Traveling Icons: The Virgin of Candelaria's Transatlantic Journeys

Traveling Icons: The Virgin of Candelaria's Transatlantic Journeys1 Ey da M. Merediz ù an Assutant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has also taught at Union College , Smith College and Princeton University where she earned her doctorate degree . She specializes in Colonial Latin American literature and Transatlantic literatures and cultures of the early Modern period. Her book, Refracted Images: The Canary Islands Through a New World Lens will soon appear in a monograph series at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies . As a secondary area of research and teaching she has also explored contemporary Cuban literature and cinIn making conquests, in the eatly-modern period , to be Catholic was no impediment, any more than to be Muslim or Russian Orthodox or Chinese. What mattered was the geographical position of the potentially imperial societies. What the seaborne empires all had in common was their starting-place on the shores of the Atlantic. For the Atlantic, in the age of sail, was a highway that led not only to the immense, underexploited , defenseless resource-base of die Americas but also to wind-systems that linked with the rest of the world. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Milhnnium I want to develop the suggestion that cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective . Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic Erasing the creared boundaries or ideological constructs that have segregated portions of Hispanic cultural production from one another is one way of transcending the crisis [of literary studies] and reconstructing a fuller and more accurare account of Hispanic American cultutal history . The nationalistic divisions applied retrospectively to the colonial world [during the post-independence period] are, for the most part, politiArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 5, 2001 116 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies cal and social judgements disguised as cultural or aesthetic assessments. Transcending this artificial boundary —which too often separates Latin Americanists from Spanish peninsularist scholars—is essencial to the development of colonial studies. Seeing the [US] Spanish Southwest in the larger Hispanic purview is also essenrial. Rolena Adorno, "New Perspectives" This article has two purposes. The first is to conceptualize briefly Transatlantic Studies, which, despite being a newly evolving area of study, has as its underlying premises mutual influences , reciprocities and exchanges between the Old World and the New, which have always been present since the late fifteenth century and have been studied in the Hispanic world of Latin American Colonial Studies prior to the more recent Anglo-American theorizations of Atlantic Studies. The second part recovers the Canary Islands and the cult of its patroness the Virgin of Candelaria and its most famous manifestation —rhat of Copacabana in Bolivia— as "transatlantic space" or locus of triangulated and traversing routes. Constructed by the multidirectional flow of peoples, ideas and artifacts, the islands and the icons have, in the process, challenged European cultural and political hegemony in a way that cannot be reduced to any national understanding of the Atlantic space in which they have been and continue to be articulated. Transatlantic Studies: A New Paradigm? The last decade has witnessed the birth of what many scholars have seen as a new revolutionarily inclusive paradigm: (Trans)Atlantic Studies. At the start of a new millennium, the geographical Atlantic has finally been valued in its function as both metaphor and practical tool of analysis with clear interdisciplinary applications. What was more evident during the early European colonial enterprises (and later systematically fragmented in the exclusionary process of the formation of fields of study and the rise of nationalisms) has regained global viability . In a way, this represents the logical development of the transnational, crosscultural and multiethnic perspectives that poststructuralist critical approaches brought to the field of cultural criticism. As theoretical concerns have gradually drifted away from emphasizing language to privileging spaces, re-mapping the Atlantic and its multiple crossings have been a pressing academic task. The notions of "transculturation," "culture as travel" and of "transatlanticism," which have recently transformed the fields of anthropology, cultural history and literature are...