“’Piety is not something you talk about, it is something you do,’ writes Elaine Peña towards the beginning of this excellent book—itself a wonderful doing. Peña participates actively as an engaged scholar. This is necessary reading for scholars of religion, performance studies, Latino/a Studies, and popular culture.” —Diana Taylor, author of The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas “Peña provides a major contribution to our understanding of sacred space, of the world of contemporary Mexican migrants, and of the vibrant ways in which Catholics honor the Virgin of Guadalupe. This is an important book about a transnational devotion, a book that powerfully and sympathetically explores how devotees perform piety in often surprising ways.” —Stephen Pitti, author of The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race and Mexican Americans “Performing Piety offers a textured and empathetic approach to religion in practice. Peña is a shining example of the materialist turn in the study of religion: religion approached not as decontextualized beliefs or free-floating symbolic systems, but as thoroughly embodied practices embedded in everyday life. This book is clearly on par with the work of Robert Orsi, David Hall, Leigh Schmidt and other distinguished scholars of the ‘lived religion’ school.” —Manuel A. Vásquez, author of More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion