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The Penitente Brotherhood: Patriarchy and Hispano-Catholicism in New Mexico. By Michael P. Carroll. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Pp. viii, 260. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00 cloth.
Here is the latest addition to the extensive bibliography on New Mexico's penitential brotherhood known as the Hermandad de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno, or the Hermanos Penitentes. What characterizes this account is its searing critique of the extant literature, offering as its own modest antidote a strident positivist reading of well-worn sources, glazed with a psychoanalytic confection of its own. So viewed, the Penitente ritual is "pervaded by a great many elements that seem ideally suited to the gratification of homoerotic desire" (p. 204). This desire, Freud and the author claim, is a "defense mechanism against the unconscious feelings of oedipal rage and hostility that are activated by the Penitente emphasis on the intense suffering of their Padre Jesús" (p. 205).
To reach this conclusion the author contends that just about every previous interpreter got it wrong. The Hermanos were not born of antique...