The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 96, July 1992 - April, 1993 Page: 599

Book Reviews

if the author had balanced a relentless chronology of activities related to leaders
and dioceses with some sustained attention to major topics such as education,
religious orders, and lay activity, as he does in the chapter on immigrant
Catholics.
The editors of Texas A&M University Press scarcely copyedited the text, which
contains much needless detail. The overuse of titles of church personnel, alter-
nately abbreviated and spelled out, also detracts from the volume's readability.
The book is useful to students of Texas history but, because of the author's
limited purpose, it does not do justice to the richness of the interaction of
Catholicism and culture in nineteenth-century Texas.
Indianapolis, Indiana JOSEPH M. WHITE
Santiago: Saint of Two Worlds. By Marc Simmons, Donna Pierce, and Joan Myers
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. Pp. xiii+73. Acknowl-
edgments, introduction, black-and-white photographs, illustrations, notes.
$45.6o, cloth; $16.95, paper.)
Richly informative and thought-provoking, these three readable essays offer a
pleasurable introduction to the complex phenomenon of Santiago.
Spanish Borderlands historian Marc Simmons discusses the amalgam of histo-
ry and legend through which the apostle St. James the Greater became Santiago,
the patron saint of Spain and the embodiment of Spanish nationalism, while his
shrine in northwestern Galicia became the focus of Christian pilgrims from all of
medieval western Europe. The cult of Santiago has also figured importantly in
Hispanic America since its arrival with the earliest conquistadors. Southwestern-
ers will be especially interested in Simmons's account of Santiago's manifesta-
tions in New Mexico from the 1590s to the present: "one of those visible links
that still ties Spain to her lost children in the New World."
Donna Pierce, a specialist in Spanish colonial art, expounds the rich iconogra-
phy that burgeoned with the Santiago cult, dwelling particularly on the architec-
tural splendors that evinced the growing prosperity as well as the intense
devotion of medieval Christians. The era of pilgrimages and crusades pro-
claimed the duty of every Christian to spread the Gospel to all corners of the
earth, a conviction quickly and logically extended by Spaniards to the New
World which God seemed miraculously to have revealed to them in 1492. A par-
ticularly intriguing aspect of Santiago in the New World is his adoption by indi-
genes: "From New Mexico to Chile, the Indians have made him their own in
dance, drama, and art."
Contrasting, but nicely complementing the scholarly analyses of Simmons and
Pierce, is photographer Joan Myers's essay on her own experience of the route
that thousands of medieval pilgrims trudged across northern Spain, from the
Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela. Although photographing the ancient Way
of Santiago was Myers's stated purpose, there was an underlying personal quest,
epitomized in a poignant quotation from Courajod: "Often on the great roads,

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