Alberto Lopez Pulido
Description
Catholics on the isolated frontiers of the Spanish empire, fashioned a self-reliant, lay religion that was intimately connected to their everyday expe
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riences. From this tradition emerged Los Hermanos Penitentes of New Mexico, a brotherhood that has led Hispano communities both in worship and in practical measures since the end of eighteenth century. Yet in accounts that range from nineteenth-century pastoral letters to sensational mid-twentieth-century magazine "exposes," the brotherhood has been cast as a group of religious primitives who practice self-flagellation and other bizarre rituals. Allowing penitentes' oral histories to reveal their views of the sacred, López Pulido shows how the brotherhood's practices have continued to maintain community identity and purpose throughout northern Mexico
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