Trail of Miracles

Trail of Miracles: Stories from a Pilgrimage in Northeast Brazil by Candace Slater offers a vivid literary ethnography of devotion, memory, and community in Juazeiro do Norte, a city renowned for its annual pilgrimage honoring Padre Cícero Romão Batista. Unlike most Catholic pilgrimages, Juazeiro draws more than a million people each year in honor of a priest never canonized as a saint. Through the miracle stories told by residents and pilgrims, Slater reveals how Padre Cícero’s figure continues to embody poverty, resilience, and traditional values in Northeast Brazil—while also traveling south with migrants seeking work in Brazil’s industrial centers. These narratives are not only testimonies of faith but also documents of social survival, enmeshed in hierarchies of patronage and infused with centuries-old hagiographic traditions.

Slater approaches her subject as both listener and writer, foregrounding her methods and the challenges of ethnography. Drawing on over 150 hours of recorded stories from more than 700 individuals, she examines how residents privatize Padre Cícero’s miracles as personal memories while pilgrims fashion them into communal “lives” that serve as master legends. In doing so, she highlights how oral traditions adapt across contexts, sustaining belief and identity amid poverty and rapid change. Trail of Miracles is at once a work of folklore, anthropology, and literary analysis, offering an unparalleled window into the symbolic power of Padre Cícero for millions of Brazilians. It illuminates the ways in which storytelling sustains faith, negotiates hardship, and binds individuals into a shared, if contested, sense of belonging.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.