Art Comes for the Archbishop

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.

Cisneros, Sandra

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.

Cerrando un programa iconográfico. Las hijas de Job en la Capilla de la Virgen de Guadalupe en las Descalzas Reales de Madrid

ABSTRACT: The Chapel of the Virgin of Guadalupe, located in the Monastery of the Royal Discalced Nuns of Madrid, features a complex iconographical program, with the Virgin and the strong women of the Old Testament as its protagonists. This program was executed by the artist Sebastián Herrera Barnuevo, and designed by one of its resident nuns, Sister Ana Dorotea de Austria. This article attempt to shed light an a rather uncommon feminine typology: that of the daughters of Job, Jemima and Keren-happuch by means of the study of the principal literary sources where they are mentioned. By this means I will offer a complete reading of the Chapel’s iconographical program, by establishing the relationship between the depictions of Día and the Immaculate Conception, and Alcohol and Bathsheba. KEYWORDS Royal Discalced; Strong Women of the Old Testament; Daughters of Job; Immaculate Conception; Bathsheba; Iconography. RESUMEN: La capilla de la Virgen de Guadalupe, situada en el Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales de Madrid, se compone de un complejo programa iconográfico, protagonizado por la Virgen y las mujeres fuertes del Antiguo Testamento, realizado por el artista Sebastián Herrera Barnuevo e ideado por una monja allí residente, Sor Ana Dorotea de Austria. El presente trabajo pretende arrojar luz sobre una tipología femenina poco común, la delas hijas de Job, Día o Mañana y Alcohol, a través de un estudio de las principales fuentes literarias en las que aparecen mencionadas, para con ello ofrecer una lectura total del programa iconográfico de la capilla, al establecerse una relación entre las representaciones de Día y la Inmaculada Concepción y Alcohol y Betsabé.

“A Desora Desperto y vio una Grand Claridat”: The Role of Dreams and Light in the Construction of a Multi-Confessional Audience of the Miracles of the Virgin of Guadalupe

This paper examines the religious proselytizing agenda of the order of Saint Jerome that ruled the Extremaduran sanctuary of the Virgin of Guadalupe since 1389. To this end, I analyze how the Hieronymite’s used literary motifs such as dreams and light in the codex of the Miracles of the Virgin of Guadalupe to create a multi-confessional audience for their collection of miracles. I contend that these motifs were chosen because they were key elements in the construction of a particular image of the Virgin that could appeal to pilgrims of different faiths. Through them, the Hieronymites evoked in the minds of Muslim pilgrims and Christian captives beyond the sea the imagery and rhetoric of Sufi devotional literature and Islamic hagiography, in order to create a vision of the Virgin that was able to compete with the more important Islamic devotional figures: the Prophet, Sufi masters and charismatic saints. Finally, I explore how the possible influence of North African devotional models, such as the Shadhiliyya order or the hagiography of the Tunisian saint, Aisha al-Manubiyya, suggests that the aims of the monastic authors of this Marian miracles collection went far beyond the conversion of Castilian Muslims, aiming at the transformation of the Extremaduran Marian sanctuary of Guadalupe into a Mediterranean devotional center.

The New Philology and the New History of Religion in New Spain

The New Philology and its emphasis on the use of indigenous-language sources for ethnohistorical insights contributes greatly to the study of religion in New Spain. Previous studies primarily employed Spanish-language accounts and reports to understand evangelization efforts. Although providing important insights, histories based solely on Spanish sources are limited in their contributions. The New Philology, however, provides an additional point of view from which to study religion. Indigenous-language texts in Nahuatl (Aztec), Yucatec Maya, Mixtec, Zapotec, and other languages contain a wealth of information on how natives responded, negotiated, resisted, and participated in the spread of Catholicism. The contributions of the New Philology to the study of religion in New Spain, although many, are particularly evident in its re-evaluation of the spiritual conquest; the natives’ role in evangelization; the diversity of religious beliefs, practices, and experiences throughout the colonial period; and through its critical study of the legend surrounding the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Blessed among All Women: The Missionary Virgin, Identity and Territory in Patagonia

After the creation of the Diocese of Viedma (1953), in Northern Patagonia, there took place the dedication to the Missionary Virgin, promoted by the Diocese’s second Bishop, Monsignor Miguel Hesayne (1975–1993). In the midst of the military dictatorship (1976–1983), he appointed her Patron Saint of Río Negro, a province that at the time belonged to the Diocese of Viedma. He followed the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, especially the Puebla Document, which considers the Virgin Mary as the patron saint of the Americas, with the dedication of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Hesayne sought to identify his Diocese with a female figure with indigenous features, like the Virgin of Guadalupe. In conceiving the Missionary Virgin deprived of ornaments and royal attributes, the bishop aimed to reflect his pastoral of the “option for the poor,” thus bringing attention to the marginalized groups and peripheral spaces of the province, and also attributing a new meaning to its social and territorial identity.