"Tonantzin-Guadalupe - A Day with her" Is the collective unpublished work of 50 mexican photographers, who gathered together in 1992 to photograph the events of the "Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe" on December 12th, all over Mexico City. This exhibition contains a brief selection of this work.

IN ORDER TO APPROACH HER, IN HER DAY.
BY JOSE JOAQUIN BLANCO

WE ARE REFERING TO CENTURIES AGO. Something happened in El Tepeyac (a hill in Mexico City) on December, 1555 (there’s any previous historical proof of that fact) if we are to believe in the Chimalpahin records and in the Franciscans, leaded by their provincial, Fray Francisco de Bustamante, who latter would collided in a furious Inquisitorial combat against the Dominican Archbishop, Alonso de Montúfar. Who refuses to accept that the image was miraculously painted by the Virgin herself, God, the angels and the saints, has the option of an early historical testimony which states that in the mentioned furious combat, someone speaks about a painting done by “the indigenous Marcos”.

Two decades after that, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún rushed forth against a resurrection of Pre-Hispanic idolatrous cults, disguised as Marian devotion, that took place in El Tepeyac. Hence, since 1555, there was a great devotion to Virgin Mary, but all her apparitions, their details and their typical Guadalupean characters were still ignored.

The oldest narration of the legend, the Nican Mopohua -which authorship was vaguely attributed to the wise indigenous Juan Valeriano, by Sigüenza y Góngora- was known only until the second half of the next century: no one knew about it before 1648. Its writing date is ignored and some of its scholars place it in the beginning of the 18th Century, though Edmundo O’Gorman in his book Desierto de sombras (Desert of Shadows, 1986) disagree with this and proposes an earlier date: 1556. First, the Nican Mopohua was in the historians Alva Ixtlixóchitl and Sigüenza y Góngora hands and then it was under the Jesuits custody and under the university responsibility. It is believed that it was stolen from the University of Mexico’s Library herewith some other historical documents, by the American troops commanded by General W. Scott, during the United States invasion in 1847. There are three antique Nican Mopohua manuscripts, all of them belong to the New York’s Public Library, but it is ignored if any of them is the original one.

It was only until one century later, when Miguel Sánchez published his book –written in Spanish- Imagen de la Virgen María madre de Dios de Guadalupe, milagrosamente aparecida en la ciudad de México (Image of the Virgin Mary, Guadalupe mother of God, miraculously appeared in Mexico City, 1648), and Luis Lasso de la Vega published his book –written in Náhuatl- Huei Tlamahuizoltica… (1949), that the story or the myth, the ritual, the legends and the Guadalupean world were configured in a very similar way to the one that we know nowadays.

From then on, and until the last stages of the Colony, there wasn’t any other topic –no liberty themes, no racial nor social inequalities, no ethnic vindication, nor political or economical ones- that would surpass the importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe theme in the Novo-Hispanic world. From Boturini, Veytia, Clavijero or Fray Servando’s pens, and later even from liberals and atheists such as Altamirano’s pen, we can read about Her -narrations of scenes, hopes and devotions, very similar to the ones we have at the end of the 20th Century, as the historian, Francisco de la Maza was able to appreciate in his book El guadalupanismo mexicano (The Mexican Guadalupanism, 1953).

However, in the past, there were some Mexican devotees that did not trust the Virgin of El Tepeyace, as a legitimate historic and a Christian belief, they considered it a simple popular devotion without serious theological and historic basis, or an indigenous cult slightly made-up with Catholicism; an Aztec idolatrous survival. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz thought that the Virgin’s story was just a marvelous poetic invention, as we can appreciate in the only Guadalupean mention that appears in her work, when she praises the poet Francisco de Castro in a sonnet. In 1883, Joaquín García Icazbalceta in his Carta del origen de la imagen de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Letter about the Origin of the Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe), denied the historic foundation of the story in an analysis that, one century after, is still valid in Edmundo O’Gorman’s new critic contributions.

NEVERTHELESS, WE ARE TALKING ABOUT SOME MORE CENTURIES, further than the Conquer and the Christianization that is known as México. There are some maternal symbols among the indigenous deities since Teotihuacán’s epoch. There are mothers that are also virgins, fertility totems that are also poor, common men (macehuales) protectors. The Aztecs also have their little mother of the abandoned ones, and people came all over Mesoamerica to thank her for her gifts and to present her their requests, precisely to El Tepeyac.

It was never a secret that the Guadalupana (Virgin of Guadalupe) looked like those virgin deities, and those Aztec helping fertile mothers. The devotees are not afraid of the similarity between the Marian cult, characteristic of Trento’s Council and the Counterreformation, and the ancient idols that protected the antique indigenous. She, the Mother, wanted that similarity –they would say so- to be closer to the indigenous, whipped by the Conquer and their colonization: She chose their language, their skin color and their symbols.

The skeptical ones find in the vast history of the world’s civilizations, similar mythical creations. A nation hit by historic catastrophes, such as the one occurred to the indigenous in the 16th Century –the weapons, the persecution of their culture as a Diabolic thing, the slavery, the hard labor and epidemics-, begins the great heroic feat of survival. It invents, with a prodigious recover of its collective culture, a way of saving the past, the millenary, the persecuted, the forbidden, through a new form, accepted by the new religion. It invents a mother, a goddess, a place in the Universe, a promise of redemption, a hopes and love system: behind the saint, the idol; under the Christian temple, the pyramid; behind the gentleness of the Child Virgin, the radical strength of the antique millenary mothers. Not in vain, during the indigenous oppression centuries, and precisely in the places where people suffer the most, several helping Virgins and Christs began to appear, in Chiapas or in Tlaxcala, in what today we know the State of Hidalgo or México. After the Conquer, the Mexican territory kept on bringing up strange gods that disturbed the bishops: there were gods crowded with Christian references, but they offered refuge, hope, conscience and a place in the indigenous cosmos. One would say that, under the disguise, these gods were still accomplishing, now in an emergency of Colony, Pre-Hispanic functions (Enrique Florescano, Memoria mexicana/Mexican Memory, 1987).

Fray Servando Teresa de Mier predicated on December, 12th, 1794, the most famous Guadalupean sermon of those that have been pronounced: behind the sweet Belén child, there is the miraculous Mesoamerican womb, the great mothers of America (as a continent) –he exclaims-: Virgin of Guadalupe is our new Tonatzin, our new Coatlicue, our Virgin, fighter, always persistent, Coyolxahuqui.

RELION OR HISTORY DEEPNESS, cultural or mythical profundities; heaven or earth’s centre mystery, the virgin soil from where it’s born, redemptive, among the bones of infinite generations of Mesoamerican dead, the corn germ.

From the iconographic perspective, Virgin of Guadalupe is an immaculate, that is to say, a representation of a single Virgin Mary, before her maternity, overflowed with the splendor of being the only human being without the original sin, the only angelical. She is a child-virgin, almost a teenager. However, she is surrounded by chaotic symbols, strangely warrior ones, terrible ones, eschatological ones, representations of the great battle of the end of the world. She is the Apocalypses vision in the New Testament: a moon is at her feet and the sun is surrounding her; her body is the firmament crowded with thunders and stars; She is the warrior Virgin of the Apocalypses, who is going to fight against the Antichrist when the last days come. (That is how she was studied by her four “evangelists” Miguel Sánchez, Luis Lasso de la Vega, Luis Becerra Tanco and Francisco de Florencia).

How can such a terrible image of Virgin Mary, practically the only warlike representation of the Mariology, become a gentle, sweet little mother for the Mexicans? As it can be appreciated, her resemblance to the terrible Aztec virgin-mothers, such as Coatlicue, is prominent. Couldn’t it be a Bishop Montufar’s trick to combat the remains of Aztec idolatry?

Bringing the most terrible Virgin Mary, the Apocalyptical one, to the Coyolxahuqui’s dismembered land? It is a mystery. However, her devotees do not know that all the theologians that have written about her, since 17th Century stress: her combatant emblem as lady of the armies of the end of the world. Her devotees see in her image the moon, the sun and the stars as mere ornamentation to her beauty. However, no one can ignore that Virgin of Guadalupe has always been seen as part of politics in favor of the most popular and regionalist causes of the nation. She helped the poor people of the Nueva España (New Spain, México, during the Colony), during the floods; first she took up the Creole cause and then the Insurgent cause of Hidalgo and Morelos against the Gachupines (Spaniards); she was the only religious institution that were untouched by Juárez and the Reform Laws. She was the liberal Virgin as well, the little mother of the freethinkers.

Another iconographic mystery: the immaculate everywhere but here, she uses to prefer the blue and the white in her clothes. It seems that during the first centuries her robe was blue, and later, in a very discussed process during the Colony it began to acquire strange greenish, pinkish and finally declared green, white and red tonalities: it only misses the eagle to be the national flag. The scholars in Nueva España (New Spain, México’s name during the Colony) in the 18th Century (Francisco de la Torre Villar, et. al. Testimonios históricos guadalupanos/ Guadalupean Historic Testimonies), discussed about how the robe became more and more green. Now we can appreciate that the pink in the Virgin’s dress has been stressed and the little angel at her feet has an evident flag in its wings, green-white-and-red.

When did she raise as the national flag, before or after Hidalgo in Atotonilco? It is a mystery. I have seen some images of the 18th Century, apparently not touched up that already have those colors. What was first

Guadalupe or the flag? Those are new mysteries of the religion and the history, of the myth and the reality… Are we tricolor because there was a tricolor Guadalupe, or she –more miraculous for some; clergy politic stratagem for some others- became tricolor after the Republican flag (Iturbide’s flag had diagonal bands with a different color distribution)? Was it green-white-and-red since 1555, 1648 or 1810? Does Guadalupe’s images change of colors, as the flowers, according to our history’s seasons? How can crowns and solar flames appear and disappear on her head?

The hand of the man has dare against that painting (Virgin of Guadalupe’s image). At the end of the 19th Century, the image that we know was touched up: it had a crown painted, which meant an unauthorized papal distinction, these brought problems to the Mexican church with the Vatican authorities. O’Gorman has demonstrated that someone from the Mexican Archbishopric erased the crown before January, 20th, 1887, he concealed it with new solar glints… but all the old copies maintain that crown, and there was a big scandal, among the clergy and in the society, during decades because of that erased crown. There were accusations, newspaper articles, sermons and notarial acts. (There are some other texts about this events such as those written by José de Jesús Cuevas in 1887, by Gabino Chávez in 1895 and by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte in 1945, among others.) On October, 12th, 1895, the Pope distinguished Virgin of Guadalupe with a real, not painted, gold crown, with this fact he ratified her happy reign, now a legal one, as Queen of México and America’s Empress.

ALSO –AND AMONG EVERYTHING ELSE- SHE OFFERS TODAY’S PROFUNDITIES, deepness of nowadays, here and now, deepness of our modernity. This book is about the urban Guadalupana (Virgin of Guadalupe) of the 20th Century, in our current society, efficient, triumphant in these days, dispenser and receiver of a modern cult, crowded with the industrial civilization symbols.

Some other sacred figures remain distant, in the heights and pure in their theological profile almost abstract. Guadalupe has always been contaminated by her people’s lives. She was early seen receiving copal, food, offerings and dances, not very different from the ones that were accepted by their nahuas preceding deities. The anti-idolatry, Christ-centric friars immediately raised their voices against that function of idol. She (Virgin of Guadalupe) won: first the local Catholic church, and then the Vatican church accepted the people right to celebrate and adore her as they wanted, and the indigenous kept their Nahua and Aztec manners alongside the Christian centuries. There are some Colonial narrations that talk about singing “mañanitas” (traditional Mexican birthday song) to the Virgin, peregrinations, vintage, pulque (a traditional Mexican beverage) and dancers.

Nowadays we see her (Virgin of Guadalupe) contaminated by the modern ways of party and celebration, she is almost a pop star with her electric lights, and her synthetic silver and golden glitters, with her plastic luxuries. The modern industry allows that flashy ornamentation even in sheds and extremely poor scenarios; the modern poor people dreams poke in painting shops and street markets, the colors, the forms and the luxury materials promoted by television.

How would the Mother of God be least celebrated than the movie stars or Miss México contestants? Her altar must be the greatest of all theatres. No one should say that poor people do not give it all for her, that they chaffer for adornments, nor for fireworks. As an offering, she receives atole, tamales and…famous soft drinks.

She is not only the well-behaved mother. She is fair. Herewith, it is said that she is complaisant with the poor ones, with the lost ones, with the failures, with the ones that have fallen once or twice in the crapulence, in the illegal business in the adversity. She loves just because she does it; her love is not a prize for the well behaved. She is always there, protector, advocate, she never fails, she never fails to anyone; when everything goes wrong, she goes on, and if she is with one, what the hell could anyone do to me? Moreover, when someone is sent to clink or is sick, or in total poverty, or sinking in desperation and adversity, then she is the first to go, solicitous, she, Virgin of Guadalupe.

Some other Catholic images are extremely rigorous with formalities and they demand to be adored dressed with austere and dull suits. With Guadalupe no one needs to seem a dandy, she accepts you with an Aztec panache (a Mexican film Aztec fashion) or with a Northern style hat. She accepts you with sunglasses or a punk hair dressing, with tattoos and tacks, wearing a mini-skirt or dressed as a mariachi, dressed as a base-ball player or if you sell balloons. She laughs if you disguise as a wrestler, as a showgirl, as an elegant fellow or as a gallant girl or “Midnight Virgin”. She (Virgin of Guadalupe) accepts you if you visit her wearing a T-shirt with the image of The Doors or with a “quinceañera” crinoline, if you are dressed with a leather jacket or if you’re stripped to the waist, in any way, Latin lover. She accepts as “mañanitas” (Mexican traditional birthday song) whatever you sing to her, even rock, even a terrible, out of key, heavy metal.

In front of her, you can really be miserable, you can get drunk to dead, until the last drop of your misadventure, yelling vulgarities, threatening with your fists or with a hidden knife. Children or old people, coming or going, decent or rich, by cab or by bus, with cargo of illusions or bitterness, on the first or the last day, in a clique, with the family or completely alone, on your knees or practicing acrobatics, because the Virgin also laughs. Guadalupe also inspires jokes and you pray to her following the Cumbia rhythm, she is swayed with such lustful boleros, even porno ones played on a portable tape-recorder.

MEXICO CITY HAS BEEN DISCOVERED on Her day, the Guadalupean, with a public intimacy; a grey tarmac heart, from the street, from the smog, bleeding electric blood, fireworks blood, collective visceral offerings.

The street is the soul; the inner prayer, a crowd outcry, with the radio at its highest volume, the horns and the fashionable records. Religion is a daily neighborhood thing, a familiar thing, and a group thing. She is the personal little mother, the vastest fact in the whole city.

This daily, street, concrete ritual goes beyond the liturgy and reality. It is an emblem and dizzy spell, the social day elevated to the myth exaltations and all the lucid and obscure mythologies in a plural and unequal society pass through reality, in this minute, and they give it an evident phantasmagorical atmosphere, of unreality, of a mistakable paradise of passionate dream with its nightmare rhythms.

Everything is religion in the materialistic world of the last years of the 20th Century, a religion that goes beyond the church, the temples or the texts. An overbearing religion that comes from the illiteracy, the poverty, the precariousness: these urban nomads that belong to the capital city, just arrived –millions- in the last decades, have their firm high note in the chaos, their spiritual oasis inside the labyrinth of daily catastrophes.

THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE THE GUADALUPEAN CULT; nothing is eccentric or discordant; just tourists find funny or dashing details in it: they are the natural popular motley of cultures and civilizations in the city’s corridors and holes.

She is Our Lady of the cab drivers and the nightclub dancers, Our Lady of the boxers and the “marías” (indigenous), of the mariachis and the masons.

Roof miracle, wall miracle, alley miracle, miracle of the electric wiring; in the vast camps and poor neighborhoods of semi-constructed houses, Our Lady of the barillas, of the concrete, of the brick, of the concrete posts, of the unpaved streets, of the little business, of the old car, of the slot machines, of the Nintendo and the video machines.

THE GUADALUPEAN MYTH: oasis and utopia predominate in the illiterate confession of the under-employed and the lumpen-proletariat, which are trying to reach the sublime outside the cultural and religious establishment. A language of poverty and marginality, covered with gala garments, an elaborated, overloaded and improvised celebration. A language of indigenous peasants, just arrived to the city, adrift in the asphalt, that begin their way as modern city inhabitant, inventing a new cult, that incorporates rural traditions as well that improvises hotheadedly in the modernity and the industrialization peripheries.

This cultural improvisation among the urban poverty does not know the firm ancestral rituals, guide lines and rules: it must build, it must begin: the ancient begins today, the traditional things are instantaneous, overloaded, over-modern almost accidental.

In a house, which begins, its construction and that will stay unfinished for years or might never been finished, the Guadalupean altar is a spacious root that will be present now and in the future. It knows about Juan Diego and about the Franciscan missionaries, it knows about the self-educated shamans, living amongst soap operas, boleros, and wrestlers and Martians comics.

Profusion of votive offerings, of beadworks, of superstitions, all of it hanging as a profuse reliquary of a tricolor smile of a Child Virgin in which all the interpretations are contained.

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