The Revolution and the Virgin Mary: Popular Religion and Social Change in Nicaragua

This article is concerned with analysing the role of popular religion in socialtransformation in Nicaragua from 1979 to the present, focusing in particular onpopular religious practices, as spaces in which gender, political and religiousidentities are shaped and contested. It explores the elements of Nicaraguanpopular religion that were constitutive of a religious and often gendered‘common sense’ which fostered identification with specific political projects.My aim is two-fold. Firstly, I am concerned to examine some general issuesaround popular religion in Latin America and its relationship to the practiceand pronouncements of the Catholic church. To this end, I begin my analysis ofpopular religion in Nicaragua with an exploration of some of the general themeswhich dominate considerations of popular culture and popular religion. I nextexamine how the issue of popular Catholicism has been taken up both by the‘official’ church, particularly in the wake of Vatican II, and by liberationtheologians. This discussion leads to a more specific focus on popular religionin Latin America. Secondly, I explore ‘Marianism’ and the Nicaraguan popularreligious festival La Purísima. Here I focus on the competing gender discourseswhich are worked through different representations of ‘the Virgin Mary’. Thesecompeting discourses are often also linked to different versions of an ‘ideal’society. Finally the article concludes by outlining how an analysis of popularreligious practices can inform a sociological understanding of contradictoryprocesses of social change.