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Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries

2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-82-2-357

1527-1900

William B. Taylor,

Early Modern Women Writers

There is no closure to mysteries, only another story, another translation —Greg Dening Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe remains an elusive subject, especially for the early colonial period. Little has been established with much certainty about the nature and scope of the devotion during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There just is not much to go on. And the four seventeenth-century Guadalupan hagiographers—Miguel Sánchez, Luis Lasso de la Vega, Luis Becerra Tanco, and Francisco de Florencia—whose ready-made narratives are cited over and over are, by themselves, of limited use for a history of faith in the Virgin Mary through this image. Nevertheless, few Latin American traditions have attracted more interest across classes and places, whether in scholarly, devotional, or polemical ways. The interest seems inexhaustible, and with good reason. This image of the Virgin Mary, widely believed and officially recognized to have occurred miraculously in association with Marian apparitions to humble Indian Juan Diego near Mexico City in 1531, is so closely connected with Mexico as “imagined community” that the origins and development of Guadalupan devotion go to the heart of Mexican patriotism, belief, and politics of identity.Now David Brading, the dean of foreign students of Mexican history, takes aim at the subject from an intellectual history vantage point reminiscent of his celebrated book about creole nationalism in Spanish America, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (1991). Observing in the preface that “in almost every generation since the middle years of the seventeenth century something of note or interest had been written about the Virgin of Tepeyac” (p. xv), Brading proceeds to discuss notable publications and debates across the centuries in thematic chapters that manage to convey a sense both of generations and continuity. As usual, he has read his published primary sources with care and sympathy, and presents them, their historical moments, and the debates in which they were situated in richly contextualized ways.Mexican Phoenix’s main contributions to a greater understanding of guadalupanismo are achieved by (1) ranging widely in time (giving considerable attention to the colonial period, but carrying the story up to the sad disgrace of the basilica’s abbot, Guillermo Schulenberg, in 1996 for doubting the historical Juan Diego and, by extension, the historicity of the apparition story as first published in Miguel Sanchez’s Imagen de la Virgen María in 1648), and (2) examining published sermons and devotional histories from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries for a theology of Marian devotion and guadalupanismo.The fruits of Mexican Phoenix’s telescopic historical vision and its key works/generational approach are many, especially for the nineteenth century. Brading’s treatment of a new burst of devotion and controversy in the 1880s and 1890s as religion returned to public life under Porfirio Díaz is especially illuminating. Joaquín García Icazbalceta’s famous 1883 Letter to Archbishop Labastida y Dávalos is paired with Fortino Vera’s copious defense during the 1890s of the apparition narrative’s historicity for a memorable view of the bitter apparitionist-“antiapparitionist” polemics of the time. The interpretations of both protagonists now depended on historical records (or their absence) as the “measure of truth about the origins of the Guadalupe tradition” (p. 287). Set next to a chapter on the extraordinarily popular official coronation of our Lady of Guadalupe in 1895, the hardening and deepening of the apparitionist position among prelates and laity becomes clear.Looking back from 1990s, Brading concludes that “In effect, the current controversy which surrounds the image derives from a nineteenth-century concern with ‘historicity’ and is animated on both sides of the debate by a latter-day positivism which impels apparitionists to insist on ‘the Guadalupan Fact,’ and their opponents to hint at forgery and condemn error” (p. 361).Threading through this story are some memorable characters and writers who cared deeply about ideas, faith, and the power of the written word, and who are presented as avatars of this history and makers or victims of it. There are heroes who stumble—García Icazbalceta and Abbot Schulenberg among them—and two who emerge unscathed: Francisco de la Maza (the modern scholar who led the way into new sources and new ways of imagining the history of guadalupanismo) and Miguel Sánchez as theologian.Brading is not the first scholar to use early sermons. In addition to the suggestive contributions of Francisco de la Maza and Stafford Poole, Francisco Raymond Schulte put them to sustained use in “A Mexican Spirituality of Divine Election for a Mission: Its Sources in Published Guadalupan Sermons, 1661–1821” (Ph.D. diss., Gregorian University, Rome, 1994), as has Carlos Herrejón Peredo in his 1997 doctoral dissertation and several fine articles. But Brading’s contribution is fundamental, both in placing the Guadalupan tradition within a history of Catholic doctrine of miraculous Marian images, and in his emphasis on Miguel Sánchez as the source of a theological rationale for the tradition that later authors and sermonizers would follow and elaborate. His discussion of the scriptural character of Sánchez’s apparition narrative and his insight that Sánchez’s “primary purpose was theological and that historical facts were of little concern to him” (p. 367) makes the tradition Sánchez shaped intelligible in a new way. Sánchez was reaching for a higher truth than historical fact.This enthusiasm for Miguel Sánchez’s place in the Guadalupan tradition and a theological explanation of the power of Marian images has a price. Brading is too quick to assume that a Catholic theology of images and devotion in Mexico has been largely confined to the Virgin Mary and that hagiographers, polemicists, and public figures can stand for the tradition. He recognizes that there is more to a theology and history of miraculous images in Mexico that the Virgin of Guadalupe— “there are a select number of images, mainly, but not invariably of the Virgin, which attract pilgrims” (p. 365)—but does not enter this larger field with more than a passing nod in the direction of our Lady of Los Remedios at Naucalpan, the Christ of Chalma, the Cristo Renovado of Ixmiquilpan (in the Carmelite convent church in Mexico City), and our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos. Using only the Guadalupan literature to highlight a theological position that emphasizes Mary (over Christ) as equivalent to the Eucharist, and has God reserving the conversion of the New World to Mary, glides past more than two hundred translocal shrines dedicated to miraculous images (both in the late colonial period and today) with a substantial documentation of their own, more than forty per cent of them images of Christ.Do the published sermons, devotional histories, and apparition polemics of intellectuals and church leaders in Mexico City tell us much about the history of devotion to our Lady of Guadalupe and imagined community in Mexico? The opening and closing pages of Mexican Phoenix suggest that they do. The publication of Sánchez’s book is taken to signal “the sudden efflorescence” of the tradition and popular devotion (p. 11). Certainly Sánchez’s book is the first in a series of publications that center on apparition stories set in 1531 and signal active promotion of the shrine, but is this equivalent to a sudden efflorescence of devotion? Where? For whom? What was understood by devotees? How might this larger claim be established? How might theology and popular devotion be more closely connected for a history of the tradition that crosses social groups and regions? One promising entry has been made by art historian Jaime Cuadriello in his iconographical studies of the vast production of Guadalupan prints, paintings, and statues that would have been seen and consumed far beyond church offices and corridors of elite power in the capital. Mexican Phoenix includes nearly 30 reproductions of printed and painted images of the Virgin of Guadalupe produced since the seventeenth century, but few are put to more than ornamental use.