In this season of diverse festivities, we need to find opportunities to find incarnations of the Divine that give us hope. On Saturday, celebrations in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe will be held in Catholic parishes throughout the U.S. Devotees of Guadalupe will wake up at 4 or 5 a.m. that day, warmly dressed and with a hot beverage in hand, to help bring the "mañanitas" to La Virgen at dawn, delight her with songs, and watch Mexican traditional dances being performed in her honor. My church is never more packed than on December 12 - the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe - except maybe on Christmas or Easter. For many Catholics like myself, the feast day of Our Guadalupe is one of our most cherished traditions that has - along with Mary herself - crossed the border with us.
Non-Catholics and non-Mexican Catholics living in cities or metropolitan areas with a substantial Mexican/Mexican American population such as Los Angeles may be vaguely familiar with Our Lady of Guadalupe, or at the very least, may have seen the iconic image on storefronts and building walls, clothing, and even tattooed on the bodies of her devotees. You may have even seen her image held up in banners at boycotts and gatherings of the farm workers' movement of the 1960s or at more recent pro-immigrant rallies and protests.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, more than any other icon in Mexican culture, has thoroughly permeated public space because she has transcended religion to become a political banner behind which revolutions and social justice movements have rallied and come together. To get a very simplistic glimpse into why this is true, one need only to look at her face. You see, Our Lady of Guadalupe is distinctly and unequivocally indigenous.
The official story describes Mary the mother of Jesus as having appeared to a poor, indigenous man named Juan Diego. Our Lady speaks in his native tongue, as a brown-skinned indigenous lady herself, asking him to deliver her message to the bishop. It is a story of humility, faith, and miracles that has been instrumental in shaping the identity of Mexico and its people. Perhaps the story was fabricated in order to more easily convert the native population to Catholicism by giving them a Divine image that looked and sounded like them. Or maybe Our Lady of Guadalupe is really the Aztec goddess Tonantzin disguised as a Catholic saint to allow devotees to openly continue their worship of her!
Regardless of which is true, this is what is important to Guadalupe's devotees: the Divine did not just take the "indigenous" (the "other") as part of itself; the indigenous took the Divine as its own to assert their right to life and dignity in the face of an oppressive power. In this way, Our Lady of Guadalupe becomes more of a political symbol rather than a Catholic one, for it proclaims the inherent worth of indigenous communities. In Our Lady of Guadalupe is a reflection of the Divine that is not neutral to race or to the oppression of marginalized groups. The Divine, therefore, does not exist outside our lived reality and outside of race, but within it. Even as the image of Our Lady imperfectly incorporates the complexity of Mexican heritage (especially by ignoring Afro-Mexican persons and history), it is still a useful symbol of seeing the Divine in and among the oppressed.
On Saturday, if accessible to you, I invite you to attend one of these celebrations in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In light of the political climate in which we currently live, it is helpful and increasingly important to imagine the Divine within the oppressed and suffering, and not in some abstract realm outside of all that is happening.
In faith,
Paulina Piña Garcia
PCU Administrator