Based on ethnographic research in northern California, Our Lady of Everyday provides an in-depth cross-sectional analysis of three groups of Mexican origin women between the ages of 18 and 82 (single and in college; mothers; and older women). The study traces their life trajectories from childhood to adulthood. Castañeda-Liles found that their mothers’ Catholic devotion became the first religious/cultural template from within which they learned to see themselves as people of faith in a specific sociocultural context. She also found that the Catholic culture in which the mothers socialized the ... More

Based on ethnographic research in northern California, Our Lady of Everyday provides an in-depth cross-sectional analysis of three groups of Mexican origin women between the ages of 18 and 82 (single and in college; mothers; and older women). The study traces their life trajectories from childhood to adulthood. Castañeda-Liles found that their mothers’ Catholic devotion became the first religious/cultural template from within which they learned to see themselves as people of faith in a specific sociocultural context. She also found that the Catholic culture in which the mothers socialized the participants provided the parameters within which they learn how to be good girls in ways that reduces a girl’s agency to rubble. Castañeda-Liles argues that instead of blindly accepting androcentric Catholic teachings or rejecting Catholicism altogether, the women developed a type of Mexican Catholic imagination that allowed them to transgress limiting notions of what a good Catholic woman should be, while retaining the aspects of Catholicism they found life-giving—all the while continuing to identify as Catholics. This is most visible in their relationship to La Virgen de Guadalupe, which is not fixed but fluid and deeply engaged in their process of self-awareness in everyday life. Their stories demonstrate that the ways race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion intersect have serious implications for our understanding of women’s subjectivity and their mental and physical health. Therefore, Castañeda-Liles argues that treating these categories of analysis as mutually exclusive undermines the researcher’s ability to grasp the fluidity and complexity of women’s lived experience.