Cachitas Streets is a sophisticated text that is part ethnography and part history of religious practices in the streets of Cuba. Jalane D. Schmidts work sheds light on the racial and political history of devotion to the Marian Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, specifically in the Oriente region of Cuba. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, this text captures the subtlety and complexity of race and racialization inherent in religious devotion in Cuba. The racialized history presented in Cachitas Streets is at once a construction of Mary, who is also named the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre (also affectionately called La Cachita), her likeness captured in statues, and her devotees.Schmidt desires to redeem the fragments by situating contemporary field work data within the broader historical and cultural context (5). By redeeming the fragments, Schmidt avers that hers is an account made up of ethnographic interviews, church archives, popular magazines, and cartoons that all fall along different positions in relation to the others. All of these fragments, however, coalesce around the street, the physical roads by which Cubans (and La Virgen) travel from destination to destination. The streets, Schmidt argues, are the quintessential expression of Cubanía, Cubanness. Therefore, beginning in 1612 with La Virgens initial theophany and moving forward chronologically to contemporaneous events, Schmidt details the transformative history through street processions and public performances. She tells the story of the transformation of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, a dark-skinned religious figure for the indigenous and enslaved people of the island, into a light-skinned woman and national symbol of Cubanía. Unlike other religious ethnohistories of Cuba that might bypass contentious questions of race, Schmidt instead uses this fraught place to ground her work.Devotion to La Virgen began in the least likely of places and with the least likely of people. According to Schmidt, it is essential that the reader keep in mind the exceptional nature of La Virgens appearance, as it tied her to marginalized people from the very beginning. Cachita was found not in Havana or by clergy but instead by three Indian men, two indigenous men and an enslaved black youth, all of whom are apocryphally named Juan. Thus, in 1612 we have the beginning of a special relationship between marginalized people and La Virgen. However, as Schmidt will detail, Cachitas movement through history and the streets transformed La Virgen from patroness of the oppressed to patroness of the entire island, a reversal of the original epiphany and a symbolic and ideological shift in Cubanía.Schmidt divides the history of Marian devotion into four parts, beginning with the story of the Three Juans, who came across her image in the early seventeenth century. From there, we move quickly through history to the twentieth century, and by the time part I ends, we are at 1931 and the Cuban governments attempts to outlaw African-inspired religious traditions. While black religiosity shifted to being outlawed, La Virgens likeness also shifted. In part II, the Virgin of Charity is officially crowned by the Catholic Church and thus begins her reign as the official patroness of Cuba. The Virgin of Charitys racial and political transformation reaches its zenith through the blancqueamiento (whitening) detailed in part III. As a result of her whitening, the Virgin transformed from the symbol of the poor and oppressed to the symbol of the government and the Cuban Catholic Church. In part IV, we enter the revolutionary period of the 1950s and the Castro-era move to marginalize religious devotion and characterize clergy as having fascist leanings. This section culminates with contemporaneous accounts of Marian devotion as it exists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Through each of these periods, Schmidt shows how Marian devotion changed concomitantly with political and social transformations vis-à-vis public street celebrations. For her, the streets are where the political plays out in Cuba. Herein lies her unique contribution to the study of Marian devotion on the island: the relationship between street processions, religious devotion, and devotees. As La Virgen was moved from one location to another, she transformed, but so did her devotees. This is seen in the general shift of Cachitas devotees from black and indigenous people in Oriente to those who would ostensibly identify as mulattos (denying their own African heritage, of course) in Havana. Extrapolating from her own argument, Schmidt advances a reading of the streets that advocates for a more general principle of relationship between the streets and the political. For example, she briefly mentions other elements of Cuban religiosity such as Carnaval and Santería, though she does not attempt to provide a universal principle and instead focuses on the relationship between Cachita and the streets.Cachitas Streets performs two essential tasks for understanding Caribbean religiosity. First, at a minimum, the text negates the modern, simplistic understanding of Cuba as atheistic and illustrates the complex way that people, despite how they are legislatively categorized, find ways of being religious. This leads us to Schmidts second accomplishment, which is the more specific consideration of marginalization within Cuban religions. She positions us to further consider how Marian devotion among black and indigenous people, who are still marginalized to this day, inherently complicates how we can understand Cuban religions. Religion, particularly in Cuba, is not conceived in a vacuum, and therefore we must pay attention to the racial overtones in practices. Schmidts focus on street performance locates devotion outside of normative structures such as churches or prescribed orthodoxy and instead locates it in lived religious practices. As readers, this means we must consider religious devotion outside the parameters of what is governmentally regulated.The complex situation above is most clearly seen in the coronation events of part II, which took place during the 1936 Eucharistic Congress in Santiago, Cuba. Schmidt argues that this canonical coronation (as opposed to another kind of popular coronation that La Virgen already experienced) theologically functioned to mark an end to popular devotion and the beginning of orthodox devotion. As Cachita processes through the streets to her eventual enshrinement in a church, we encounter the transition from personal devotion to La Virgens national devotion in the Cuban Roman Catholic establishment. This literal movement highlights the juxtaposition between lived religion and legislative religion. Such a shift from El Cobre, a town originally made up of a majority of enslaved Africans, to a more free town such as Santiago itself showcases the demographic and ideological changes that Mary was forced to undergo. This is only reified through the transformation of her likeness before a national audience. Schmidt catalogs the Church and government efforts to whiten the skin of her statues that would be undertaken throughout the island.One final note as we consider Schmidts important contribution to critical race theory and religion in this text: instead of using dated and ultimately pejorative language of African-based or African-derived, Schmidt purposefully uses African-inspired throughout to denote an authentic Africanity that does not need geographic proximity, which stands as a helpful reminder of the African inheritance that Caribbean peoples live with today. However, this inheritance gets briefly mentioned and mostly bypassed with regard to religious lives in the pre-Marian encounter. That is, what do we know about the religious milieu of black Cubans at each of these intervals in Schmidts text, and how might African-inspired religious traditions augment how La Virgen was worshipped during each of these periods? It should be said, though, that the complexity of Afro-Caribbean religiosity falls somewhat outside the scope of her specific project on Roman Catholicism in Cuba. However, without a substantive discussion of this complex environment, Schmidts book suffers from an exclusively Catholic perspective, a fault that undermines her own use of African-inspired.As an ethnohistory of practice, Cachitas Streets is an impressive archive of religious devotion that successfully weaves together disparate academic fields. Given all of the fragments that Schmidt brings together, this text is so much more than a religious history. Ambitious and courageous, Jalane D. Schmidt presents a little-known history of religious devotion with all of its complexity. Unique in not only its contributions to the fields of history, political science, ethnography, and religious studies, Cachitas Streets marks the beginning of unique opportunities to explore the implications in other parts of black Atlantic studies broadly and Cuban studies in particular.