This dissertation explores the role of popular religion in a transnational community by examining the performance of devotion to local patron saints, virgin mothers and sacred crosses. Annually in May, Empalme Escobedo, Guanajuato, Mexico celebrates San Isidro Labrador (the patron saint of farmers), Maria Auxiliadora (the patroness of railroad laborers) and the Santa Cruz de Picacho (Sacred Cross of Picacho). Following the celebrations many of the male participants in the fiestas travel to Texas to work in agriculture or the service industry. Consequently, devotion to the saint(s) moves with migrants back and forth across the Mexican-U.S. border. My thesis is that the force of devotion gives voice to the tension between the desire for solidarity (experienced through fiesta performance) and the erosion of the community by migration (experienced as absence and dissolution). What I call the force of devotion refers to the social processes, expressive culture, continuity and change that make up a transnational community's system of beliefs and practices and enable folks to understand, explain or cope with everyday life. The force of devotion is the key analytic frame through which I interpret the articulations of spirituality and popular religion, impermanence and fragmentation, absence and hope. The central questions posed in this dissertation emerge from the stories folks in Empalme Escobedo tell about their lives. Consultants talk about their devotion as an expression of faith, a necessary guidance through daily life and a symbol of hope. Tracking the force of devotion exposes social relationships, emotional and intimate experiences, desires and fears. Memory of and participation in the fiestas not only symbolize the force of devotion, but also serve as a connection to separated family members and place of origin. The everyday reality of the absence of loved ones and the fragmentation of the community as a result of migration amplifies the human desire for sociability and solidarity. The fiesta performance provides a space in which the consciousness of communal boundaries is heightened, thereby confirming and strengthening the experience of the social and the force of devotion. / text

Spanish monarchs ruled a global empire encompassing millions of colonial subjects for nearly three hundred years. One key factor in the longevity of the Spanish Empire was its skillful integration of elements from an even longer-lasting, centralized Institution--the Catholic Church. Through a focus on San Felipe de Jesús, a Mexico City-born saint, this dissertation analyzes the pious imperialism of the Spanish Empire in the Catholic missions of Japan, the politics of beatification in Rome and local devotions in Mexico City. Funded by Philip II, Spanish missionaries spread across the Atlantic and then to the Pacific. The mission of Spanish Franciscans in Japan including San Felipe exemplified the orthodox and expansionistic tendencies of this movement. The friars’ uncompromising zeal caused them to reject Japanese society and authority, something which led to their executions in 1597. Spanish subjects thrilled to the martyrs’ inspiring story and supported their beatification cause. The Spanish king, too, actively promoted new holy figures in Rome for political and pious reasons. During the seventeenth century, more than half of the new beatified or canonized holy figures came from the Spanish Empire, including the Nagasaki martyrs. As each new saint earned a feast in liturgy, worship in Spanish territories began to disseminate not only Catholic values, but also divine favor toward the Spanish Empire and its monarch. The liturgical schedule of colonial Mexico City shows that Spanish Catholicism projected both Church and Empire across the Atlantic. As the Catholic Church had found, cults to saints formed effective imperial ties because they could also attract and adapt. Civic and religious leaders in Mexico City molded the cult to San Felipe to express municipal pride, to assert the city’s place in the Spanish Empire and to commemorate its contributions to Catholicism. Devotions to saints, then, captured the potentially-divisive power of identity to reinforce Empire and Church. Pious imperialism worked well until Bourbon-era reforms distanced the Spanish monarch from the devotional culture in Mexico City and interrupted the mediating power of saints’ cults. The Spanish Empire was less able to withstand shocks like the political instability of the early nineteenth century. / text