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This chapter, explores the changing heart of Catholic migration while engaging with presences of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Rome. It focuses on Mexican transnational returns of histories and the affective politics of celebrating the Virgin of Guadalupe in Rome, arguing that these transnational Catholic devotions contain or exceed the affect of a nation. Through an ethnographic attention to the forms that this transnational religious celebration has taken within a four-year period, the chapter foregrounds gendered complexities and anxieties that these celebrations unleash as a strengthening of a traditionalist Roman Catholic Church. The chapter argues that a study at the heart of the transnational Roman Catholic Church needs to engage different haunting presences in the political imagination of transnational displacement and re-emplacements. This is also illuminated by a focus on repressed and returned histories, histories that may come back sometimes in symptomatic forms around issues of the nation and its relation to Catholicism.

This chapter examines how female symbols of the divine played out in the violent encounter between the Aztecs and their Spanish conquerors in Mexico in the sixteenth century. Spain sought to repress all the Aztec gods and goddesses in favor of a devotion to the Christian God the Father and his crucified son. Yet the very shock of this meeting and the mixture of the two peoples produced many apparitions of the central female symbol of Spanish Christianity, Mary, most notably in the apparition of Mary as Virgin of Guadalupe. This chapter also explores the extent to which this veneration of Guadalupe represents a syncretism of the Catholic Mary and a pre-Columbian veneration of a Mother Goddess, Tonantzin. It provides a case study of how the Catholic veneration of Mary, with its own roots in ancient Near Eastern goddess worship, was and continues to be a vehicle for the assimilation of goddess worship into Christianity from the conquest period to today.

In late fourteenth and fifteenth-century Castile, Mary continued to be used as a patron of royally-led warfare against Muslims. As Ferdinand of Antequera, regent of Castile, and the so-called Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand II and Isabel, invoked her on the battlefield and converted mosques into her churches, they often modeled themselves on legends about past Marian heroes, such as Ferdinand III. Ferdinand III’s sword, held by his effigy in front of a statue of Mary in Seville’s cathedral-mosque, became a Marian relic that rulers often took with them on campaign against the Muslims of Granada. These monarchs were particularly devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose statue was believed to have been buried in 711 by Visigoths to protect it from the invading Muslims and then unearthed in the era of Christian reconquests. Similar legends gave other Marian statues Visigothic connections and made them into guarantees of Spain’s essential Christianity.

This chapter attempts to unravel the different strands and levels of motivation and interest that were historically brought together into a powerful collective representation. It represents an effort to analyze a national master symbol as a manifold of heterogeneous referents drawn from various traditions of ethnicity, class, and region and combined into a multifunctional unity through intersecting signs. A symbol is encountered that seems to enshrine the major hopes and aspirations of an entire society. The Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint, represents such a master symbol. Cultural forms provide the cultural idiom of behavior and ideal representations through which different groups in a society can pursue and manipulate their different fates within a coordinated framework. The Guadalupe symbol links together family, politics, and religion; colonial past and independent present; Indian and Mexican. It reflects the salient social relationships of Mexican life and embodies the emotions they generate.

In 1583 the Augustinian order moved the Cristo Aparecido to Mexico City where the image quickly became part of the religious life of urban, baroque Mexico. The belief among the friars and indigenous Christians of Mexico City was that the Cristo Aparecido demonstrated signs of animate life and the image became among the most celebrated sacred images in New Spain. The fame of the image led to an Inquisition hearing that scrutinized the Cristo’s origins. Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in Mexico City the image was not only a baroque adornment, an object of beauty, but also functioned as a “shield of arms,” protecting the poor residents of Mexico City from repeated waves of epidemic disease.

This book is a history of popular devotion to a single, carved image of Christ crucified, called the Cristo Aparecido by devotees, spanning five centuries of Mexican history. From the colonial period observers of Mexican Catholicism have speculated that indigenous suffering under colonialism was the lens through which Mexicans viewed and interpreted the crucifix. This interpretation is reflected in the works of twentieth-century Mexican artists. Throughout the biography of the Cristo, however, the themes of beauty, affection, and protection are more prevalent emotions than pain, grief, or affliction. From the beginning of devotion in the sixteenth century, the faith of the image’s local devotees is at once authentically indigenous and fully Christian.

This chapter examines La Antorcha Guadalupana, or the Guadalupan torch run, organized annually by Asociación Tepeyac, in which a flame is brought overland from the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City. The running of a torch was a pre-Columbian practice for carrying messages. Relay running is described in conquest-era codices as the means by which Moctezuma and his predecessors issued edicts and received news from all over the empire. It was after the conquest of the Mexica empire that the practice became associated specifically with Guadalupan devotion. It is said that when Juan Diego appeared before the bishop to deliver the Virgin of Guadalupe's request for a shrine on the hill at Tepeyac and spilled roses at her feet, torch runners conveyed the news of the miraculous apparition throughout the land.

This chapter examines the celebration of the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose shrine in Mexico City is the focus of one of the largest pilgrimages in the Catholic world, as a window on to the aesthetics of contemporary Roman Catholic Church evangelism. Since Pope John Paul II, and ongoing under Benedict XVII and Francis, the institutional Church’s mass public ritual performances have shown a shift toward a new aesthetic sensibility emphasizing emotion, spectacle, and multiculturalism. Concurrent to this shift has been the gradual emergence within the Church of a new media strategy associated with the institutional Church’s campaign of the “New Evangelization”. Drawing on recent theories of the neo-baroque, the chapter explores how the Virgin of Guadalupe celebration, like those of other saints, is a key arena in the Church’s mediation of its institutional power and presence. Public, mass celebrations of this kind cannot be interpreted as manifestations solely of ‘national culture,’ for they are orchestrated partly from the institutional heart of the Church in Rome. As they are mediated through television and other mass media technologies, they create new religious subjectivities, imaginaries, and publics.

In the 1950s Mexicans moved into Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, which had thirteen mostly Slavic parishes. The ensuing ethnic succession challenges the expected narrative of “white flight.” Catholicism offered common ground: the desire to maintain parish structures explains European Americans’ willingness to live and worship with Mexican newcomers. Mexican Americans and immigrants faced slights in the pews and at parochial schools, but parishes transitioned from exclusively European American ethnic enclaves to shared congregations. After 1960 some priests added Spanish Masses and celebrated the Virgin of Guadalupe’s feast day, opening the way to Mexican religious devotion. Mexican laypeople, bolstered by Cursillo training, worked with those clergy who acknowledged their distinct needs and strengths. Together they made the parishes Mexican.

Histories of the conquest often end with the fall of Tenochtitlan, but the forging of New Spain required decades of continued military invasions in which central Mexicans, in particular, played leading roles. This chapter examines how the Tlaxcalteca and other Native allies petitioned the Spanish Crown for certain rights and privileges, as a form of negotiation within a system of domination and oppression, even sailing across the Atlantic to Spain multiple times to do so in person. Imperial rule and religious conversion could occasionally be challenged or proactively shaped by Mesoamericans, generating hybrid forms of religious belief, public spectacles, art, architecture, diet, and personal adornment, all inscribed on Mexico’s natural and cultural landscape. Such exchanges also crossed the Atlantic, and eventually the Pacific, to begin a truly global world history.

As art historians Clara Bargellini and Pamela Huckins show in Chapter 9, the missions, at least in Serra’s mind, were to be held together not just by violence but by a common devotion to Catholicism that was reinforced by architecture and art. Bargellini and Huckins show that Serra had a clear sense of how he wanted to adorn the missions in the Sierra Gorda and those of Alta California, and he saw architecture and liturgical art as an important tool in the conversion of Indians. Images of the Virgin, Christ’s Passion, and Franciscan saints all took center stage in the churches of the California missions, and Serra favored an older Baroque style over the emerging Neoclassicism.

This book explores the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It then turns to the decades between 1910 and 1950 as the focus of the study on feminism and culture in Latin America. It mainly examines the struggle of women to participate in public culture, and the particularities of their participation, especially in print culture. Feminist analysis of the literary-historical situation of Sor Juana exposes the internal contradictions of the poetic canon and the effect on women's writing of the patriarchal definitions of public and private spheres. The three mythic female figures of Mexican Colonial history—the Virgin of Guadalupe, La Malinche, and Sor Juana—represent modes of inscription of the feminine in the theological and political discourse of colonization. The research in women's journalism has been important to the awareness of the social and historical context of women's roles and women's writing.