Espinoza Meléndez, P. (2024). El más pobre de los obispos. Fray Ramón de Moreno y Castañeda y su destierro del vicariato de la Baja California en 1876. Gobierno del Estado de Baja California Sur. 163 pp.

Abstract

This review examines Pedro Espinoza Meléndez’s El más pobre de los obispos. Fray Ramón de Moreno y Castañeda y su destierro del vicariato de la Baja California en 1876, highlighting its contribution to the study of nineteenth-century Mexican religious history from a biographical and historiographical perspective. It emphasizes the author’s use of a broad documentary and newspaper corpus to reconstruct the trajectory of Fray Ramón Moreno y Castañeda, his conflict with civil and ecclesiastical authorities in Baja California, his exile, and his later incorporation into Catholic networks of power. The review also points to the relevance of categories such as intransigent Catholicism, secularization, and social and spatial mobility for understanding both the life of Moreno y Castañeda and the broader transformations of the Mexican religious field.