A review of Edward Wright-Ríos’s Devotion in Motion
In Devotion in Motion: Pilgrimage in Modern Mexico (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Edward Wright-Ríos invites readers into the “disorienting, unrelenting, and unforgettable ordeal” that is contemporary pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin of Juquila in Oaxaca, Mexico (3). Through historical analysis of this devotion, considerations of pilgrimage’s interactions with daily life and community, and rich narrations of both walking and biking pilgrimages to Juquila in which he participated as a researcher, Wright-Ríos has authored a book that is every bit as captivating, vivid, and intricate as its colorful, multilayered cover image would suggest.
Wright-Ríos posits that pilgrimage is a practice that centers around change and adaptation, not stable and unchanging tradition. In his own words, “Devotion in Motion offers both a descriptive and a visual testament of how a ‘tradition’ remains highly adaptable, flexible, and thus vital. It reveals that pilgrimage, in fact, isn’t old at all” (10). What an enormous claim! Modern imaginations often perceive pilgrimage as a stable practice, its ancientness part of its very appeal. Contemporary devotees may envision themselves sharing the same experience as pilgrims who journeyed centuries or millennia ago, steeping in the wisdom of well-trodden trails as they escape “normal” life, and praying at unchanged sites of past miracles. Yet Wright-Ríos holds that pilgrimage is constantly in flux, an event in which individuals and communities adopt and adapt past practices in ways they find meaningful. Pilgrimage for Wright-Ríos merits study precisely because of its elasticity and penchant for change. Dynamism, not stagnation, makes pilgrimage ever-interesting.
The book’s ten episodic chapters naturally fall into three groupings. The first three chapters provide a solid foundation for understanding contemporary devotion to the Virgin of Juquila. These chapters present personal stories of devotion from contemporary pilgrims, an overview of pilgrimage studies, and the origins and history of this devotion. Chapters 4 and 5 consider pilgrimage’s interactions with other facets of daily life, namely the market and social media. Chapters 6 through 10 bring to life the walking and biking pilgrimage journeys that the author joined as a participant-observer in 2016. The book concludes with a reflection on a devotional tattoo shared by a Juquila devotee on social media, bringing together many of the work’s themes.
By beginning with vignettes of personal pilgrimage experiences in the introduction and chapter 1, Wright-Ríos sets the tone for the rest of the work. This is a book that trusts pilgrims and views them as the authoritative experts on their own practices. In his overview of pilgrimage studies literature in chapter 1, Wright-Ríos commends and critiques scholarly theories based on how they correspond with real, lived pilgrimage practices. He establishes a posture of respect toward the Oaxacan pilgrims from the beginning, in contrast to the elitist attitudes some Juquila pilgrims report encountering, which cast them as backward or superstitious. He also is not afraid to laugh at himself, maintaining an attitude of both humor and humility. Given his first book, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934 (Duke University Press, 2009), and his second, Searching for Madre Matiana: Prophecy and Popular Culture in Modern Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2014), Wright-Ríos has long been pondering Mexican religious practices with this posture of curiosity.
Chapter 2 examines the devotion’s origins and history through the early 20th century. Sources for this work are limited, insofar as we have almost no direct accounts of the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of historical pilgrims. In lieu of firsthand accounts, Wright-Ríos turns to census data, financial records at the shrine that track devotional offerings, receipts for building purchases or labor, newspaper articles, and letters. One of his most important sources is the 1791 guidebook Memorias de la portentosa imagen de Nuestra Señora de Xuquila by Father Joseph María Ruiz y Cervantes. This priest-authored text provides the most reliable history of Juquila’s devotion, despite being written 200 years after it began. Today, many pilgrims approaching the shrine still follow the route mapped by this colonial book.
Juquila’s origins remain contested; one local town asserts that the Virgin of Juquila miraculously appeared directly to its inhabitants, in contrast to the 1791 textual narrative of Spanish colonial missionaries bringing her statue to the region. Whatever the case, devotion to her ebbed and flowed—but never died—for centuries, affected greatly by politics, revolution, economic recessions, and social forces. In chapter 3, Wright-Ríos chronicles the impact of Father Cornelio Bourguet, the shrine’s controversial pastor from 1941 to 1980. Although entangled in financial, political, and romantic scandal, he also worked to revive pilgrimage practices that had waned leading up to the 1940s. Throughout both these chapters, Wright-Ríos emphasizes the role of intentional promotion in pilgrimage, reminding readers that devotional practices never function independently from practical realities.
The next two chapters move into thematic considerations of contemporary pilgrimage to Juquila. Chapter 4 examines the relationship between pilgrimage and market—both commerce in general and the marketplace as a specific location of pilgrimage activity. Wright-Ríos’s research leads him deep into Oaxaca’s Central de Abastos market, about 120 miles northeast of the shrine, winding through bustling rows of vendors and customers to find local expertise. Given their knowledge of routes, vehicles, and stories from faraway places, many vendors understand pilgrimage intimately. In fact, the walking pilgrimage group that Wright-Ríos joins and chronicles later in the book consists of market vendors from the Central de Abastos and their extended families and friends. Oaxaca’s busy central market becomes a site where people make and share pilgrimage plans behind mountains of pineapples and other goods for sale. Commercial relationships have affected Juquila’s pilgrimage from the beginning and continue to do so today.
After considering the market as part of pilgrimage’s cartography, Wright-Ríos next turns to digital space. Chapter 5 considers pilgrims’ interactions with one another on social media, especially Facebook and YouTube. Online, pilgrims share memories, seek and offer advice, and ask others to intercede to the Virgin of Juquila for specific intentions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the online space became an even more important part of the pilgrimage community, a virtual opportunity to offer prayers to the Virgin when offering them at the physical shrine was not possible. Chapters 4 and 5 are highlights of the book, expanding pilgrimage’s sacred landscape to include seemingly mundane marketplaces and the digital space of social media.
Chapters 6 through 10 constitute the heart of Devotion in Motion’s descriptive and ethnographic work, closely detailing the walking pilgrimage of the Oaxacan market vendors and the biking pilgrimage of a group from Acatzingo, both of which Wright-Ríos joined. The images painted in these chapters are striking: a statue of Mary carried on a decorated wooden chair worn as a backpack, cyclists with crucifixes strapped to their backs, trucks transporting gear and first aid equipment, fireworks acting as alarms at 4:00 a.m., eggs and steak cooked on griddles set up roadside. Along with the textual descriptions, these chapters feature a series of stunning color photographs taken by professional photographer Mike DuBose, who accompanied Wright-Ríos to Juquila twice. These photographs bring readers into pilgrimage more fully.
The narratives in these chapters convey a world that is complex and varied. Participants represent many lifestyles and careers: accountants, shop owners, truckers, and medical workers. Thanks to the author’s commitment to completing both walking and biking pilgrimages and engaging with bus pilgrims, the book highlights some of the unique features that these different travel modalities offer. The slowness and difficulty of walking lends itself to increased camaraderie among pilgrims; the cyclists enjoy festive evenings with dancing and mariachis who travel with them; and the buses make pilgrimage destinations accessible for those who cannot otherwise make the journey. Additionally, gender affects how participants experience pilgrimage and interact with other pilgrims. Wright-Ríos includes fascinating reflections on masculinity and pilgrimage at the end of chapter 6, examining how the skills that many men have cultivated as vendors, laborers, and truckers enrich the pilgrimage and how these men display affection and tenderness before and during the journey.
Chapter 10 describes the Pedimento, a chapel that pilgrims reach a few miles before the main shrine in Juquila. This space is a perfect example of Wright-Ríos’s claim that pilgrims adopt and adapt practices as they see fit. Although the shrine in Juquila is the destination of the pilgrimage, the Pedimento has arisen in recent decades as a place where many pilgrims offer their prayers to the Virgin as they approach the end of their journey. The Pedimento is a space overflowing with prayer. Papers with written intentions are hung from walls and wedged into corners, real and imitation money is pinned to a copy of Juquila’s statue, and pilgrims even create small dioramas outside from the earth’s clay to represent their prayers. Walking sticks, which pilgrims believe absorb their troubles and sins along the journey, are discarded here. From the Pedimento, pilgrims continue to the shrine, where they attend Mass before returning home. Interestingly, Wright-Ríos depicts shrine clergy as mostly out of touch with the pilgrim experience, reporting that homilies at the shrine emphasize personal commitment to conversion but ignore the real hardships and conditions that motivate many pilgrims as well as the concrete experiences of these journeys.
There were a few times when I wished to hear more from the pilgrims with whom Wright-Ríos journeyed. For example, given the book’s emphasis on change in past and present iterations of Juquila’s pilgrimage, I found myself wondering what these pilgrims hope and predict for the future of this devotion. I also wondered how age plays a role in pilgrims’ experiences, a factor that was touched upon but less highlighted than gender and occupation.
Despite these minor questions, I found Devotion in Motion to be a truly excellent book. Wright-Ríos concretizes modern Mexican pilgrimage and expands readers’ imaginations about where and how pilgrimage appears. As a fellow scholar of pilgrimage, I found myself captivated by the descriptions and images in this book and convinced by Wright-Ríos’s claims about pilgrimage’s dynamism and expansive cartography in places like the market and the internet. As a theologian, I find the adaptability of pilgrimage that Wright-Ríos emphasizes exciting. Pilgrimage brims with creative theological possibilities, precisely because of its constant newness. In my own ethnographic work with women devotees to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City, I encountered the festiveness, fervent devotion, and intertwining with gender, politics, finances, and social factors that Wright-Ríos highlights in the Juquila pilgrimage. Moreover, like many Juquila pilgrims, many Guadalupan pilgrims I met re-make the journey over and over throughout their lives. Wright-Ríos reflects on these repeat pilgrims in his final pages:
Spending time with devotees and getting to know them gradually made me realize that for many of them it isn’t a single year’s journey to the shrine that matters as much as the ongoing relationship with Juquila sustained through serial pilgrimage. In other words, many devotees don’t seek a simple personal transformation or expect a life-changing miracle after one trip to the shrine. They embrace process, although they would never say it that way (171).
Year after year, these pilgrims deepen their understanding of themselves while building relationships with other pilgrims and with the Virgin of Juquila. Pilgrimage becomes an iterative framework, a grounding touchpoint in life that allows people to understand and tell their own stories. Perhaps this is pilgrimage’s powerful invitation to us all, including those who will never get the chance to walk to a faraway shrine: build relationships, embrace process. What a privilege to step into this world of pilgrimage in Devotion in Motion. I would recommend this book to students, scholars, and casual readers interested in Mexican culture, history, and religiosity.
Sadie Yates is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Theology at Fordham University focusing on pilgrimage studies and feminist theology. In her dissertation research, she employs ethnographic methods at three contemporary pilgrimage sites—the Camino de Santiago in Spain, women’s Guadalupan pilgrimage in Mexico, and the Migrant Trail along the Arizona-Mexico border—to construct a contemporary theology of pilgrimage.
This review appears in the spring 2026 issue of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.