The black Christ of Esquipulas : religion and identity in Guatemala / Douglass Sullivan-Gonzalez.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

On the eastern border of Guatemala and Honduras, pilgrims and travelers flock to the Black Christ of Esquipulas, a large statue carved from wood depicting Christ on the cross. The Catholic shrine, built in the late sixteenth century, has become the focal point of admiration and adoration from New Mexico to Panama. Beyond being a site of popular devotion, however, the Black Christ of Esquipulas was also the scene of important debates about citizenship and identity in the Guatemalan nation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In The Black Christ of Esquipulas , Douglass Sullivan-González explores the multifaceted appeal of this famous shrine, its mysterious changes in color over the centuries, and its deeper significance in the spiritual and political lives of Guatemalans. Reconstructed from letters buried within the restricted Catholic Church archive in Guatemala City, the debates surrounding the shrine reflect the shifting categories of race and ethnicity throughout the course of the country's political trajectory. This "biography" of the Black Christ of Esquipulas serves as an alternative history of Guatemala and sheds light on some of the most salient themes in Guatemala's social and political history: state formation, interethnic dynamics, and church-state tensions. Sullivan-González's study provides a holistic understanding of the relevance of faith and ritual to the social and political history of this influential region.

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CHOICE Review

Historian Sullivan-González (Univ. of Mississippi) traces the history of the Guatemalan Catholic shrine known today as the Black Christ of Esquipulas, created in 1594 by a Portuguese artisan, through the Catholic Church's centuries-long resistance to acknowledging the racial dimensions of the image's color, instead elevating the icon as the preeminent symbol of Guatemalan Catholic nationalist identity. The Black Christ's location, Guatemala's eastern region, is associated with both political and racial turbulence (e.g., the cradle of 19th-century mestizo Rafael Carrera's multiethnic uprising and eventual presidency and the 1954 entrance of the CIA-supported forces that overthrew President Jacobo Árbenz and then took the Esquipulas image as the army's patron saint). As the diverse peoples of Guatemala's east (including African-descended, "Spanish," ladinos or mestizos and Maya and non-Maya Indigenous people) and its "Maya" or western highlands underwent Guatemala's troubled and often violent transformations of "race," church officials framed the Esquipulas Christ's darkening color (from candle and incense smoke and the hands of the devoted) as "dead blood," the mark of Christ's sacrifice. Sullivan-González closely reads church and other documents to document the Black Christ's rise in official prominence as well as in lay popularity, sometimes in interpretive dissonance with official promotions. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Abigail Elizabeth Adams, Central Connecticut State University