Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century by Daniel Ramírez (review)
Michèle Montas, whose husband, Jean Dominique, was assassinated in Haiti in 2000 and who herself suffered through three exiles, takes solace in small victories, such as the trial of a notorious massacre perpetrator, during which memory is, she claims, gradually reconstructed for future generations. Paolo Vignolo, a Colombian architect, participates in a project centered on “the city of the dead,” Bogotá’s Central Cemetery. Vignolo and his colleagues at the National University of Colombia and elsewhere encourage the voices and memories of multiple social groups that identify with and are inspired by the immense disorder of the Central Cemetery, where esteemed historical figures are entombed next to guerrilla commanders and ex-prostitutes. Vignolo is aware that “to perform memory in the middle of an ongoing conflict may be something akin to acting as sorcerer’s apprentice seeking alchemical formulas” with “the risk of biased history of national history that ignore crucial people and episodes.” But he argues that, “in Colombia we have no option. We cannot wait for the end of a never-ending war to develop serious participatory work on memory” (236–237).