Our Lady of the Rock: Vision and Pilgrimage in the Mojave Desert by Lisa M. Bitel (review)

On December 9, 1531, Mexico’s most famous visionary first saw the Virgin Mary in her avatar as Our Lady of Guadalupe, on the hill called Tepeyac, outside of Mexico City. Catholic neophyte Juan Diego was looking like a Christian, continuing a centuries-old tradition of visual grammar, a language of witness and verification, of envisioning the Virgin.

In Lisa Bitel’s remarkable new book, Our Lady of the Rock: Vision and Pilgrimage in the Mojave Desert, with photographs by Matt Gainer, she tells the story of one of Mexico’s more recent visionaries, Maria Paula Acuna, who now lives in California City, on this side of the border, and sees the Virgin on the thirteenth of every month, deep in the dusty heart of the Mojave Desert. Hundreds of witnesses flock to the desert to see the Virgin and to photograph observable celestial phenomena they attribute to the Virgin’s presence. A culture has developed around interpreting the images to one another, witnessing and being seen.

Although Maria Paula is not in an official order, she dresses in a habit, as do the women who accompany her. She calls them monjas, or nuns, and they perform Catholicity. Maria Paula sermonizes each month. She claims to see the Virgin, who gives her messages to relate to the witnesses. Perhaps unremarkably, the messages admonish listeners to uphold Catholic doctrine: against abortion, against divorce, against immodesty, and the like. Maria Paula heals, in the ancient postcolonial tradition of curanderismo or spiritual healing that combines Catholic ritual and faith with Mesoamerican techniques of physical and spiritual balance and exchange with the divine.

Based on nearly a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, interviews, and photography, Bitel and Gainer document this fascinating movement. Maria Paula’s visionary performance begs the question of authenticity or sincerity: does Maria Paula really believe that she sees the Virgin? But Bitel refuses to see the issue that way, as she states early on:

I tried to look through Maria Paula’s eyes, but of course that is impossible—only Maria Paula knows what she sees. I considered causes for her behavior and wondered about her background and motives. I pondered her relation to the witnesses who accompany her . . . while I might be able to rule out some causes for her sightings, I lack evidence.

(p. ix)

Bitel rightly settles for the “invisibility” or “untranslatability” (p. x) of Maria Paula’s mystical experiences.

Still, the question remains vexing, plaguing me throughout the reading. If her performance derives from cynical motives, she manages to persuade otherwise. On some occasions, the Virgin does not arrive at all. Maria Paula supports herself and the monjas through this work; concession stands are set up each month where tamales and cold beverages are sold along with various Marian merchandise. They once sold photographs of purported Virgin-related phenomena, but that stopped when witnesses began to claim that they, too, could see the Virgin—a claim that makes Maria Paula bristle. Donations can be made to Maria Paula’s organization, the Marian Movement of Southern California. Yet, Maria Paula and the movement lack a Web presence, which today is essential for fund-raising.

But the book is about much more than Maria Paula alone. The visionary is situated within a “longue durée” of Marian visual culture, set against the backdrop of a genealogy of seeing the Virgin, communicating the vision, experiencing miracles, and in some cases verifying a visionary event’s authenticity. Bitel locates this Marian phenomenon within the discourse of Latino religion and theology. In this book with sixty photographs, many of them in color, Bitel and Gainer have seen, captured, and represented a beguiling particle of Christian history and reality.