Patiently, from 1993 to 2003, Kristy Nabhan-Warren listened, learned, and participated as a deeply sympathetic outsider in the devotions and public activities that developed around a busy professional woman, Estela Ruiz, and her home and family in South Phoenix after Estela claimed to have received a visit from the Virgin Mary in 1989 and began to share the Virgin’s frequent messages with a mostly Mexican American audience. The author was not present at the beginning of the movement—how it all began is not perfectly clear—but she describes in rewarding detail the role of Estela’s family in what has come of the Blessed Mary’s messages of love, hope, occasional displeasure, and promise of healing. She traces changes that point toward less charisma and greater institutionalization, some decline in devotional fervor locally, and more interest from abroad.

This shrine and popular devotion are not offshoots of liberation theology or an exalted millennialism that rejects the world of the living. Estela and her family are conservative Catholics, respectful of church authority and very much in the world, but they found inspiration in a direct, personal experience of the divine. The charismatic, apparitionist side of the story seems inspired by older revivalist traditions in Mexican Catholicism and the examples of Marian apparitions and messages at Medjugorje and Lourdes, with a dash of Guadalupanismo. But this is Phoenix in the 1990s, and the shrine-making and public activities reflect local countercurrents and concerns in striking ways. The movement focuses on faith and obligation here, now, and for eternity, blending older Baroque practices with the vocabulary and activism of evangelical Protestantism, an ecumenical message, a vision of Mary as more than sweet and passive, community improvement programs, female empowerment, Montessori schooling, and even partial sponsorship by the National Football League.

This is a respectful, sensitive, clearly written book in which the author seeks to resolve the alien ethnographer’s dilemma by “writing like a relative.” The reader’s reward is a rich sense of the circumstances and struggles of at least some Mexican Americans in South Phoenix to make a good life in the contemporary United States that balances faith and family with education, material strivings, professional growth, discrimination, and personal suffering in ways that begin to bridge the conceptual divide between official and popular religion. Whether the author reaches her grander goals of getting at the heart of lived religion and “understanding the power of place, the process of pilgrimage, and how personal transformations are named by the devout” (p. 181) is less certain. Little is mentioned about pilgrimage, place, the “cadres” of Mary’s Ministries , and the remote but watchful interest of the church hierarchy. And thin conceptualizing about syncretism, fusion, and transculturation tends to confuse more than clarify the living of religion in the neighborhood. No doubt “the shrine remains a place of hope and healing in the religious imagination of the pilgrims who go there” (p. 213), but the book has little to say about those who go or have gone. And how important to the recent changes (especially the waning devotional fervor at the shrine) are the end of Mary’s messages to Estela in 1998 and the death of Reyes, Estela’s husband, in 2003? Perhaps the outgoing, deeply devout Reyes was more important to the unfolding of the whole story than the view of him as model husband, father, and devotee. In the end, readers learn mainly about Estela’s immediate relatives and the activities of a family ministry and enterprise that brought them closer together. That, in itself, is well worth knowing and can serve as a touchstone to much more.