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“Popular religious painting” has been examined by scholars primarily for its documentary value, disregarding the aesthetic, ethnographic, and religious value it presents for the study of Novohispanic and Mexican history. The theoretical position of indigenized art as neither fine art nor historic(al) document arrests it to a fixed place as “curious” and “naive” expressions of the past. This panel will re-consider the nomenclature and academic positionality surrounding “popular religious painting,” by recentering the study, collecting, display, and making of ex-votos within the context of the spiritual and creative life of indigeneized communities. We posit that, in ways both unlike and similar to their academic counterparts, these paintings conveyed historical and spiritual narratives, demonstrated popular religious practices, depicted surrounding environments and objects, all while offering a means of healing, closure, and spiritual expansion for those who doubted the power of faith.