A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice

Chapter 3. ANA CASTILLO AS SANTERA: RECONSTRUCTING POPULAR RELIGIOUS PRAXIS

ANA CASTILLO AS SANTERA RECONSTRUCTING POPULAR RELIGIOUS PRAXIS Storytelling: her words set into motion the forces that lie dormant in things and beings. TRINH MINH-HA In June 1997, an item appeared in the San Diego Union Tribune that recounted the miraculous appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City’s Hidalgo Subway. Spotted by a fifteenyear -old girl who was mopping the floor, the Virgin has attracted hundreds to the site, who come bearing candles and flowers to Our Lady. Their responses to this people’s miracle replay the contestation of meanings, both hegemonic and counterhegemonic, generated not only in Mexico since the original apparition in 1531 but in subsequent apparitions throughout the American Southwest. Of the “Metro Miracle,” working women said, “This is telling us that there is divine light, that we are not alone,” and “She is here . . . You can see her if you have faith.” A student was more skeptical: “Let’s see what the government has invented for us now.” Rather predictably, the archbishop gave the final word: “It is not a miracle.” The history of Our Lady of Guadalupe demonstrates that her cult was initially opposed by the Franciscans as obvious indigenous atavism until her image was later recognized by the hierarchy as a useful instrument of conversion. However, her apparition continued to grace indigenous revolts C H A P T E R 3 gail pérez throughout eighteenth-century Chiapas, the Yucatán, and Morelos, often in highly syncretic forms. It was on the foothills of the volcano Popocatépetl that Antonio Pérez in the 1760s found an image of the Virgin that inspired a millennial movement to rid local peoples of a corrupt clergy and Spanish hacendados, all in the name of the Christian Virgin. “God,” Antonio announced, “is the ear of corn, and the three ears of corn, the Holy Trinity.”1 Indigenous revival movements were motivated by the deep sense that both Christians and their own gods had abandoned them. So profound is this legacy of both political and ironic hermeneutics that locals in Mexico City interpreted the eruption of “El Popo” on the eve of the 1997 elections as a sign that the god/mountain was angry with the PRI, the ruling party. I am indulging in precisely the amused, faithful, political interpretive practices of popular religion/folklore that is the subject of Ana Castillo’s cuento (or better, metacuento), So Far from God. Published at about the same time as her book of prose, Massacre of the Dreamers , the novel recounts the miraculous doings of a poor, femaleheaded household in the old Penitente town of Tomé, New Mexico. Four hundred years ago, Juan de Oñate made his entrada into New Mexico, then a distant outpost of New Spain and later of Mexico. The legacy of Franciscan missions, Indian enslavement, and cultural syncretism provides an ideal site for the re-imagining of Chicano/a culture from a feminist (or Xicana) perspective.2 (Of course, isolation and the neglect of church and state have played and still do play a role in Chicano/Hispano cultural production. Thus, Chicanas/os are so far from God.) As Castillo relates in Massacre of the Dreamers, miracles still have their place within our five hundred years of struggle; in 1992, the Virgin appeared on an oak tree during the mostly female-led cannery strike in Watsonville, California: The response of the Mexicanas to the apparition of the Virgin’s image on the oak tree is, to my mind, an indication of a need for spiritual consolation and material relief. Again, it is not so much a manifestation of the Church but of the women’s culture and ethnic identity. Above all, I see the Guadalupan Cult as an unspoken, if not unconscious, devotion to their own version of the Goddess.(48)3 The novel, then, is embedded in a long tradition of voicing struggle and oppositional consciousness in the language of miracle and popular religion. Whatever the “real” status of the Metro or oak tree miracles , Castillo’s concern (and ours) should be the social and political 54 SOURCES, THOUGHT, AND PRAXIS OF LATINA FEMINIST INSIGHT struggles motivating each community of interpreters—in this case, the plight of contemporary Chicanas. The women in Mexico City interpret the sign as showing they are “not alone,” not abandoned; just as indigenous leaders felt their apparitions testified to their suffering under...