BIO

Renée de la Torre Castellanos is Associate Professor of Anthropology at CIESAS Occidente (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social) in Guadalajara, Mexico. She is the author of the books Los hijos de la Luz. Discurso, identidad y poder en La Luz del Mundo (Guadalajara: UdeG/ITESO/CIESAS, 1995 and 2000) and La Ecclesia Nostra. El catolicismo desde la perspectiva de los laicos: el caso de Guadalajara (Mexico City: CIESAS/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006). Her current research deals with religious movements, urban culture and social movements, institutional analyses, and new cultural identities.

CLOSE

The Wandering Religiosity of the People of Jalisco: Traveling Virgins, Apparitions in Non-Places, and Border-Smuggling Saints

This article aims to demonstrate that popular Catholic traditions in the state of Jalisco, Mexico do not simply represent a residue of the past but rather bestow continuity and territorial anchorage on new situations of mobility, displacement, and emergent (prefigurative) identities. The need for roots that characterizes contemporary life cuts across and reconfigures the most traditional of practices, those which in Mexico, as elsewhere in Latin America, are intimately associated with popular Catholicism. How do the effects of mobility manifest themselves in popular religiosity? The present essay illustrates and analyzes this phenomenon by way of several examples taken from a broader investigation into wandering religiosity, Marian apparitions in non-places, and the invention of patron saints for migrants.

CLOSE