Abstract

The video is the result of an investigation that sought to account for religious diversity in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City. The collection of information was carried out between 2016 and 2018. By allowing the images to be the protagonists, a visual argument is built, woven with an oral story that explains the three dominant matrices in this neighborhood: Catholicism, in its official version, popular religiosity or angelic devotion; the expansion of yes and the culture of "self-improvement" and alternative therapies; and oriental religious expressions. The documentary shows a territory in transformation, where the landscape of faith touches the traditional boundaries of what is understood as religious.

Keywords: Mexico City, spiritualities, religion, urban religions, visual sociology

faith in images: a visual sociology of la condesa, mexico city

This video is the outcome of a study on religious diversity conducted from 2016-2018 in La Condesa, a Mexico City neighborhood. A visual argument is made through the images as a narrator explains the three dominant spiritualities in this neighborhood: Catholicism, be it institutional, spiritual, or veneration of the saints; the expansion of self, the culture of self-improvement, and alternative therapies; and Eastern religious practices. This documentary sheds light on the transformations of a territory where the landscape of faith is pushing beyond traditional borders of what constitutes religion.

Keywords: religion, Mexico City, visual sociology, urban religions, spiritualities.

This documentary is part of a long-standing research project carried out at the Social Research Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, UNAM).iis-unam), which seeks to explain some religious forms in Mexico City. A couple of decades ago, several studies showed that the country was experiencing an ascending process of religious diversity (De la Torre and Gutierrez, 2007; Hernandez and Rivera, 2009; Odgers, 2011; Masferrer, 2011; Rivera, 2005; Zalpa, 2003), which was also empirically observable in Mexico City (Hernandez, 2007; Gutierrez, 2005; inegi, 2005, 2011). The initial study was carried out in 2007 and its objective was to understand how believers in the Ajusco neighborhood (Coyoacán) constructed their religious meaning. For this purpose, several strategies were established, from participant observation and dozens of in-depth interviews, to a survey and a field diary. However, the particularity was that, in addition to the traditional tools, photography was used as an ally of observation to collect images that later became books, articles and computer media (Suárez, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2017a, 2017b).

With the results of that study, another investigation was undertaken in a sociologically contrasting neighborhood: Hipódromo, Condesa or Hipódromo-Condesa.1 This demarcation has experienced an intense gentrification that gave it lifestyles closer to those of some European capitals. In 2011, based on data from the Social Development Index of Mexico City, it was determined that the profile was of a population between young and adult (65%), salaried (82% "employed personnel"), with a monthly income higher than the average for the capital and with a high percentage of university degrees.2

The interest of the new project that began in 2016 was to continue observing religious expressions with special attention to believers, so field observations, field diary, interviews and discussion with specialists were made.

To put the study in context, some aspects of the religious experience in Mexico City should be briefly explained. In general terms, the capital has undergone a process of differentiation that has been accentuated in recent years. By testing a pattern and trend of behavior in the city - as Alberto Hernández (2007) does - and taking as a basis the general census data from 1990 to 2020, it can be observed that the most important change did not occur at the end of the century, but, above all, during the first decade of the 20th century. xxiWhile between 1990 and 2000, the Catholic population of the capital city was greater than the national average, in 2010 it is equal and remains almost similar for 2020 (two percentage points of distance). If we look at the data broken down by mayor's office -formerly called "delegaciones"-, we see a trend process of a transition from homogeneity to religious differentiation: in 1990, the difference between the most and least Catholic mayor's office was 4.5 percentage points (Cuajimalpa, 94.4%; Miguel Hidalgo, 89.9%), and in 2010, the place was occupied by Magdalena Contreras (86.6%) and Benito Juárez (75.3%), respectively, but the distance was 11.3 percentage points, which is endorsed in 2020 between Magdalena Contreras and Cuauhtémoc.

The statistical data show two poles: on the one hand, the more Catholic municipalities which, in recent years, have a less accelerated behavior in their variation and whose percentages of Catholic population are high; and, on the other hand, the municipalities with lower percentages of Catholicism and which allow for other religious options. In sum, we are witnessing a qualitative change in terms of distance, territorial differentiation and religious diversification in the city. The Condesa neighborhood in the Cuauhtémoc district is at the center of this process, but with its own characteristics.

This documentary recovers strictly the visual experience and some complementary accounts from the field diary. The starting point is the question about the religious landscape in the colony, the place of religious images in the public life of the colony and how the religious is expressed in the public space. These aspects will be addressed from three analytical pillars that, although not widely developed, support the reflection: the image and the sacred (Lavaud, 1999; Belting, 2009; particularly for Latin America the text by Gruzinski, 2006), religion and its expressions in the urban (Abbruzzese, 1999; Hervieu-Léger, 2002; Garbin and Strhan, 2017), and visual socioanthropology, an axis that deserves to be explained in greater detail.

Visual sociology aims to build knowledge having as its main basis the image (Harper, 2012; Becker, 1974, Bourdieu, 2003; Williams, 2015; Banks, 2001; Suárez, 2008). For several decades now, different voices have striven to give photography not a complementary role, but a leading role as a source of meaning and an explanatory argument. The experiences are broad, diverse and have taken shape according to local academic contexts. The Visual Sociology Association, founded in 1981 and responsible for the journal Visual Studies (Ortiz, 2017: 44; Köppen, 2005), was one of the nuclei of reflection, as well as the thematic group Visual Sociology of the International Sociological Association, created in 2009. In France, Pierre Bourdieu's works were very important, from the collective study on the social use of the photograph -published in Spanish in 1979- or his famous and later volume that recovers his shots in Algeria in the 1960s and curiously published for the first time in 2003. The provocative film Chronicle of a summer by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch hit the screens in 1961 and marked a line in the work with the image. The same can be said of the initiative of Marc Augé who, between the eighties and nineties, promoted a study on religious rites in different countries of Africa and Latin America with the particularity that, from the immense visual material collected, several videos were made and broadcast on open television (Augé, Colleyn, Crippel, Dozon, 2019). Other younger researchers have had very suggestive initiatives; for example, the visual "projects" of sociologist and photographer Camilo Leon-Quijano,3 and particularly his book La cité. A photographic anthropology (2023), or Roger Canals' articles and films (2018a, 2018b), particularly his videos on Maria Lionza.4

In Mexico, this line of research has also had multiple faces that it would be useless to mention here. in extenso. Suffice it to recall works such as Luis Ramirez's work on village photographers in Michoacan (2002, 2003), John Mraz's various studies on history and photography (2005, 2014; Mauad and Mraz, 2015), or Antonio Zirion's visual documents - for example, Voices of the Warrior- (2004). In addition, institutional initiatives such as the creation of the Audiovisual Laboratory for Social Research (lais) of the Mora Institute in 2002, the Laboratory of Visual Anthropology of the Institute of Anthropological Research of the University of Mexico (Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas de la Universidad de la unam or the Multimedia Laboratory for Social Research of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the University of California, Berkeley, USA. unamamong others, which have generated a dynamism in the field and have promoted several publications, videos and visual essays.

It is in this climate and intellectual sensibility of this unconventional work that the images will build a particular problematic and will be the ones that will try to offer an explanation. The words are present -a discreet companion-, the concepts -support of the narrative and the search-, but hidden behind the shots. As has been said, taking up again what was learned in the previous study of the Ajusco neighborhood, the research strategy of the project was to photographically record everything that indicated some kind of religious evocation. Thus, with camera in hand in each tour, interview or participation in an event, photography accompanied and, many times, guided the interpretation and analysis.

The result of the fieldwork was vast: two thousand photographs portraying religious diversity and its different expressions. In order to make this documentary, a double exercise was carried out: on the one hand, to select the most important axes and themes and, on the other hand, to elaborate a visual story that would present the images in an argumentative narrative.

With this intention, the documentary is divided into eight parts. First, the lifestyles of a colony that strives to demonstrate its own urbanity in everyday life are presented. Then other images of the sacred that go beyond what is normally understood as religious are shown. This is followed by an exploration of the House of Angels and its various details. This is followed by a section that dissects two expressions of formal Catholicism, and then the place of popular religiosity is shown. In the sixth episode, a Hindu festival is presented to then introduce the inner courtyards of a Catholic family in the neighborhood (with information from the experience published in Suárez, 2019). It concludes with a reflection on the impact of the earthquake of September 19, 2017, which hit the neighborhood hard and which occurred while the fieldwork was being conducted.

As can be seen in the video, the narrative option was to combine text with image. The challenge is to resort to two expressive supports that are not subordinate to each other, in constant dialogue, but not braided in an explicit and fixed reference in each episode. Thus, the viewer will find that in some moments there is a clear concordance between what is shown and what is narrated, while in others a single static photo is accompanied by the reading, or even the relative discordance between the visual and the read. Unlike other documentaries whose direct correlation -image and text- runs through the entire document, here we sought a different strategy in the narrative that, depending on the case, privileges multiple articulation options.

La Condesa shows a degree of religious diversity inscribed in the global context of mutation and transformation of religion in Mexico. There are three main matrices of belief that emerge from the images. The first has to do with Catholicism expressed in four faces. The second matrix of beliefs observed in the Condesa refers to the offer of expansion and restitution of the self that administers both alternative medicines -Bach Flowers and others- and psychologically based therapies -the techniques of "mind control" or the "coach"-. The third matrix focuses on Eastern religions.

It should be emphasized that the nature of this work is not encyclopedic; it does not pretend to reflect the totality of the religious expressions of the colony. For the same reason, there are several faith orientations, of greater or lesser number and rootedness, which are not present. For example, there are Jewish and Islamic centers, Pentecostal churches, Eastern temples, which are very dynamic and bring together various believers. The inclusion or not of one or another religious enterprise did not respond to the criterion of exhaustiveness or exposure of all the actors that make up the religious field (as was done, for example, in the research in the Ajusco neighborhood already mentioned). Here, the ethnographic idea of the visual experience prevailed, which places the researcher as a "witness" of what happened in his fieldwork, which is collected in the final document. Thus, there is a notorious disparity: for example, there is a deep incursion in a Catholic home, which is not repeated in any of the other options; or there is an abundance of Hindu festivities and not in any Pentecostal celebration. The reason is that what is reflected in the text is the field experience, with what happened at that time, as a privileged moment of observation and construction of knowledge. For this reason, what happened in the 2017 earthquake is presented in detail: the event occurred in the midst of field research and, although in principle it has nothing to do with religion itself, it brought to light important dynamics that were worth exposing. Beyond the unjustified absences and detailed presences, the underlying thesis is that what was collected in a time and space reflects the socio-religious dynamics of the place.

In the Condesa, a certain religious diversity is observed, but it is different from that recorded in the Ajusco neighborhood -the study that precedes this one-. While in that colony popular religiosity was the basis of most of the possible combinations, here that place is occupied by flexible Catholicism in several of its expressions. Likewise, the presence of oriental religiosity is greater in the Condesa, devotions to unofficial popular saints are not seen, and the icons of traditional Mexican culture appear less in chapels, virgins, saints and pilgrimages, and more through folklore, whether in its commercial version -in expensive hotels and restaurants- or in its more informal expression -through certain graffiti-. Aesthetic and religious manifestations in Ajusco assumed other forms -such as rockets, music, festivities, the burning of the bull, etc.- that are unthinkable here in a deeply gentrified urban environment.

The above, read in a more abstract code, leads us to wonder about the nature of what is understood by religion in this economic and socio-cultural context, a concern that is at the heart of the sociology of contemporary religion (Gutiérrez, 2010; Parker, 2011 and 2021; Algranti and Setton, 2021). Everything indicates that the sacred expressed in this type of neighborhoods overflowed its traditional containers and icons and is now perceived even in food stores, gyms, mind control centers or image stores, which undoubtedly represents a conceptual challenge.

Finally, a reflection on the relevance of audiovisuals in the social sciences. As I pointed out at the beginning, the use of the image in research comes from afar and offers multiple options, from a collaborative agreement with specialists to "translate" the scientific product into visual material, as is the case of Verónica Roldán's video on the devotion to the Lord of Miracles in Rome, which was carried out in dialogue with professional film directors (Roldán, 2018), to Eduardo González's work on the evangelical male rehabilitation centers in Tijuana, which was elaborated by himself in interaction with the study actors (González, 2019). Thus, there are different possible combinations. In the present writing, both the images and the texts were the responsibility of the author, with his limitations and successes. Undoubtedly, a collaborative and interdisciplinary work would have opened more clues and probably achieved other results.

The main lesson is that considering photography as an instrument from the beginning of the research process allows, as with any methodological strategy, to construct the object in a certain way. If one follows Ferdinand de Saussure's maxim that the point of view creates the object, the visual constructs a particular type of knowledge, thus becoming a distinct epistemological position. More generally, all indications are that this is a time when the nature of social experience demands other narrative experiments (Trejo and Waldman, 2018; Jablonka, 2016). This paper aims to contribute to that concern.

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Filmography

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Hugo Jose Suarez D. in Sociology from the Catholic University of Louvain. D. in Sociology from the Catholic University of Louvain. unam. Member of the National System of Researchers level 3. Full member of the Bolivian Academy of Language. Visiting Professor for the Alfonso Reyes Chair at the Institute for Advanced Latin American Studies (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 University, 2018). Visiting Professor at the Jacques Leclercq Chair (Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, 2018). Visiting researcher at the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 University (2019-2020). Editor of the journal Culture and Social Representationss. Latest books: Guadalupanos in Paris (2023), Paris daily (2022), La Paz Newspaper (2022), Bourdieu in Bolivia (2022), La Paz in the whirlwind of progress (2018). He has published several scientific articles in different national and international journals, as well as chapters in academic books. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in several universities in Latin America and Europe. Lines of research: sociology of religion and culture, religious practices in Mexico, visual sociology, qualitative methodology, culture and politics in Bolivia.