By LEONEL MARTINEZLA VOZ DE KERN
It was the pretty lady that got my attention.
I was perhaps three or four years old and fidgeting at Mass with my grandmother. As the story goes, I kept turning around toward the rear of the church and smiling. When my grandma turned to see what was going on, she saw that I was looking at a young girl sitting in the pew behind us. But it wasn’t the young girl I was interested in.
Instead, my attention was riveted to the girl’s hand, where she held a holy card with the image of the pretty lady that caught my eye, the Virgin of Guadalupe.
“Do you want it?” the girl finally asked. I smiled and nodded yes, so the girl gave it to me.
I was a toddler who should have been more interested in building blocks than religion, but my mother tells me I took the holy card and kept it for years.
What is it about the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that fascinates even Latinos like me, who are three and four generations removed from Mexico, where she is said to have miraculously appeared more than 470 years ago?
The fascination runs deep. A statue of Guadalupe watches over Cesar Chavez’s grave in Keene. Her image appears on murals throughout east Bakersfield. She adorns calendars, clocks and T-shirts at barrio stores and is even etched on people’s bodies in tattoos. Virtually every Mexican-American has a relative – male or female and on the U.S. or Mexico side of the border or both – named “Guadalupe.”
My grandmother, although raised Protestant, is buried beneath a grave marker etched with Guadalupe’s image. A wooden image of “La Virgen Morena” stands guard over my bedroom in east Bakersfield. And when I asked a reporter from Mexico City once why, although he claimed to be agnostic, he still revered the Virgin, he responded, “Well, that’s a different story.”
For centuries, the Guadalupe story was communicated primarily through symbols and oral tradition. Every Mexican church has at least one statue of La Virgen as do most homes. Like other Mexican-Americans, I heard the Guadalupe story frequently as child and believed it wholeheartedly, like everything else my parents told me about faith and religion. But when I got to my teens, the story began to fade in importance. It became a cute yarn from long ago and far away that held little meaning for me.
Now 50 years of age, I am a die-hard Guadalupano who see the Guadalupe story as a historical, cultural and spiritual event that holds profound meaning for Mexican-Americans in the United States as well as our relatives south of the border.
But I came to that conclusion gradually. Because the U.S., where I was born, isn’t immersed in the story of Guadalupe like Mexico, I’ve embarked for the last three decades on a journey of rediscovering the symbol and its power for Latinos.
The bare-bones Guadalupe story is this: Between December 9 and 12, 1531, the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to a 57-year-old Aztec Indian named Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin on Tepeyac Hill, a poor area near Mexico City. The Virgin told Diego she wanted a church built on that site, healed his uncle of a disease and left a miraculous image of herself emblazoned on Diego’s cloak. The cloak is displayed at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe to this day, a brown-skinned woman with hands folded as if in prayer and surrounded by golden rays of light.
First, let’s get the obvious question out of the way. Did the Guadalupe story with its apparitions, healings and miraculous image really happen? I believe it did. Various books and other publications that discuss scientific studies of Juan Diego’s cloak – called a “tilma” -- are available for those who want to do their own research.
But I also believe that a more important question is this: What does the Guadalupe story mean?
"But I also believe that a more important question is this: What does the Guadalupe story mean?"
When I was a teen-ager, the stern Augustinian priests at St. Augustine Church in Lamont emphasized the importance of believing the story as a matter of faith without necessarily knowing and appreciating its significance. As a result, it seemed to have little connection to everyday life. To learn its meaning, I had to turn to a man who has made Guadalupe his life’s work.
Theologian and Guadalupe scholar Father Virgil Elizondo is perhaps the premier American expert on the event. In various books, classes and lectures over the years, Elizondo has argued that the Virgin of Guadalupe is more than a pretty picture to be used for personal piety. A closer look at the icon reveals that it symbolizes the unlikely spiritual and ethnic synthesis of Europeans and Indians that occurred after the conquest of Mexico.
“In Latin American Catholicism today, (the Virgin of Guadalupe) is both the feminine aspect of the face and heart of God, which was absent from the Christianity of that period, and the Mother of Jesus in the Americas; the mother of the new man or woman of the Americas,” Elizondo wrote in the Harper Collins Encyclopedia of Catholicism.
The conquest of Mexico was clash between two violent and powerful cultures that saw the world in vastly different ways. Each group had its own language, religion, set of values and mythologies. While the Spanish, for example, were horrified that the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice as part of their religion, the Indians were puzzled that the Spanish would gladly kill not for their deity, but for property and riches.
In the end, the Spanish’s superior technology helped them practically level Aztec civilization, and the Indians were expected to abandon a way of life their ancestors had followed for centuries. In that historical context, the Catholic missionaries’ attempts at religious conversion were doomed to failure, and fail they did.
Until Guadalupe.
In the years after the apparition to Juan Diego, millions of Indians were baptized into the new faith. How did a simple image that appears on the humble cloak of a poor and uneducated Indian change history? Because, Elizondo maintains, it communicated a message of unity and compassion in a language that would have been understood by both the Aztecs and their conquerors.
Interpretations of the various different aspects of the Guadalupe story would fill a library, but here is a brief summary of the most important points as I see them:
• Her physical appearance is both European and Indian. Her brown-skinned face, for example, appears to be a combination of both ethnicities, which would make her mestiza, a person of mixed race. Like most Latinos today.
• Her clothing is European, but many of the related symbols are Indian. Much has been made, for example, of the fact that the Virgin of Guadalupe appears to be pregnant. And tied around her waist is the traditional Aztec symbol of motherhood, a black band. The Spanish-language word for pregnancy, “encinta” – literally “on the band” – reportedly originated with that tradition.
• The Virgin appeared on a mountain that was already known as the dwelling place of the mother goddess Tonantzin and spoke the native language of the Indians. While the Spanish told the Indians that virtually everything about them was inferior, especially their religion, the Virgin spoke to Juan Diego on their holy site and in their language. In fact, one theory has it that the name of “Guadalupe” itself is a corruption of the Aztecs’ language for “She who crushed the serpent’s head.”
• The earliest written account of the Guadalupe story, called the Nican Mopohua, mentions several times that Juan Diego was a macehual, a low-class laborer. Because he would have been considered a nobody, it’s significant that the Virgin of Guadalupe chose to appear to him instead of to someone with wealth and/or political power.
• Despite the Spaniards’ insistence that only they possessed religious truth, and the Indians’ religion was false, the Virgin instructs Juan Diego, an Indian, to convey her message to Bishop Juan de Zumarraga, a Spaniard. This is a complete reversal of the typical approach to evangelization.
"How did a simple image that appears on the humble cloak of a poor and uneducated Indian change history?"
All this may be fun to discuss and debate at parties, but discovering the depth of meaning behind the Guadalupe story eventually prompted me to ask some uncomfortable questions about its ramifications for today.
Who are the macehuales, the nobodies, of modern society? Illegal immigrants? The aging? Farm workers? How are they treated, and what can I do to make things better?
What are the cultural, ethnic and religious clashes occurring right now in my own city? Blacks and Hispanics? Christians and those of other faiths? Latinos and non-Latinos? What can I do to promote acceptance and discussion instead of intolerance and animosity?
In what areas am I so certain that I posses the only truth that I refuse to listen to any truth I might receive from others? Politics? Family life? Religion?
It seems that Guadalupe is just as good at afflicting the comfortable as she is at comforting the afflicted.
Yet the image retains its power.
When my wife and I married 22 years ago at San Clemente Mission in east Bakersfield, we chose to place the traditional bridal bouquet not before another statue of the Virgin Mary, but before a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Many years later, when I delivered a speech on the meaning of Guadalupe, my children dressed in full costume and acted as living representations of La Morenita and Juan Diego. They were only playing roles, of course, but in truth, I see La Virgencita in their brown faces every day.
And now in the chubby face of my 19-month-old granddaughter.
For La Morenita will always hold a special place in the hearts of Latinos, no matter which side of the border they may call home.
And I still gaze every day upon the image of the pretty lady that captivated me as a toddler. My fascination with her has grown stronger every year.
Only now, she is more beautiful than ever.
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