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The Virgin of Guadalupe
"You do not have to be Catholic to have a deep reverence for the Virgin. There are many Mexican atheists who would defend her image adamantly." --Cesareo Moreno, Chicago Museum, 1997
According to oral tradition, the Virgin Mary appeared in Mexico in 1531, symbolically showing God's blessing for the Spanish conquest and making an appeal to the native peoples to accept the Christian faith. While they would eventually embrace her image enthusiastically, the process took two centuries. Meanwhile, Spaniards born in Mexico saw her as a Creole version of the virgin their forebears had revered in Spain, the Virgin of Guadalupe. During periodic upheavals in Mexican history, such as the struggle for independence and the Revolution of 1910, Mexicans held her image aloft to stand for the new nation and its ethnic inclusiveness, for Guadalupe was a dark-skinned virgin who could speak Nahuatl.
Today, considerable controversy surrounds her apparition and its meaning. Was it a story made up by priests to get their native parishioners to turn away from a pre-Columbian goddess worshiped on the site where the Virgin of Guadalupe supposedly appeared? Professor Wood takes the stance that the apparition is a matter of faith, impossible to prove or disprove. What is worth exploring in this slide presentation is the way Mexicans and Chicanos have, throughout history, interacted with the Virgin of Guadalupe as a symbol, sometimes radicalizing that representation, in order to extract a more satisfying personal or political meaning from it. In the process, they have also shaped a larger ethnic and national identity that is intrinsically linked to her image.
Presenter Profile: Stephanie Wood, Senior Research Associate, CSWS
 Stephanie Wood Stephanie Wood grew up in Northern California, picking apples and blueberries in the summers, rubbing shoulders with Mexican workers and becoming fascinated with their language and cultures. She comes from a family that greatly admired the Mexican heritage of California, built an adobe home, and traveled regularly south of the border. As an undergraduate, she lived in Mexico City, doing archival research for a senior thesis on indigenous communities' struggles to defend their lands. Her doctoral dissertation continued in this vein, requiring another year's research in Mexico. Now the author of three books and dozens of articles on Mexican history, Wood is developing a multimedia project about five female icons, whose lives spanned five centuries and whose stories help us understand Mexican history today. Wood is also co-directing the Virtual Mesoamerican Archive and the Mapas Projects, two Internet-based works aimed at advancing Mesoamerican Studies and research into pictorial manuscripts from colonial Mexican indigenous town histories.
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