Christianity, a singularly malleable faith, has been transformed in Mexico from the sixteenth century to the present in ways that can be plumbed in historical scholarship due to equally singular conditions. Two such factors are the preservation of deep archives that record how Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and commoners repurposed Christian teachings, and the collective effervescence—to lean on Émile Durkheim’s theory of religion—of irrepressible forms of devotion that competed with orthodoxy. This panel offers for debate various methodological approaches in order to rethink the transformations in Christianity in colonial and modern Mexico for a broad audience interested in the history of religion, Christianity, Indigenous societies, Franciscans and Jesuits, and society and popular culture.

In Theater of a Thousand Wonders (Cambridge, 2016), an influential work on images and shrines in colonial Mexico, William B. Taylor examined the advantages and limitations of narrative versus analytical history. Taylor noted that, while the former subsumes event-based histories into sweeping narratives that leave little purchase for subjectivity, the latter emphasizes precious archival sources whose existence points toward highly localized directions. This panel, which emerged through exchanges among Indigenous, Mexican, and Mexican-American scholars, addresses both narrative and analysis by means of two papers on Indigenous and Jesuit foci of piety in New Spain, and two on popular forms of devotion in Mexico since the 1970s.

Our presentations embrace a promising intersection of analytical history with broader narrative histories. We do so through a focus on actors whose existence is revealed through precise sources and contexts, and who labored at the margins of Christian orthodoxy in time periods best apprehended through narrative histories. Our first paper examines Christian theology as rendered into Nahua cultural frameworks through an extraordinary source: the first—and, per current knowledge, the only—scholarly exegesis of a Biblical book by Indigenous intellectuals in the colonial Americas. Our second presentation investigates the symbolic links between the body of Christ and his followers by tracing sacramental logics that enabled the Spanish crown to claim sovereignty over Jesuit silver altarpieces after their expulsion from Spanish America. Our panel then turns to public religion through an analysis of the coexistence of Nahua observances that absorbed Christian logics in local devotions termed “the custom,” and by examining the vibrant testimonies of pilgrimages and veneration of the most prominent Marian devotion in Oaxaca, the Virgin of Juquila, by a generation of digital natives who express their devotion in social media.

As to method, our work casts a broad net by employing philological and linguistic approaches to the study of Nahuatl, Latin, and Spanish sources; tracing the historical resonance of sacramental material culture; collecting oral histories and employing ethnographic observation; and scrutinizing a novel, emergent archive of devotions preserved in public social media accounts. Hence, this panel embraces Taylor’s challenge to seek “a fuller understanding” of the history of Latin America Christianities by examining the variegated contours of public devotions and the peripheral and institutional actors that supported or proscribed them.