Marie Theresa Hernández discusses various stories told to her in villages, towns, and cities of the state of Nuevo León in northern Mexico during fieldwork in the 1990s. “I believe the stories that are told among the nuevoleneses [people of Nuevo León] are a way of saying ‘This is our history, this is who we are, regardless of what the government and the church decree’… The stories are repressed, erased, put aside, yet they continuously erupt” (p. 171). She begins with stories about the supposed barbarity of nuevoleneses, noting that “at times [this] is an embarrassment and at other times is touted as an asset” (p. 183). People also say that the region was settled by Jewish conversos from Spain, although this is denied in official history. By contrast, she notes the lack of stories, whether official or nonofficial, about the previous indigenous inhabitants of the region. Hernández ends by looking at stories that are not just hidden but also are about hiding—tales of buried treasure, bodies buried in the walls of houses and under shopping malls, and so on. She argues that all these stories are “ingredients still active in a place that has moved swiftly into modernity, yet has chosen not to occlude all of its past life … allowing the nuevoleneses to move between the alternating identities and moments that characterize their world” (p. 4). This leads her to conclude that “Delirio is located within the eye of the norteño who is constantly facing a de-centering and de-territorialization resulting from the convoluted and opaque nature of the region’s written, oral, and occulted history” (p. 260).

Hernández presents much interesting material in an engaging way. She discusses, for example, the months she spent working with Horacio Alvarado, the presenter of a well-known television program on the traditions of Nuevo León, as well as her friendship with the artist and collector Aquiles Sepúlveda, who claimed Jewish descent and encouraged her to take the Jewish stories seriously. She describes her experience in the state capital, Monterrey, of taking diploma classes in regional history, observing that when she and other students asked about the stories of Jewish settlement, the teachers would simply respond that there was no documentary evidence. Some of her arguments are also interesting. For example, she suggests that the epithet barbarian was formerly used for the indigenous inhabitants but has now lost that association and is used for and by nuevoleneses in general. Her discussion of the secrecy of all these stories, drawing on Michael Taussig’s notion of the “public secret,” is suggestive, too.

That said, the author is often coy about stating her arguments, and when she does state them, I found them sometimes simplistic, despite her compulsive references to theory, mostly citing Taussig and Michel de Certeau. She argues, for example, that the 16th-century trial of Luis de Carvajal, the first governor of Nuevo León, for practicing Judaism, was “closely related to the ‘secret Jewish stories’ often told in present-day Nuevo León” (p. 171). She continues that “this secrecy is intensified by the contradiction of history and remaining ambiguity regarding the current-day presence of Jews in the world,” but she gives less attention to this latter contradiction and ambiguity than to the 16th-century events surrounding the trial (p. 171). She also cites several people, such as Alvarado and Sepúlveda, who claim to identify remnants of Jewish practices in the region. Rather than presenting and seemingly backing their claims of a Jewish legacy, she might have paid more attention to what these stories did for people in the various ethnographic contexts that she describes.

In this respect, Hernández might have benefited from a closer look at Mexican anthropology, not just for ethnographic context but also for its sophisticated approach to region. Region in Mexican anthropology is the outcome of a process through which particular groups struggle to corner and control other groups, often in the face of state power. Representations are caught up in this struggle, setting the terms of relations among groups, but they are not the whole story. This approach could have offset her poststructuralist readings, which I felt also served to distance Nuevo León from Houston, where she lived and studied. The Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos wrote in 1937 that northern Mexicans were barbarous; Hernández seems to respond that they are merely decentered.