La Conquistadora

Reviews of Books

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CARIBBEAN AND LATIN AMERICA AMY G. REMENSNYDER. La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and New Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. ix, 470. $35.00.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

How could the passively suffering mother of Christ inspire so many people over the ages to fight and die on her behalf? Was she not, after all, the antithesis of violence? In this splendid book, Amy G. Remensnyder studies Mary as the leader of armies in the medieval and early modern frontiers of the Spanish monarchy. Her subject is Mary, La Conquistadora, a figure claimed by soldiers crusading against Islam, by strict enforcers of boundaries with Judaism, and by aggressive negotiators of political alliances with Native Americans. In the Loreto Litanies, Mary appears as a “gatekeeper of a garden” and as a fortified “tower of David.” She is also the “morning star” and the “moon.” Each one of these metaphors (in fact, Old Testament prefigurations) offers some insights into how her figure was deployed in the Spanish monarchy. Mary came to be seen as a garrison, castle, and fortification against demonic aggression as well as a weeder in the well-tended gardens of the church. Yet she was also a beckoning doorway for the polity. She was a guide, a constellation, and a planet in charge of the tides to avoid shipwrecks and hardship. In all these guises, Mary became the model of the ideal earthly ruler. In one of her most important insights, Remensnyder argues that the Spanish monarchy invested heavy cultural capital into casting kings (and queens) as Mary’s image on earth: the supreme model of human justice, a charitable advocate in the heavenly courts. Remensnyder explores in great detail the slow development of the ideal Marian monarchy over the course of the high Middle Ages. Remensnyder not only reconstructs the world of Christian Iberians, she also delves deep into the logic of Marian reception among Jews and Muslims, as the latter two groups faced the onslaught of La Conquistadora. Jews, she concludes, had little interest in giving into the theological demands of Mariology. Conversion only happened through randomly scattered Marian miracles. Rabbis abhorred the idea of a transcendent Yahweh becoming flesh within the corrupt womb of a woman and mocked the virginity of Mary. There was no ground for compromise. Christians legitimated their pogroms, citing these rabbinical speeches as heresy. Muslims were far more accommodating, largely because Mary was perhaps the single most important female figure of the Qur’an, Maryam: the virgin mother of a prophet and a prophetess herself. Such sense of shared familiarity prompted the Iberian monarchies to signify military victory by transforming captured mosques into Marian chapels; to send missionaries into Mudejar communities and into North Africa; and to imagine as stories of miraculous Marian-induced conversion what in fact were pragmatic alliances with Christians of beleaguered Muslim lords. It is in the chapters on early modern Amerindian understandings of La Conquistadora, however, that Remensnyder is at her best. She describes the logic of Marian conquest in the Americas as singular: it was characterized by violent assaults on local deities but also by an exchange of women. Spaniards got concubines from local lords; indigenous communities got

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The progressive evangelical surge of the 1970s, however, never flourished. It was left politically homeless by a secularizing Democratic Party and by a tightening alliance between evangelicals and the Republican Party. The Religious Right primarily retrenched on race, Balmer maintains, and was captivated only secondarily by abortion. He also argues that events beyond Carter’s control—notably a stagnant economy, high inflation, and diplomatic crises in Afghanistan and Iran—sabotaged his second campaign for president and limited his effectiveness in office. By 1980 large chunks of his evangelical constituency devastatingly—and ironically—defected to Ronald Reagan, a twice-divorced, Hollywood actor. Only a successful post-presidency in which Carter invested heavily in the Carter Center and Habitat for Humanity has rehabilitated his image. Balmer’s depiction of Carter’s spirituality and how it informed his politics is compelling. Based on oral interviews, archival sources, and a multitude of newspaper and magazine accounts, this book convincingly shows the depth of Carter’s faith. Those who actually read the titillating Playboy interview, not just the headline, knew that Carter was not a “redneck Baptist with a hotline to God,” as a 1976 New Republic article assured readers just months before the election. Nor was the politician a saint. While less tawdry than those of his rivals, Carter’s campaign for governor in 1970 still made use of a politics of retribution as well a “southern strategy” that appealed to segregationists. Nonetheless, Carter emerges in this empathetic and humane biography as a hard-working, compassionate politician with a social conscience. Less convincing is Balmer’s depiction of Carter’s broader evangelical context. Despite the work of Darren Dochuk, Bethany Moreton, and others on the long rise of evangelical conservatism since the 1940s, Balmer portrays Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as abrupt hijackers of an apolitical, benevolent evangelicalism. At the same time, he constructs an overly romanticized account of a nineteenth-century evangelicalism that pushed for abolitionism and women’s rights. To be sure, evangelicals pioneered many social justice initiatives, but they also reinforced Jim Crow, robber barons, and jingoistic imperialism. Still, this compact, readable, and clearly argued biography contributes to a rapidly growing historiography that acknowledges the full dimensions of a diverse evangelical movement. Progressive strains of that movement, which sought to take seriously Jesus’s admonition to care for “the least of these,” in fact reached the highest political office in the nation. DAVID R. SWARTZ Asbury University

Caribbean and Latin America

MICHAEL MATTHEWS. The Civilizing Machine: A Cultural History of Mexican Railroads, 1876–1910. (The Mexican Experience.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Pp. xiii, 321. $40.00. In this entertaining and engaging study, Michael Matthews provides us with the first cultural history of Mexico’s railroads. While there exists a virtual cottage industry on the economic history of railroads, Matthews is the first to examine the railroad industry as both a product and a metaphor for Mexican modernization. Becoming a lightning rod for critics of the perils and disastrous consequences of industrialization, the railroad nevertheless solidified the rule of Porfirio Dı´az (1876–1911). Matthews offers a close examination of the cultural producers—journalists, artists, writers, and politicians—who articulated what he calls a “discourse of development,” which held the locomotive as its central subject. Matthews argues that the locomotive enabled officials during the Porfiriato to unite the country through a shared national identity based on modern notions of citizenry. The railroad promised to civilize a hitherto war-torn and disconnected populace. Drawing on Norbert Elias’s classic work on bourgeois propriety and Walter Benjamin’s powerful reflections on capitalism’s alienating effects, Matthews shows that Mexicans, too, found modernity to be both liberating and dislocating. The writings of cultural producers provide the empir-

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

ical evidence of the fetishization of the iron horse, a fetish because the locomotive symbolized modernity narrowly and incompletely. This “discourse of development,” the subject of chapter 1, emphasized the country’s economic and social backwardness, which they viewed as principally the result of the large indigenous population tied to traditional production and ways of living. The railroad would civilize the native masses that had resisted subjugation since the sixteenth century. Implicitly echoing Jackson Lears’s insight on the nineteenth century in United States as a moment when the nation yearned for regeneration through work and physical sacrifice, Matthews finds that Mexicans too employed “the language of revival and energy” in representing work as “a redemptive, and almost sacred, activity that would bring peace and progress (pp. 33, 47). Porfirian weeklies aimed at middle- and upper-class readers popularized the understanding that the railroad would bring modernity and civilization to the country. Unlike bourgeois commentators in Europe, who often emphasized negative aspects of the railroad’s introduction, Mexican writers saw no ill effects. Moreover, by targeting women and publishing the writings of women, these journals, Matthews claims, “fashioned a female subjectivity that allowed for a meaningful engagement” with ideas about progress (p. 65). Unfortunately, the evidentiary base for this claim is lacking, because Matthews does not document how women readers reacted to these representations. We are left wondering what women—beyond the few who wrote for the weeklies—actually thought about the railroad and modernity in general. The final two chapters provide a window into the dark side of Porfirian modernity as depicted in oppositional newspapers and in corridos (ballads). The latter were especially important for disseminating critiques to peasant and working class individuals, who were largely illiterate. When people sang corridos in public, or read them out loud at workplaces or cantinas, illiterate audiences were presented with stories and images that implicitly criticized Porfirian policies. Matthews’s study of train accidents is a highlight of chapter 4. Little has been published on the train accident as a social and cultural phenomenon that deeply affected workers and those that lived near rails. These two groups, not passengers, were most frequently the victims of accidents. Since foreigners had such a large financial stake in the industry, articles on railroad accidents often blamed foreign owners, and thus came to serve as a critique of the Porfirian reliance on foreign investment and the dictator’s cozy relationship with European and American capitalists. This reader has two reservations. First, precious little of the exciting and relevant theoretical discussion offered in the introduction is applied in the body of the book. If those theoretical concepts are important enough to be presented in the introduction, then they should be developed in each of the chapters. Second, if Porfirian society made a fetish of the railroad industry

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Mary in exchange. Whereas the Spanish knight of the Islamic Iberian frontier was a chivalrous lover of Mary, who fought to bring spoils not converts into Mary’s fold, the crusader in the Americas considered himself a lay missionary. Wielding the sword and relying on Mary’s miracles and Mary’s Amerindian friendly allies, the Spanish knight sought indigenous conversions, both mass and elite, by exorcising demons, namely, toppling idols. The natives, by and large, accepted Mary as a sign of complex political alliances, which were sealed through violence, the exchange of women, and the incorporation of new militarily powerful foreign deities. Remensnyder demonstrates that by the late sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries, many native groups came to see themselves as Marian conquistadores. This is an erudite, stimulating book that cuts across chronologies, regions, and literatures. It deserves to be read both by medievalists and ethnohistorians of the Americas. It is worth insisting, however, that La Conquistadora was not the result of the Iberian penchant for violence. There were many other conquering Maries. They also ought to be brought back into any analysis: the Theotokos of Byzantine and Muscovite crusading imperial expansions; the Marian armies of the French, Italian, and Central European Middle Ages; and the French Jesuit conquering Mary of the Great Lake regions. ˜ IZARES-ESGUERRA JORGE CAN University of Texas at Austin

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