More Than a Fad: Carmen's Cult of Saints

Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints, the newest work from Chicana poet Pat Mora, is an attempt to create a literature to accompany the particular religious traditions of New Mexico. Overflowing with luscious color photographs of religious folk art (everything from pine wood statuettes of Jesus to napkins embroidered with the images of saints), Mora's book consciously tries to capture the combination of humility and religious pride that makes folk art so captivating. She attempts to give a voice to the shaky hands that manifested their faith through carving and sewing and painting.

The project is not an easy one. Mora must, in a sense, create a new religious language: a language for dusty missionary churches, tremendous desert vistas and rusty trailer parks.

To do this, Mora wisely decides to inhabit the mind of an aged Chicana named Aunt Carmen. The poems in Mora's books are presented as the secret prayers of Aunt Carmen, a strong-willed eighty-year-old house cleaner, to the various saints that make up the religious infrastructure of Southwestern Catholicism. Through Carmen, Mora explores the issues at the heart of religious faith.

As she prepares to enter the next world, Carmen looks back on her life: her masked desires for passion, her resistance to change, her assertions of power in a male-dominated religion and male-dominated world and her constant struggle to find beauty in a harsh and unforgiving terrain. The saints that Carmen addresses have given her solace and guidance through the years, from Saint Liberata, the patron saint of abused women represented as a crucified female martyr, to Saint Theresa of Lisieux, who teaches Carmen to find beauty in adversity.

The results of Mora's experiment with folk religion are, unfortunately, mixed. It is a fine line she must walk between the grandeur of religious language and the earthiness of folk traditions, and she often errs on one side or the other. As a result, her poetry can sound stilted at times. "Light enters you through every pore/dissolves you into itself," she writes in "Our Lady of the Annunciation." The imagery is too grand and abstract to touch the reader on a visceral level and too removed from the dirty realities of desert life to sound authentic.

At other times, Mora becomes too engrossed in writing in a folk tradition and falls into the trap of sentimentality and kitsch. "Corn and trees glow in the sunset, grace manifest May our work enrich the earth. Hear our request/This night and at our death, en paz may we rest," she writes in "Saint Isidore the Farmer." Such passages lose the transcendent quality that should mark them as religious poetry. They are too focused on this earth. More often than not, though, Mora manages to find the right balance between religion and reality, between the glory of the next life and the hardships of this one. When she does find this balance, Mora's words achieve a beauty that matches and often even surpasses that seen in the religious art on which she bases every poem. In "The Guardian Angels" she writes "In these hills,/the houses of glowing adobe/like rounded loaves,/like sliding but also rising,/the clear gold of wild grasses,/of swirling pollen,/of frog eyes humming." It is in passages like this that the intensity of the faith Mora is exploring, the power of the religion she addresses, and the sincerity of the people for whom she speaks combine into beautiful poetry.

Though she is often mediocre, at her best Mora is able to find the tone she is seeking in Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints. She gives voice to the New Mexican religious tradition. And at points, that voice becomes as transcendent as the spirituality which it seeks to represent.