Mary, Mother and Warrior: The Virgin in Spain and the Americas

Acknowledgments

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In the course of researching and writing this book, I have incurred many debts. The wide-ranging and synthetic nature of the topic has led me into contacts with many scholars in regions and disciplines far removed from my original area of expertise. Further, given the importance of the visual images in this work, I have been enormously helped by the artists and photographers who have created many of them and the individuals at museums around the United States and the Hispanic world who have made other works of art available to me. I am grateful to all of them, more than this simple acknowledgment can convey, and hope that I have used their help wisely. I know that this help—and interest—on the part of many individuals has made this work far better than it otherwise could have been. I was fortunate during the early months of my research to receive a Fulbright Association grant for a six-week seminar in Peru, Argentina, and Brazil. Although I have not included Brazil as a prominent part of my work—finding this very complicated country too different from Spanish America to fit cohesively into the volume—the experiences in Argentina and Peru have led to my selection of these countries as major foci of the book. Norma González and Marcia Koth de Paredes, Fulbright directors in Argentina and Peru respectively , and Ralph Blessing and CynthiaWolloch fromWashington helped me in every possible way. Traveling through three countries in the company of eleven fellow scholars from various disciplines was an enormous privilege and helped me see many things I would not otherwise have seen. I want particularly to acknowledge among my companions in that extraordinary trip Lucía Garavito, Andrew Boeger, and Rachel May for their ideas and Acknowledgments



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interest in the project.The Fulbright Association made it possible for me to return for several weeks in  to Cuzco, where I was able to do follow-up research and to observe the Corpus Christi celebrations there from start to finish. Amy Remensnyder andWilliam Christian have furnished encouragement as well as enormous help from the field of Spanish history, and I have constantly kept their work in mind as I have observed, researched, and written. The works of Louise Burkhart and Carolyn Dean have fascinated and inspired me, though I have only been in contact with them by telephone and email . In Argentina, Eloisa Martín, Patricia Fogelman, Alejandro Frigerio, and Ricardo Salvatore have provided encouragement and guidance in regard to theVirgin of Luján, to the enigma of Eva Perón, and to the larger project as well. A conversation in Paris with Serge Gruzinski gave me new perspectives and ideas, as has his voluminous work as single author or in collaboration with others on matters cultural in colonial Spanish America. Readers of the manuscript for the University of Texas Press have provided helpful suggestions that, I believe, have notably enhanced the text. During the course of the writing, I benefited from the group of scholar friends who form the Santa Fe Seminar: Sandra Lauderdale, Richard Graham , Richard Flint, Shirley Flint, Peter Linder, Curt Schaafsma, Polly Schaafsma, Shirley Barnes, Barbara Sommer, Jim Dunlap, Suzanne Stamatov, Cal Riley, and the late and much-missed Benjamin Keen. The seminar read with care; critiqued my ideas, facts, and perspectives; stimulated my thinking ; and consistently renewed my enthusiasm. No scholar could have a better set of colleagues than these. Any shortcomings that remain, of course, are entirely my own. It will be obvious to the reader of this volume that the illustrations are crucial to an understanding of what I have to say. I am grateful to Blair Woodard for working with me on ideas about these illustrations at an early stage of the project. I worked with museum officials who have gone out of their way to make available many of the images that appear in these pages. Donna Pierce and Julie Wilson of the Denver Art Museum helped early in the project and then straight through to its conclusion, not only with the wonderful images in that repository but also with ideas and contacts for other illustrations. Hector Rivero Borrell, Eduardo Ancira, and Ricardo Pérez of the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City and Mark Roglan and Kay Johnson of the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas also made available images from those extraordinary collections and went out of their way to...