Abstract
This book discusses what it means to be Q’eqchi’-Maya Catholic in Guatemala in the early 2000s. It explores how religion is “formed and reformed through the actions of laypeople” (11). The author, a linguistic anthropologist, follows a dialogical perspective: religion is built on interactions by the interplay of voices in a given social context. The big interaction here is at San Felipe’s church, between what he calls “mainstream” (the Q’eqchi-Maya community) and Charismatic Catholics (the “others,” in this story).
The book is structured in seven main chapters, framed by an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction discusses the theoretical perspective (heteroglossia, voicing, and dialogism) and introduces the methodology used (participant observation living in situ from 2004 to 2006, visiting the field location in 2014, and doing research in the summers of 2015 and 2017). The chapters zoom into the region (the parish was founded to care for the Q’eqchi’ people), describe the parish life (and the contested appearance of charismatic Catholics), explore the institutional structure (and the legitimation process of Q’eqchi’ catequistas and charismatic predicadores), and investigate the language used in the ritual (the messy use of Spanish and Q’eqchi) as well as the songs and music present in the celebrations and embodied practices.
Comparing the two groups and the tensions between them, the author explores what it means to be a Catholic in those years in that part of Guatemala. Hoenes del Pinal connects theological developments and institutional trends, from Liberation Theology to charismatic renewal, to “popular missions” in the 2010s that follow a Bishops’ gathering in Aparecida, Brazil. Hoenes del Pinal proposes a “heteroglossic” model of Catholicism—a Catholicism that is not monolithic nor uniform but has a plurality of voices that are shaping and modifying each other. It is a diverse Catholicism despite the institutional claim of unity.
He explores the tension between mainstream and charismatic Catholics in all the chapters (chapter 7 about Holy Week is the exception; for that reason, it felt a little off to me). As an example, when presenting the training of pastoral agents for both groups the author states: Briefly put, for Mainstream Catholics, a person became a catechist by entering into a particular kind of pedagogical relationship with representatives of the Roman Catholic Church. Catequistas’ authority derived from their membership in the Church’s institutional hierarchy, through which they received formal (and somewhat circumscribed) models of what counted as proper exegesis of the Bible that could serve as the basis for their sermons. The predicadores who led Charismatic Catholic groups, on the other hand, received no formal training and operated independently of the clergy and each other. Their authority to perform sermons was attributed to the individual person’s ability to receive unmediated, divine inspiration during religious rituals. (96-97)
Hoenes del Pinal does a good job registering the tension and wrote, to my knowledge, one of the first linguistic anthropologies of contemporary religion in Latin America. That is the main contribution of this book.
I found two main problems with the text. The first one is that the author does not seem to be familiar with the existing literature on religion in Latin America. What surprises him, that Latin American Catholicism is not as uniform as it claims to be, is, and has been discussed in many different disciplines. Some studies discussed that around the idea of popular religion (the differentiation of a preached religion vis-à-vis a performed one), the tensions caused in communities around the debates on Liberation Theology, or the different positions Catholics held regarding political human rights in the 1970s, or gender and reproductive rights in the 2020s. Many Latin American scholars have been talking about “Catholicisms” for the last twenty years. They have been registering that Catholicism changes over time, that it is a social construction and as such susceptible to other social dynamics. The problem is that they are absent from the discussion. Hardly any Latin American scholars are mentioned.
The other large problem for me is that the categorization (mainstream vs charismatics) hides the context of the discourse. This is key to answering the research question of this work: “What does it mean to be a Catholic and indigenous in postwar Guatemala?” (233). I think that the author’s answer to this question downplays the role of the civil war in the country.
Under the mainstream category, the author places the Q’eqchi’ Catholics who were, at the moment of the fieldwork (basically 2004 to 2006), coming out of the most brutal civil war in Latin America (about 250,000 people were killed) that was also a genocide: it targeted the Q’eqchi’ population.
In the context of racism against the indigenous population, Catholic parishes in the early twentieth century were one of the few places where natives could be Mayans without discrimination. If on top of that history, you add the contemporary massacre of the indigenous population, the tension between the Q’eqchi Catholics and the Charismatic Catholics has a different connotation. Moreover, charismatic Catholics, even when they were also Mayan, were religiously similar to the Pentecostal piety (chants, music, preaching style). One of the most brutal dictators, Efrain Rios Mont (de facto president 1982 to 1983, and then President of the Congress 2000 to 2004) was a Pentecostal who was targeting Catholic Q’eqchi’ and sentenced to eighty years in prison for genocide.
Labeling it “mainstream” instead of Q’eqchi hides more than clarifies. The discourses analyzed here took place in a small church in Cobán, but they were part of a broader discussion (and in those years, being on the wrong side, was dangerous). The context shapes the text. What has become mainstream is the discrimination, and sometimes violent persecution, against the Q’eqchi.
