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Globalization of the local: Agency, shifting identities, and a community that 

sticks together 

Review by Sarah Leiter 

 

Mixtec Evangelicals: Globalization, Migration, and Religious Change in a Oaxacan Indigenous Group 

by Mary I. O’Connor 

University Press of Colorado, 2016  

 

Like many other groups in Latin America, the indigenous Mixtec people of Oaxaca, Mexico have been 

Catholic for centuries. And like many other groups in Latin America, the Mixtec people have become 

less Catholic in recent decades. Although an adherence to Catholicism historically has shaped the 

Mixtec system of governance, patterns of economic exchange, and social interactions in daily life, 

many Mixtec individuals recently have converted to evangelical streams of Christianity. Mary I. 

O’Connor’s Mixtec Evangelicals explores the socioeconomic factors influencing this trend, arguing 

that globalization and corresponding economically motivated migration have given rise to this religious 

conversion among members of the community. Her multi-sited comparative study contributes to a 

growing collection of literature on ongoing religious change across Latin America. 

 

O’Connor presents a macrocosmic view of contemporary Mixtec villages, situating them as nodes in a 

network of Mixtec migration sparked by globalization. In doing so, she places the phenomenon of 

evangelical conversion in Latin America within its broader socioeconomic context. She demonstrates 

that while the local consequences of conversion vary from village to village, its causes are closely 

intertwined with broad global trends. Mixtec Evangelicals thus provides a necessary analysis of 

intersections between global processes and local experiences that is highly relevant as the emerging 

effects of contemporary globalization continue to unfold. 

 



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The book begins with an overview of the “Mixteca Region” in Oaxaca and highlights the established 

role of Catholicism in what O’Connor refers to as Mixtec “traditional culture.” Most Mixtec villages 

are governed by the usos y costumbres system in which each resident family is required to contribute to 

and participate in civil and religious duties, including the sponsoring and planning of fiestas honoring 

Catholic saints. It is this civil-religious system, O’Connor argues, that allows the communities to stay 

intact. Before Mixtecs began converting in the 1980s, it would not have made sense to separate the 

civil from the religious in Mixtec communities; being Mixtec meant being Catholic, and fulfilling 

responsibilities within the local system of governance often meant carrying out Catholic practices. In 

more recent decades, many Mixtecs who have become evangelical Christians have faced rejection in 

and from their home villages. For these reasons, as O’Connor points out, it is extraordinary that many 

Mixtecs have moved away from Catholicism yet have maintained both their Mixtec identity and, to 

varying extents, their participation in village life.  

 

Though these villages generally remain central to the lives of migrants even after they convert away 

from Catholicism, the Catholics living in the villages are often unwilling (to varying extents) to fully 

accept evangelicals upon their return. While the migrants continue both to recognize the villages as 

their ancestral homelands and to financially support family members still living there, local Catholics 

often view the evangelicals’ rejection of Catholicism as a threat to the perpetuation of their community. 

Despite this conflict, when Mixtecs move to other parts of Mexico and throughout the United States, 

they remain rooted in their home villages both through processes of social identification and through 

financial obligations to their families. 

 

The book’s second chapter provides a convincing critique of contemporary thoughts about 

globalization. O’Connor points out that although the phenomenon has introduced amenities such as 

cellphones to the communities and often has made potable water more accessible, Mixtecs and many 

other groups should be conceived of as “victims” of globalization. Because of international trade 

agreements like NAFTA, Mixtecs can no longer profitably sell their agricultural crops and thus are 

forced to migrate elsewhere to find employment. Of course, as is reflected throughout the entire book, 

globalization affects the lives of its victims in ways that extend far beyond available income sources. In 

the case of the Mixtecs, it affects where they live, which affects their religious commitments. This, in 

turn, affects their social relations with their families and home communities, the ways in which they 

spend money, the social practices in which they engage, and, in some cases, the structural organization 



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of their home villages. 

 

In the same chapter, O’Connor also challenges notions of indigeneity or the “traditional” as static. She 

frames Mixtecs as inhabiting “selective modernities,” as able to maintain their indigenous Mixtec-ness 

while simultaneously choosing to incorporate certain elements of modernity into their lives. Because 

Mixtec practices and systems, which are so integrally defined by Catholicism, have persisted despite 

the increasingly common turn away from Catholicism, Mixtecs must be regarded as modern, adaptable, 

and agentive rather than as inflexible and stuck in a former epoch.  

 

The core of the book consists of a comparative study of different Mixtec villages in which members 

have converted away from Catholicism. It illustrates the varying reactions evangelical converts have 

faced in their home villages and emphasizes that each village has managed its newfound religious 

diversity in different ways. These varying reactions are presented as correlated with quantitative data: 

in general, greater numbers of non-Catholics in a given village is correlated with increased amicability, 

while a smaller but still significant presence of non-Catholics is correlated with increased animosity. 

Through this comparative approach, O’Connor importantly conveys the heterogeneity of Mixtec 

villages, illuminating how a single current of religious change has had very different effects across 

villages.  

 

Finally, O’Connor argues that the newly transnational character of the Mixtec population has produced 

a Mixtec diaspora in other parts of Mexico and in the United States. As such, the book provides a 

window into the ways in which a diasporic community sustains its cohesion and connection to its 

homeland in today’s globalized world. Interestingly, the Mixtec diaspora maintains its ties to the 

Oaxacan villages in part through the use of cellphones, devices that index modernity-driven 

globalization—the very phenomenon that engendered their dispersion in the first place. O’Connor 

acknowledges that the longevity of this diaspora will depend upon the extent to which future 

generations maintain a relationship with their ancestral villages in Oaxaca; such a development, as she 

notes, would be an interesting subject for future study. 

 

O’Connor places migration, caused by ever-changing global economic realities, at the center of her 

proposed explanation for religious conversion. While in the migrant stream, Mixtecs encounter 

evangelical missionaries who offer gifts, free food, and religious leadership in a place far removed from 



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the structured Catholicism of village life. However, beyond arguing that globalization-induced 

migration offers a setting ripe for conversion, O’Connor does not provide an analysis of why, in fact, 

Mixtecs might abandon what she presents as so integral to Mixtec life. If being Mixtec meant, until 

recently, being Catholic, why have so many Mixtecs rejected Catholicism yet faithfully remained 

Mixtec? Beyond relocation to areas where evangelism has a more powerful presence than Catholicism, 

what has inspired so many Mixtecs to give up a religious adherence that seems so crucial to their 

identities? Though O’Connor poses similar questions, her answers rely heavily on macro-social trends 

and only minimally consider individuals’ experiences. She uses the intentionally broad label “non-

Catholic,” for example, as the term “Protestant” is uncommon, but she does not address how newly 

evangelical Mixtecs refer to themselves affirmatively. Though it is useful to point to religious 

conversion as a broader trend, the ways in which it has manifested in individuals’ lives warrants a 

stronger focus than they are given in O’Connor’s work. 

 

In addition, although O’Connor argues that Mixtecs select the components of modernity they wish to 

adopt, the actual extent of their agency in this regard should be called into question. If Mixtecs are 

among the groups she calls “victims” of globalization and modernizing processes, as they are forced 

into the migration stream to find work, to what extent are they actually sovereign over their own 

relations to modernity? They can, of course, choose to use cellphones or to uphold non-modern forms 

of local governance, but the global drive toward modernity, as O’Connor presents it, has transformed 

Mixtec communities in ways beyond the control of the individual or even of village leadership. 

Whereas Mixtec life was historically built around Catholic practices and village obligations that were 

fulfilled in person and without financial remuneration, the Mixtec community in the contemporary 

globalized world has become religiously diverse, transnational, and increasingly reliant on money. Thus 

it seems that Mixtecs’ entire lives have been affected by modernity, regardless of whether they are 

“selecting” modern changes.  

 

In short, Mixtec Evangelicals presents an engaging macro-social analysis of some of the local effects of 

globalization. It ventures beyond a consideration of globalization’s socioeconomic consequences, 

drawing attention to its ripple effects on religious identification and intra-communal conflict. It is an 

anthropological work that would be of interest to, in addition to anthropologists, geographers and 

economists who study the effects of globalization on communities. As the religious makeup of Latin 

America continues to shift, the book can help point to the causes underlying these trends. Mixtec 



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Evangelicals thus makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the ways in which global 

changes reshape communities both locally and transnationally.  

 

Work Cited 

O’Connor, Mary I. 2016. Mixtec Evangelicals: Globalization, Migration, and Religious Change in a 

Oaxacan Indigenous Group. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. 

 

Sarah Leiter is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. 

She is currently a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow studying Brazilian Portuguese. Her 

research interests include language, religion, and emerging religious communities in Brazil.  

 

 

 

© 2017 Sarah Leiter 


