CHAPTER 10 Ignored Virgin or Unaware Women: A Mexican-American Protestant Reflection on the Virgin of Guadalupe

2002 ◽  
pp. 204-216
Author(s):  
Nora O. Lozano-Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Mexican American ◽  
Virgin Of Guadalupe

The Virgin of Guadalupe as an Iconic Image in Mexican Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlene Villaseñor Black
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican American Women ◽  
Virgin Of Guadalupe ◽  
Peace And Justice ◽  
Iconic Image ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
The Hill

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.

Flowers Disguised

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 100-123
Author(s):  
Soo Y. Kang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Women's Issues ◽  
Still Life ◽  
Virgin Of Guadalupe ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Mexican American Woman ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Woman's Voice

Abstract Since the late twentieth century, Latina artists have used Catholic images, such as depictions of altars and the Virgin of Guadalupe, to speak both for themselves and for women’s issues at large. Maria Tomasula seems far from that norm, since she focuses on tightly constructed, dramatic still life, painted in the traditional European illusionistic manner. She reveals, however, Catholic influences and feminist messages in her flower paintings. This article aims to unveil the woman’s voice in the works of still life by Tomasula, as communicated through embedded Catholic symbolism and references. It will examine how her works evoke the home altar tradition as well as images of saints in martyrdom to speak for the Mexican American woman. This article also applies the concept of the abject, as espoused by Kristeva to denote a woman’s realm, to Tomasula’s art. Tomasula’s still lifes thus ultimately delineate a woman’s space and her discrete experience.

Chicana Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette Marie Calafell
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Mexican American Women ◽  
Virgin Of Guadalupe ◽  
The Public ◽  
Educational Rights ◽  
Chicana Studies ◽  
The 1960S

The field of Chicana studies was born out of the experiences of Mexican-American women in the southwestern United States. Chicana leaders, such as Dolores Huerta were central activists in the Chicano civil rights movement in the 1960s, working alongside leaders like Cesar Chavez and cofounding the UFW. Others were involved in social movement activity in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas with activists Reies Tijerina, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles, and José Ángel Gutiérrez. While fighting for labor, political, and educational rights, Chicanas contested the machismo, sexism, and heterosexism that they experienced from Chicanos. Chicanas were urged to perform stereotypical feminine roles or activities, while men served as the public face of the movement. They were disciplined further by the invocation of the virgin/whore dichotomy, based in Catholicism around the Virgin of Guadalupe; and Malintzin Tenépal, Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes’s translator and lover. In addition, Chicanas were encouraged to take a single-axis approach to social justice and keep silent about their concerns in order to highlight the fight against ethnocentrism and racism, which were deemed by male leaders to be of the utmost importance. Similarly, Chicanas who looked for solidarity in the mainstream women’s movement were encouraged to put aside their racial concerns in favor of an agenda that focused solely on their identity as women. Put in the untenable position of lacking a space in which their complex and intersectional experiences were honored, and of being subjected to the virgin/whore dichotomy and its unrealistic expectations, Chicanas needed to create a space of their own. The late 1970s and 1980s saw the birth of Chicano Studies departments in academia, as well as the rise of Chicana studies and Chicana feminism. Chicana studies blossomed through works by artists such as Yolanda Lopez, Judy Baca, Patssi Valdez, and Ester Hernández, and scholarship by Deena J. González, Antonia Castañeda, Angie Chabram, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Sandra Cisneros, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Ana Castillo. The publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color became an important benchmark for Chicana feminist writings, and women of color feminism in general. In addition, Moraga’s Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza were foundational texts in the development of Chicana feminist thought. Moraga’s work (originally published in 1983 and republished in an expanded edition in 2000) addresses her experiences as a queer Chicana born to a White father and Mexican mother, while Anzaldúa’s book (published in 1987) theorizes about the possibility of a mestiza consciousness or borderlands identity. A central theme in Chicana feminist writings is the reinterpretation of Malintzin Tenépal, also referred to as La Malinche, through poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, while Chicana feminist artists have visually reimagined the Virgin of Guadalupe queerly and in their own images as everyday women. Through the reinterpretation of these figures, Chicanas have created possibilities for Chicana identifications that resist the binary virgin/whore dichotomy.

Cisneros, Sandra

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga L. Herrera
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Virgin Of Guadalupe ◽  
Mexican American Family ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
The Social ◽  
La Llorona ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Poetic Prose

Sandra Cisneros is one of the best-known and most influential Chicana authors in American literature. Beginning with her first chapbook publication in 1980, the poetry collection Bad Boys, Cisneros has written and published fiction, poetry, and essays with a distinct Chicana feminist consciousness. Drawing on her experience as an only daughter in a large Mexican American family, Cisneros challenges patriarchal hierarchies in Latino/a culture in her work, as well as those grounded in race, class, and gender in US culture more generally. As part of a larger Chicana feminist intellectual critique of gender roles within Latino/a culture, Cisneros’s fiction and poetry examine the social roles for women in marriage and motherhood and identify the archetypal figures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, La Malinche, and La Llorona as sources of oppression within discourse and practice. Innovative in form and language, her work explores the influence of these figures on the lives of women and imagines new, more liberating possibilities in the recuperation of their agency, self-determination, and independence. Cisneros joins this revisionary work with one of her primary thematic concerns, the Chicana writer’s need to break with cultural expectations in order to establish herself and develop her talents. Her innovations in genre and language, such as the hybrid poetic prose used in The House on Mango Street, demonstrate formally the results of a Chicana feminist resistance to class-inflected literary conventions. From the publication of The House on Mango Street (1984) through the poetry collections My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987) and Loose Woman (1994) and the short story collection Woman Hollering Creek (1991), to the publication of Caramelo or Puro Cuento (2002) and her book of essays, A Home of My Own (2014), Cisneros explores with depth and compassion the struggles of Latina women to break down patriarchal conventions and create for themselves a space for self-expression and creativity.

Art Comes for the Archbishop

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (S1) ◽  
pp. 169-195
Author(s):  
Luz Calvo
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Sandra Cisneros ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Virgin Of Guadalupe ◽  
John Rechy

Abstract Inspired by the Chicana feminist artist Alma López’s Our Lady (1999), this essay explores Chicana cultural and psychic investments in representations of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As an image of the suffering mother, the Virgin of Guadalupe is omnipresent in Mexican-American visual culture. Her image has been refigured by several generations of Chicana feminist artists, including Alma López. Chicana feminist reclaiming of the Virgin, however, has been fraught with controversy. Chicana feminist cultural work—such as the art of Alma López, performances by Selena Quintanilla, and writings by Sandra Cisneros and John Rechy—expand the queer and Chicana identifications and desires, and contest narrow, patriarchal nationalisms. By deploying critical race psychoanalysis and semiotics, we can unpack the libidinal investments in the brown female body, as seen in both in popular investments in protecting the Catholic version of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Chicana feminist reinterpretations.

An evaluation of two primary care interventions for alcohol abuse among Mexican-American patients

Addiction ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 92 (12) ◽  
pp. 1705-1716 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra K. Burge ◽  
Nancy Amodei ◽  
Bernice Elkin ◽  
Selina Catala ◽  
Sylvia Rodriguez Andrew ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Primary Care ◽  
Alcohol Abuse ◽  
Mexican American

Mexican American Psychotherapy: A Mestizo Perspective

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (28) ◽  
Author(s):  
J. N. Valdez ◽  
Andreana Jezzini
Keyword(s):  
Mexican American
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