Villancicos from Mexico City for the Virgin of Guadalupe

Early Music ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. E. Davies
2016 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-210
Author(s):  
Robert Weis

As Agent 15 of the Mexico City judicial police made his way home for lunch on a day early in December 1926, he saw a balloon floating in the breeze. He rushed to the rooftop observatorio of his apartment building, where he spotted a girl around 14 years old, wearing a lilac-colored dress, standing on a nearby roof and holding a string. Certain that the balloon had been released from this location, he ran down the stairs, and, while crossing the street, looked up to see yet another balloon. Balloons had been drifting through the sky since early morning, so many and from so many directions that police struggled to find where they were coming from. When the balloons popped, flyers came tumbling down, urging Catholics to engage in peaceful protest against government anticlericalism by adorning their houses with yellow and white stripes in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe on her upcoming feast day, December 12. Accompanied by a beat policeman, Agent 15 approached two men in the building where he had seen the girl with the string, surmising that they had aided the launch. Although a search yielded nothing more incriminating than a stick with four strings, he arrested the men. He and other balloon-chasing police officers were obeying specific orders in hunting down the perpetrators that day, but in a broader sense they had become enforcers of laws introduced in the 1917 constitution that sharply restricted the scope of religious expression and observation in public.


Author(s):  
Charlene Villaseñor Black

According to believers, the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared in 1531 to recent indigenous convert Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac, north of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, an area in the environs of Mexico City. The series of apparitions culminated with the miraculous appearance of her image imprinted on his native cloak, or tilma. This painting, housed in the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the Villa de Guadalupe in northern Mexico City, has been venerated from the 16th century. The Virgin of Guadalupe is considered the patroness of Mexico, and special protector of its native and mestizo populations. She is perhaps the best-known symbol of Mexico, and her image is very common in the fine and popular arts. She has played a number of roles over the centuries—as object of religious devotion, emblem of national pride, symbol of peace and justice, and feminist icon. Similarly, her image has transformed over time, from the original sacred icon of 1531 to controversial contemporary images from the 1970s. Her image is also frequent in the United States, where 20th- and 21st century Chicana/o (Mexican American) artists represent her in community murals, prints, photographs, sculptures, and paintings. Chicana (Mexican American) women artists have transformed her into a feminist icon, generating controversy and provoking censorship in both the United States and Mexico. Held sacred by many Mexican, Chicana/o, and Latina/o Catholics, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe has never been neutral, but instead, represents the mutability and political potential of Catholic sacred imagery.


2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 487-514
Author(s):  
Kirstin Noreen

Devotion to the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Los Angeles has a complex and multifaceted history. This article will discuss the initial celebrations of Our Lady of Guadalupe, beginning with a procession in 1928 and developing with increasing popularity in the 1930s. By 1941, the Virgin of Guadalupe had become an important political and religious symbol for the archbishop of Los Angeles, John J. Cantwell, who conducted a pilgrimage to Mexico City, during which he reconfirmed the significance of the Guadalupe image for the Los Angeles Catholic community. In commemoration of Archbishop Cantwell's historic visit, a fragment of thetilma, the cloak on which the Virgin of Guadalupe representation had appeared, was offered to Los Angeles. As the only known piece of thetilmacurrently found outside of Mexico City, this relic has great devotional significance. As this article will show, thetilmarelic disappeared into relative obscurity following its arrival in Los Angeles, only to become a renewed focus of devotion over sixty years later, in 2003. This article will conclude with the reasons behind the relic's revival through a discussion of Juan Diego and his canonization.


Author(s):  
Paul Ramírez

From 1736 to 1739 an outbreak of matlazahuatl, likely typhus, ravaged the Valley of Mexico. In Mexico City, public responses in the form of hospital care, processions, and numerous devotional acts were documented by Cayetano Cabrera y Quintero, an eyewitness and promoter of the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His plague chronicle provides a point of departure for a deeper history of the dramaturgy of epidemic outbreaks, in which public pageantry and appeals to beloved saints transformed cities and towns into thoroughfares of saints and devotees. This chapter examines how these performances were both sponsored by corporate bodies and solicited by laypeople well into the eighteenth century, when administrators aggressively pursued sanitation and hygiene campaigns alongside divine succor.


2015 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-606
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Owens

In 1620, almost a hundred years after the Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have appeared to Juan Diego on the Hill of Tepeyac, a small group of Spanish nuns paid a visit to the chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Like many others before and after them they stopped at the shrine on their way to Mexico City. The Franciscan nuns were traveling from Toledo to Manila and were about to cross Mexico to board the yearly Manila Galleon at the port of Acapulco.


2005 ◽  
Vol 61 (04) ◽  
pp. 571-610
Author(s):  
Jeanette Favrot Peterson

It was in 1531 that, according to the apparition legend first recorded over a hundred years later in 1648, Juan Diego’s visionary experience of the Virgin of Guadalupe was miraculously mapped onto his tilma (tilmatli in Nahuatl) or woven cloak. This painted cloth, hereafter referred to as the tilma image, is said to be the same relic venerated today in the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City (fig. 1). However, no sacred image is invented from whole cloth, to use a highly appropriate metaphor here, and the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe is no exception. Moreover, its very materiality makes it vulnerable to the passage of time, the laws of physics and human intervention. As an object of human craft produced post-Conquest, it has a traceable genealogy within the combustible mix of art modes, mixed media and theological tracts found circulating in early colonial New Spain.


2005 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 571-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanette Favrot Peterson

It was in 1531 that, according to the apparition legend first recorded over a hundred years later in 1648, Juan Diego’s visionary experience of the Virgin of Guadalupe was miraculously mapped onto his tilma (tilmatli in Nahuatl) or woven cloak. This painted cloth, hereafter referred to as the tilma image, is said to be the same relic venerated today in the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City (fig. 1). However, no sacred image is invented from whole cloth, to use a highly appropriate metaphor here, and the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe is no exception. Moreover, its very materiality makes it vulnerable to the passage of time, the laws of physics and human intervention. As an object of human craft produced post-Conquest, it has a traceable genealogy within the combustible mix of art modes, mixed media and theological tracts found circulating in early colonial New Spain.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Alejo

There is a pressing need to extend our thinking about diplomacy beyond state-centric perspectives, as in the name of sovereignty and national interests, people on move are confronting virtual, symbolic and/or material walls and frames of policies inhibiting their free movement. My point of departure is to explore migrant activism and global politics through the transformation of diplomacy in a globalised world. Developing an interdisciplinary dialogue between new diplomacy and sociology, I evidence the emergence of global sociopolitical formations created through civic bi-nationality organisations. Focusing on the agent in interaction with structures, I present a theoretical framework and strategy for analysing the practices of migrant diplomacies as an expression of contemporary politics. A case study from North America regarding returned families in Mexico City provides evidence of how these alternative diplomacies are operating.


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