Frances L. Ramos. Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla

Throughout the eighteenth century, the town council of the Mexican city of Puebla spent enormous amounts of money carrying out elaborate public rituals; this is the central fact of Frances L. Ramos's book. Ramos shows the reader that official ritual—celebrations of royal births, deaths, and coronations; viceregal entrances; and periodical religious celebrations—was a crucial part of the cultural and political structure of Mexico's “second city.” The book tackles two main issues. It investigates the question of the role of public ritual in the city throughout the colonial era, and it reconstructs the effects of the empire-wide Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century on Puebla's ritual calendar, and thus on relations of prestige and power. Ramos's findings on the first of these questions are convincing. Public ritual was more than simply a reflection of social hierarchy or a tool of domination. Ritual, she shows us with an impressive level of detail appropriate to her baroque subject, certainly served as a tool to represent the elite's ideal societal hierarchies. It did this by simultaneously stressing ties to the Spanish monarchy and crafting a specifically poblano identity in which local religious practice served to alleviate “feelings of material insecurity and uncertainty” (p. 81) provoked by a declining economy and a spate of natural disasters. We do not really know how broadly effective this was; due to a near complete lack of evidence for reception, Ramos is forced to speculate as to what “likely” or “surely” were plebian reactions to the city's rituals. But it is more important for her argument that public ritual served as a tool in the ongoing struggle for power among the elite. Public ceremonies were occasions for elite individuals and corporations to demonstrate and establish their honor. And as Alejandro Cañeque has shown in a different context, ritual provided an arena for disputes over jurisdiction between corporate bodies such as the church, the city council, and the courts. Ramos takes this one step further, showing how ritual was also linked to “underlying material interests” (p. 134). Not only were rituals events that provided a market for the goods and services of the city, they were places where elites played out disputes over things such as tax collection and control over the resources that they used to distribute patronage. Ramos nicely traces several such disputes, and thus adds an important layer of complexity to our understanding of the reasons for and importance of public ritual in urban life.

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