In his book Open Your Heart: Religion and Cultural Poetics of Greater Mexico, David Sandell attempts to answer one of the main questions of religious studies: why do people practice religion? And while the book is unable to fully answer this question, Sandell presents an interesting analysis of how narratives, both mythical and personal, and cultural practices are interwoven. According to Sandell, rituals frame stories that express a distant (and mythical) past, while relating to the present and pointing toward the future.
The structure of Sandell’s book, and of each chapter, aims to follow his theoretical proposition, that stories are not linear, but circular, and interweave past, present, and future. Each chapter tackles a different aspect of Catholic ritual as practiced in a Fresno, California, parish: the rosary, the Mass, Holy Week, retreats, pilgrimages, and the Matachines dance. However, instead of describing the ritual practices, and how people interact with them, Sandell uses each ritual practice as a platform to discuss issues of structural inequality, politics, labor, migration, history, and other topics.
Chapter 1, “The Dance,” describes the Matachines dance, along with its origins and symbolism. The author also describes the preparations of some members of the community as they embark on a pilgrimage to Mexico City to visit the Virgen de Guadalupe. This chapter, and the discussion of the Matachines, serves as a framing device for the rest of the book, which starts and ends with the Matachines and their pilgrimage to the Church of the Virgen de Guadalupe. In it, he mixes historical narratives together: the story of the apparition of the Virgen de Guadalupe, the origin of the forms of worship for the Virgen, and the debates over the construction of the temple in her honor. He also uses this chapter to explain how the rest of the chapters, and the movement of the people described in the chapter, are structured: “They move forward, sometimes backwards, and always in procession as if they were on a journey” (33).
Chapter 2, “The Daily Service,” focuses on the Mass. According to Sandell, the Mass allows people to access the past, and after a brief introduction about the Mass and its history, the rest of the chapter is spent describing the town of Fresno, the history of California, and how Saint Anthony Mary Claret Church fits into the landscape and history of the area. In addition, and to illustrate the segregation and discrimination towards the Mexican/Mexican-American community in the area, he presents a childhood friend who lives in the area and will not send his children to the local public school because Mexicans “just do not think the way we do” (55). Every so often in the chapter Sandell breaks away from his historical narrative to remind us that the chapter is about the Mass.
The topic covered in chapter 3, “The Journey Home,” is the rosary. After explaining the history of the rosary’s creation and telling us how the rosary is composed of stories that aim to take the person praying to a spiritual home, the chapter focuses on Gracie Romana Adame and her stories. Using Gracie’s life story, Sandell talks about family life in Fresno, including how young people may end up in jail, and the communal life at the church. Gracie is one of the most compelling individuals in the book, making this chapter the book’s strongest.
Chapter 4, “The Sacred Circle,” is designed to focus on a religious retreat organized by a nun from Saint Anthony’s. Sandell was invited to attend the retreat by Eva Gonzalez, who is a parishioner of the church. Utilizing the structure of the religious retreat (mainly its symbols, such as tomb, heart, and rose) and using Eva as a narrator, the chapter actually focuses on immigration, politics, the labor market (migrant farm workers), structural inequality, and violence. In the middle of the chapter, Sandell narrates an accident that his young son suffers while Sandell is conducting his fieldwork. Eva suggests that he take his son to a Mass where healers can help heal him. Sandell and his family attend the Mass, and the child is healed after the healers perform their rituals. At the end of the chapter, Sandell returns to the retreat and describes the walk to the parking lot and concludes, “these signs [the ones used during the retreat and the chapter] refer to stories that circulate through a social landscape and provide inhabitants with objects of desire, exchange, shock, and horror” (108).
The following chapter, “The Passion Play,” uses the structure of the reenactment of Jesus’s Crucifixion to anchor a discussion of labor issues, such as the plight of migrant workers and the work of the United Farm Workers (UFW). According to Sandell, people enact the Via Dolorosa “because these events from the past and their reenactments in the present create parallels to contemporary life” (114). After providing an in-depth account of the European origins of the Passion Play and its journey to the Americas, Sandell turns to Javier Martínez, a farm worker involved in a dispute between the UFW and growers in Watsonville, California. The UFW wanted to create a union among the local strawberry pickers, but the majority of pickers, including Javier, were against the UFW. Using the different stages of the Via Dolorosa, Sandell discusses Javier’s journey and his negotiation between the UFW and the growers, the life and death of César Chávez, and the formation and weakening of the UFW. The chapter ends somewhat abruptly, with Sandell informing us that the Passion Play has ended and making a seemingly unrelated reference to the day’s weather.
The last chapter in the book, “The Pilgrimage,” circles back to the first chapter and the Matachines’ pilgrimage to Mexico City to visit the Virgen de Guadalupe temple. This brief chapter also serves as a way to say goodbye to the people Sandell introduced throughout the text and to bring all the strands of his narrative together to finally showcase how rituals frame stories. Going back to his original question of “why people practice religion?” he argues that people practice religion because religion provides the “ability to approach origins—mythological, historical, and social—and account for the sacred center of the stories that define their lives” (158). In the last ten pages of the book, Sandell finally discusses the importance of ritual and its function in society, but he does not make a persuasive case for how rituals frame narratives.
In my opinion, this book falls short in its aim to answer one of the field’s central questions, but it presents an interesting account of other matters. According to the introduction, the book is about the relationship between rituals and narratives, but Sandell’s descriptions of rituals are brief and scarce, and this discussion only takes place in the conclusion. However, he does discuss issues of immigration, discrimination, structural inequality, lack of access to education, social movements, and politics. This book is not about rituals and narratives, but about narratives that (may) circulate around rituals. If Sandell had positioned the text from the beginning as a book about how history, politics, violence, and structural inequality affect and influence religious narratives, this book would have made a much stronger case for itself.
Sandell’s writing in the book does not help illustrate how stories are circular and weave together the past and present, as at times the jumps between settings and topics feel forced and clumsy, instead of woven with the seamlessness that he argues happens in practice. In addition, he constantly tells us what the meanings of actions, stories, and rituals are, but he does not show us how they work together. Every so often, Sandell includes historical facts about the Catholic Church, the Latin roots of words, and stories about saints—which showcase his general knowledge of the religious studies field—but these instances break the flow of his narrative and derail attention from the stories told by his informants that would further his stated argument. While I commend Sandell for his attempt to play with the linear structure of writing to support his points, his book would have benefited greatly from a more focused treatment of the stories and rituals it seeks to highlight.
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[Review length: 1366 words • Review posted on April 13, 2016]