueled regional and national discussions over the state's conceptualization of indigenous citizenship and the parameters of local autonomy. The book's timely scholarship is an important addition to the growing literature on transnational religious movements, gender, and indigenous identity in Latin America.

296 pages, Hardcover

Published May 15, 2019

Reviews

[Andrew Paxman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The long march of Mexican Protestantism has received little attention from historians, so Kathleen McIntyre’s account of how religious conversion and church growth played out in Oaxaca, from the 1890s to the near-present, fills a major gap. It’s a well-wrought fusion of archival research, digging among periodicals, and ethnographic inquiry in towns across this highly indigenous state. And it’s mostly even-handed as it studies the unsettling of Catholic traditions, the persecution of Protestant converts, and the clash between the collective rights usually considered crucial to indigenous identity and the individual rights, especially freedom of worship, guaranteed by Mexico’s Constitution.

One highlight is the tale of Samuel Juárez García, a Zapotec itinerant pastor. His success as a horseback evangelist and advocate of land redistribution combined to cause his murder by Catholic assailants in 1935. His local afterlife as a Baptist martyr, like nationwide awareness of persecution in general, helped create an ‘imagined community’ of patriotic Protestants. Much of the book shows how Protestants met resistance from town authorities who argued that ‘custom is law’ and ‘everyone is Catholic here’. In the short run the Catholics usually won, stalling church construction and sometimes expelling converts, for the state declined to intervene beyond a stiff letter to the mayor. In the long run the Protestants won, for their numbers increased. How they did so is as much a matter of politics and economics as it is of faith. Converts tended to resent the imposition of traditional Catholic duties: financing lengthy patron-saint festivals and devoting Saturdays to collective-work projects from road construction to church repair.

Less successful are chapters on the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and the resistance of Catholic prelates to challenges to their hegemony. The SIL story has been better told by Todd Hartch in Missionaries of the State; McIntyre is too ready to take criticisms of SIL at face value. The chapter on Catholics is largely tangential. A thorough explanation of Pentecostalism’s local rise would have been more useful. Still, this book sets a high standard for broad-scope histories of Protestantism in Mexico’s states. Chiapas, Tabasco, the Yucatán, and the border states await similarly adventurous scholars.