Sánchez, David A. From Patmos to the Barrio: Subverting Imperial Myths. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008. Pages, xi + 209. Paperback, $21.00. ISBN: 9780800662592.

In From Patmos to the Barrio: Subverting Imperial Myths, David A. Sánchez impressively models a new approach to biblical scholarship. Sánchez’s focus is not strictly an exegesis of Revelation 12; rather he explores the ongoing life of that text as a site of community engagement, especially the afterlife of Revelation that can be found within the community from which he hales, Chican@s in East Los Angeles. Examining Revelation 12 as it travels in the multiple migrations of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Sánchez furthers the possibilities of biblical study opened up by scholars such as Musa W. Dube, Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Fernando F. Segovia, R. S. Sugirtharajah, and Vincent L. Wimbush.

Sánchez’s monograph, an adaptation of his dissertation, takes up the multivalent questions of what a particularly Chican@ biblical scholarship should look like by exposing patterns of counter-imperial textual engagements in first-century Patmos, seventeenth-century Mexico, and twentieth-century Los Angeles, California. Sánchez explains how imperial powers justify their domination on the basis of particular myths. Employing the work of James C. Scott and the concept of “hidden transcripts,” Sánchez then explores how dominated peoples appropriate and subvert imperial myths. Familiar with the murals of Guadalupe in East Los Angeles and the ways that la Virgen has served as a symbol of resistance, Sánchez reveals a practice of counter-imperial subversion that has informed certain aspects of her long history.

In chapter one, Sánchez begins his study with Revelation 12. He demonstrates the importance of the Apollo-Leto-Python myth to Augustan Rome. Sánchez then draws on the work of Adela Yarbro Collins to lay bare the ways in which Revelation 12 subverts this imperial myth so as to delegitimize Roman power. In part, Sánchez chose Revelation 12 because of its reputed relationship to Guadalupe, as elucidated in a text from mid-seventeenth-century Mexico. Thus, in chapter two, Sánchez turns to the mid-seventeenth-century writings that first entext la Virgen’s apparition in Mexico while also subverting imperial Spanish myths. He shows how Miguel Sánchez writes a Guadalupe narrative that favors the criollo over the peninsulares, and then D. Sánchez shows how Laso de la Vega, writing in Nahuatl, turns the myth around to favor the indigenous.

Finally, in chapter three, Sánchez turns to the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrating a pattern of subversion of dominant U.S. myths. He looks first at the texted Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and then at the imagery of Guadalupe in East Los Angeles. His book is often most poignant here, in his captions beneath his primary sources, the Guadalupan images found in Appendix 3. Sánchez reveals that these images can likewise serve as a hidden transcript of resistance, where Guadalupe counters both John Gast’s mythical progress goddess as well as the Statue of Liberty. Sánchez concludes his monograph with reflections on the postcolonial optic employed in his analysis, elucidating fissures in the “objectivity” of normative European and Euro-American biblical exegesis. Yet his work also intervenes in postcolonial discourse, especially in terms of highlighting the place of Latin America in the study of colonialism and nascent modernity.

From Patmos to the Barrio is a provocative work that raised many more intriguing questions than I suggest here, but I would like to point toward a few we should consider. Reading hidden transcripts requires a transdisciplinary and transhistorical methodology that examines scriptural performances, community engagements, and visual interpretations around transhistorically parallel dynamics of imperial powers and counter-imperial subversions, transporting readers on a vertiginous climb through complex and painful histories. Sánchez amply demonstrates that a complex transhistorical and transdisciplinary project can and must be undertaken by twenty-first century scholars. What are the methods we can and must take up in such work? How should we understand and approach the task of “history”? While being especially mindful of colonizers’ intentional masking of indigenous voices, how can we go about reading the first writings about Guadalupe in the seventeenth century, or any writings from colonial New Spain? In what ways can we attend to the indigenous traditions also employed to subvert imperial visions? Following the suggestions of Jean-Pierre Ruiz and Neomi DeAnda, I must also ask how can teología de y en conjunto aid us in such complex transdisciplinary and transhistorical work?

            At the level of the individual imagery of Revelation 12, Guadalupe, and the Virgin of East Los, Sánchez brilliantly reveals the multiplicity of images implicated in all three historical moments, but it is outside the purview of his study to address every thread woven into broader fabrics. Thus, we must ask why the imperial myths and counter-imperial countermyths hinge so strongly on wo/men. How and why were images of wo/men readily employed in imperial myths and counter-imperial subversions? How are actual wo/men either implicated or abandoned in these particular patterns of resistance?

            The gender trouble endemic to these myths points also to broader questions inherent in discussions of Bhabhain hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence. In his conclusion, Sánchez draws a careful distinction between counter-imperial and anti-imperial that is worth heeding. Precisely because they draw on the myths of empire, some resistance narratives have been easily redeployed for imperial purposes. Revelation has served the U.S.’s own quest of Manifest Destiny. Driving through parts of the Midwestern U.S., Guadalupe inhabits English-language billboards in an attempt to enforce appropriate gender roles and sexualities and reinforce ideals of feminine submission. Sánchez suggests that one of the larger narratives of power contestation has to do with struggle over myths, but he chronicles only the side of resistance. Why and how are these images rewritten for purposes of empire? Why are such contestations undertaken in written form? This question is pertinent to Revelation 12, Guadalupe, and El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán as well; why were these counter-imperial myths codified, written down, and “scripturalized” at all?

            This excellent book is a whirlwind tour that is thoughtful and yet satisfyingly incomplete. For me, this is the mark of an excellent beginning to a scholarly career, and I hope to read more from Sánchez, and others as well, taking up the myriad questions, both small and large, that his work provokes.