Kinga Novak

Fulbright-Hays Project Description

Giving Thanks: A Visual History of Mexican Spirituality

Mexican devotional paintings, also known as ex-votos or retablos1, provide a window

onto the mentalities of the people who have created and commissioned them. Few historical

studies of these objects exist. While extant retablos abound in churches and in recent museum

exhibitions, the attention that they have received has traditionally been art historical or

anthropological, that is, as “primitive”2 or folk art. Wonderfully rich in both conception and

execution, retablos’ vivid colors and naive style can obscure their fundamentally religious nature

and their implications for the history of Catholicism and of the Catholic Church in Mexico. They

represent communication between human beings and the spiritual world, and it is this aspect of

retablos that my dissertation will explore. I propose to analyze Mexican retablos from an

interdisciplinary, yet essentially historical perspective, probing the connections between the

visual culture of a society and the collective mentalities that underlie its creation.

Retablos are part of the tradition of ex-votos, derived from a Latin expression meaning

“votive offering”, objects offered to divine beings when favors are sought or thanks are given for

favors received. In Mexico, they are offered as expressions of thanks to a specific Catholic saint

for helping in a time of need. They usually take the form of painted sheets of tin that depict

personal calamities experienced by ordinary individuals, ranging from apparently miraculous

escapes from near-catastrophes, to inexplicable recoveries from grave illnesses, to more prosaic

problems affecting an individual’s livelihood. Generally, they are composed of three elements: an

image of the saint being thanked, a depiction of the dangerous situation in which the supplicant

found him- or herself, and an explanatory text describing the situation. Stylistically, retablos
1
Retablo is a colloquial term used in Mexico to refer to the kind of devotional art I will be discussing in this
proposal. A more accurate term is “pictorical ex-voto”, that is, an image that expresses thanks to a saint for a favor
granted. Ex-votos have been produced all over the world, and can take many forms. For the sake of simplicity, in
this proposal I will use the terms retablo and ex-voto to refer only to the small, personal, painted devotional images
that are the centerpiece of my dissertation, and which are known as retablos only in Mexico.
2
This is another problematic term, which will be elucidated in the dissertation but not discussed in this proposal.

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Fulbright-Hays Project Description

show wide range. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries most were painted by

professional retablo-makers (who, while they were specialized artists, were generally not

formally or academically trained) but many of the more recent retablos evince a do-it-yourself

aesthetic that incorporates photographs and even photocopies into hand-drawn images based on

popular religious prints.

The discipline of history is centrally concerned with the question of change over time. Yet

most studies of folk art (a category to which Mexican retablos are often assigned) presuppose a

sort of timelessness to its creation. An important strand of cultural history has debated the

meaning of “folk” and “popular” art and traditions, but none of these historians’ work concerns

Mexican retablos specifically (Burke 1978; Christian 1981a, 1981b; Davis 1992, Levine 1992).

Solange Alberro (2001), Eli Bartra (1995, 2005), Elin Luque Agraz and Michele Beltrán (2001,

2003, Luque 2007) and Rosa María Sánchez Lara (1990) have presented more nuanced

interpretations of retablos as an art form, but have paid more attention to the question of what

social function retablos fill than to how that function changed. I propose to start with a thorough

analysis of whether retablos can or should be categorized as folk art, and will pay close attention

to the social function of religious images, but the center of gravity of my dissertation will be to

analyze them as a way into a better understanding of devotional practices in Mexico over time.

What do Mexican retablos tell us about popular and religious culture in nineteenth- and

twentieth-century Mexico? What changes in the collective mentality of this society can be

ascertained from the information contained in retablos? What was the role of priests and the

institutional church in affecting or mediating these changes? Retablos, a category of devotional

art, were and continue to be produced all over Mexico, but there is a definite concentration of

them in the central regions of the country. Does this historical fact indicate that some regions of

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Fulbright-Hays Project Description

Mexico were (are) more religious than others? Did women create or commission them more

often than men; in other words, is there a case to be made for gender as a framework of analysis

in the Mexican retablo tradition? By combining archival research, especially archives kept by the

numerous shrines at which the retablo phenomenon was particularly apparent, with interviews of

contemporary priests who have allowed retablos to be displayed at their churches and laypeople

who have been involved in retablo production, and by making use of collections of ex-votos in

Mexico and the United States, I will place these objects in their proper historical contexts.

Retablos as a distinctive art form have been produced in Mexico since colonial times, but

their production reached a peak in the late nineteenth century. Despite a lively intellectual

tradition of skepticism of miracles and of divine interventions by anti-clerical Liberals since the

late colonial period, and despite the mid-nineteenth-century liberal “Reforma” that attempted to

displace the Church’s and Catholicism’s roles in Mexican society, popular Catholic piety proved

impossible to eradicate, and that mentality revealed itself particularly clearly in retablos. A close

examination of the production and meanings of retablos can help us understand Mexico’s

particularly Catholic accommodation with modernity.

Retablos express an emotional, non-rational faith that human affairs are governed by

outside, supernatural forces. Alberro (2000:74) argues that the mentality that they reveal rejects

the idea of free will (and, to an extent, of personal responsibility for the outcomes of various

disasters). Retablos can be said to fill an emotional need in people to express a connection

between themselves and their saints. In this vein, I will be taking a close look at the relationship

between human and supernatural beings, at the expectations people have of their saints and of

themselves. I am most interested in why people produced (and continue to produce) objects that

express a sense of mutual obligation between saints and humans—what I term a

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Fulbright-Hays Project Description

phenomenological approach. In an immediate sense, what function do the paintings themselves

fill for the devotees, taking into account the social contexts in which they were produced? And in

a larger sense, how does a physical offering of thanks express the kinds of complex relationships

between humans and intercessory beings who can pull strings with God? Basically, what do

retablos say about the religious culture of Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, and what changes in the collective mentality can be ascertained from the information

contained in them?

If one goal of this dissertation is to use retablos to help us analyze the changing

sociopolitical context in which they were produced, and a second goal is to use them to get at

changing devotional practices (and perhaps even changing faith systems), a third goal is to

explore the role of the institutional church in shaping devotional paintings specifically, and

devotional practices generally. Did the church promote, or possibly censor, these paintings? This

is an aspect of retablo painting that is almost completely neglected, but given that retablos were

typically placed in churches near the image of the saint, not in the home, they became a kind of

public art that the priest must have approved, encouraged, tolerated, feared, or disdained. Church

officials were deeply concerned with what kinds of images were displayed and what kinds of

practices were to be tolerated within the church. A close look into correspondence between local

parish priests and their higher-ups in the centralized bishoprics, which typically involved

numerous consultations about similar issues of how to control or channel popular piety, may

reveal both the attitudes of local priests toward the retablos and the attendant policies of bishops

and higher officials.

Literature review

Extant studies of Mexican retablos have mainly focused on specific and well-known

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Fulbright-Hays Project Description

shrines. Robert and María R. Shadow’s seminal ethnographic study of the shrine of Our Lord of

Chalma, in the State of Mexico (2000), Mariane Bélard and Philippe Verrier’s analysis of the

retablos at the major shrine of San Juan de los Lagos in Jalisco (1996), Patricia Arias and Jorge

Durand’s examination of the female votive tradition at eleven Mexican shrines (2002), and

Durand and Douglas Massey’s study of retablos commissioned by Mexican migrants to the

United States (1995), provide a way into various anthropological, art historical, and sociological

aspects of Mexican retablo production. These studies drew upon and expanded earlier research

by the art historians Roberto Montenegro (1950), Gloria Fraser Giffords (1974), and Graciela

Romandía de Cantú (1978).

From a different angle, my work will fit into a historical literature that is just beginning to

take seriously religion and devotional practices in the lives of ordinary Mexicans as a topic of

interest in social and political history. Terry Rugely (2001) pioneered an appreciation of the

connections between political change and religious observance and practice. Paul Vanderwood’s

works on folk saints (1998, 2004) show a similar concern with these connections. An earlier

literature on Social Catholicism (Adame, 1981; Ceballos Ramírez, 1986 and 1991; Meyer, 1992;

Scott, 1994) establishes a narrative about the changing attitude of the Church toward popular

practices and toward the state that my work will test and amplify. My dissertation will begin to

tie together these art historical, anthropological, and historical threads into a more

interdisciplinary and holistic approach to the study of devotional painting in Mexico.

Methodology

My approach, which seeks systematic evidence about the nature of retablo production

from all over Mexico, takes into account a significant, but overlooked feature of the Mexican

retablo phenomenon: it cuts across regional divisions, is known in almost all corners of the

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Fulbright-Hays Project Description

republic, and has been instrumental in promoting distinctive local devotions. Rather than

attempting yet another catalogue of all the retablos at a particular site, I will supplement my

archival and ethnographic research on the large shrines (the Basilica of Guadalupe, Chalma, San

Juan de los Lagos) with oral histories taken at lesser-known shrines with their own retablo

traditions. These sites include, but are not limited to, the shrines of San Miguel del Milagro in

Tlaxcala state, The Lord of the Miracle in Puebla, Our Lady of Health in Michoacán, and the

Virgin of Solitude in Oaxaca. Yearly pilgrimages to the shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi in Real

de Catorce, in San Luis Potosí, the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos in Jalisco, and to the Virgin

of Ocotlán in Tlaxcala, bring new retablo offerings along with their devotees. These pilgrimage

sites offer rich opportunities to ask the people directly involved in retablo production—pilgrims,

priests, and local shopkeepers—about their thoughts about particular saints and their motivations

for keeping the devotion, and tradition, alive. Sample questions will address the history of

devotional practices above all: How long has retablo offering been a tradition in people’s

families/communities? Did their mothers and fathers bring them? How did they learn about the

efficaciousness of retablos and of particular saints in solving problems? And is there any

evidence for some scholars’ claims that some parts of Mexico are more “religious” than others3?

Thus an important methodological feature of this research will be to conduct semi-formal

interviews during important feast days at these and other sites.

Oral history techniques will also be used for other purposes. I intend to conduct

interviews with priests, working artists, curators, and collectors of retablos. My research so far

has shown that priests, while potentially excellent curators of the visual culture associated with

3
While retablos seem to have been produced all over the Mexican republic, there is definitely a concentration of
them in the central part of the country. The most sizable collection of them outside of Central Mexico that I am
aware of is in Oaxaca (Luque Agraz 2007). The hypothesis that the most “religious” area of Mexico coincides with
the region most affected by the early twentieth-century Cristero rebellion has been advanced by Chowning (2007,
personal communication), Purnell (1999), and others.

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Fulbright-Hays Project Description

their churches, as often as not disregard the aesthetic qualities and social significance of retablos,

or else see ex-votos (retablos and other types of offerings left at shrines) as problematic

expressions of devotion4. My hope is that by talking to various priests at churches with a retablo

tradition, I will not only contribute to our understanding of the phenomenon, but also to

preservation efforts.

This study assumes that the attitudes and beliefs of a society, whether deliberately or

unconsciously, are expressed in its images, and that much information can be gleaned about

individual and collective mentalities from unwritten sources. An investigation based on images,

however, will need additional documentation to fill in gaps left by the subjectivity of

representational sources. Oral histories can help, but written archival sources provide a crucial

third “leg” of my source base. One written source is correspondence between priests and other

church officials, which constitutes a large part of the archiepiscopal archives in Mexico City,

Morelia, and Guadalajara, as well as a significant part of the smaller episcopal archives of

Zamora (Michoacán), Zacatecas, and Querétaro. Analyzing letters regarding retablos in specific

churches or shrines will not only yield potentially rich insights into the Church’s role in shaping

devotions to particular saints in Mexico, but may also shed light on social realities whose

representational absence may provide a clue about the kinds of issues that were censored or

otherwise deemed inappropriate, by priests or even by parishioners themselves, as devotional

subject matter. Additionally, institutional correspondence will help place retablo production in its

proper historical context. The role of the Catholic Church in disseminating religious beliefs and

devotional practices, and its promotion and/or censorship of certain rituals and themes, is a key

4
Vargaslugo, in Luque Agraz and Beltrán (2003); 26-27; Rodríguez-Shadow (2003): 185-186; parish priest at
Chalma, May 2001, personal communication. Vargaslugo refers to an incident at the church of Santa Veracruz in
Taxco, where the priest decided that the ex-voto collection was taking up too much space and literally threw the
paintings in the trash. This incident is, unfortunately, not unique: in May 2001, the priest at Chalma told me the same
thing had happened there.

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Fulbright-Hays Project Description

component of my project, and the changing fortunes of the Church as a political force in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries were reflected in its official reactions to popular devotions

even as the people’s faith ran strong independently of the institutional Church.

Another source is the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century newsletters and

bulletins published by religious confraternities or cofradías. Like retablos, cofradías were means

by which members expressed a personal relationship with a saint, incarnation of the Virgin Mary,

or representation of Jesus Christ such as the Blessed Sacrament. They provided a social and

spiritual glue in colonial and nineteenth-century Mexican society, uniting the faithful in their

devotions to various saints and their images. In cofradía newsletters devout members announced

their gratitude at having been cured of disease or saved from misfortune due to the beneficent

actions of a saint or the intercession of a deity. These published expressions of thanks, a kind of

written counterpart to the retablo tradition but with a very different institutional context, will add

a comparative dimension to my investigation: how did these expressions of devotion differ from

retablos? Were the socioeconomic backgrounds of those who commissioned (or made) retablos

different from those who submitted testimonials to cofradía bulletins? If so, what difference did

this make?

Finally, I will consult the archives of the artists who created retablos. Retablo production

was associated with family workshops, and documentation of at least two artists (Hermenegildo

Bustos and Gerónimo de León, both active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) is

on record in archives in the Bajío region of Guanajuato and Jalisco. A few contemporary

professional retablo painters still maintain workshops in Mexico City and elsewhere, and I hope

to gain access to their records, if these artists are willing to share them. Lastly, records in

collections of retablos, such as those in the Frida Kahlo Museum, the Museum of the Basilica of

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Fulbright-Hays Project Description

Guadalupe, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, are sure to be helpful and will

certainly be consulted as part of my archival work.

Preliminary research and institutional affiliations in Mexico

My research interests have centered on the themes of popular, religious, and visual culture in

Mexico during my entire graduate career. My Master’s thesis (NYU, 1998) focused on the

bloody and tormented aspect of colonial Mexican crucifixes. At Berkeley, I produced original

research on the tradition of funerary photography in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico,

addressing questions about Mexican spirituality and attitudes towards death and the afterlife. The

seminar paper I wrote on this subject won the UC Berkeley Department of History’s Graduate

Seminar Paper Prize in 2004. I have written extensively about what religious images mean to

their audiences and most recently I produced a seminar paper on Mexican retablos while in

residence at El Colegio de México, in which I introduced many of the themes I plan to address in

my dissertation. I have extensive experience working in Mexican archives and am familiar with

almost all of the shrines and pilgrimage sites I plan to visit during my research year. I am

completely fluent in Spanish and do not expect any sort of language barrier while I conduct my

written and oral/ethnographic research. I am professionally affiliated with the Center for

Historical Studies (CEH) at El Colegio de México, and will be meeting regularly with my

colleague and advisor Oscar Mazín while in Mexico. I plan to participate in conferences and

symposia organized by the Center, and will provide a copy of my dissertation to the CEH and to

the main archives I consult upon its completion.

Research schedule

My dissertation will combine on-site ethnographic research centered on pilgrimage sites and

major feast days of the saints honored in retablos with research in associated church and

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Fulbright-Hays Project Description

archdiocesal archives. I plan to attend the pilgrimage to San Juan de los Lagos in August 2008,

staying on afterwards to consult the archdiocesal archives of Guadalajara, where San Juan de los

Lagos’s records are kept. From there I will move my base of operations to Mexico City, where I

will spend my time in the National Archive (AGN), the Archive of the Archdiocese of Mexico

(AHAM), the Historic Archive of Mexico City (AHCM), where records of the shrine of the

Virgin of the Remedies are kept, and the archives of the Basilica of Guadalupe and the Frida

Kahlo Museum. In October 2008 I will attend the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi in Real de

Catorce, in San Luis Potosí state. I plan to attend one religious feast day in various locales in the

rest of the country roughly every month, periodically returning to Mexico City for the bulk of my

archival research. Additional research will be carried out in the archiepiscopal archives in

Morelia (Michoacán), Querétaro, León (Guanajuato), and Zacatecas.

Conclusion

This project is conceived as an original way into a central historical concern, the question

of change over time, using Mexican retablos as a window or mechanism. I plan to analyze, from

a historical perspective, how Mexican retablos shed light on the spiritual belief systems of the

people who created them, using visual art as the basis for exploring the collective mentality of

nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico. In addition to being visually pleasing artifacts from

the past (the aspect responsible for their renewed popularity among collectors and experts on folk

art), Mexican retablos have the distinctive advantage of alluding to the theme of popular

religiosity in ways that have not yet been studied in a systematic fashion. My methodological

approach, which relies on visual, oral, and written source material, will provide a multifaceted

look at this central question.

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