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

chapter four

our lady in mexico 


OurLadyinMexico Catechisms, Confessions, Dramas, andVisions chapter four


The cult of Our Lady became firmly established in Latin America during the colonial period, that time between the Discovery and Conquest in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the wars of independence in Latin America in the early s. At the same time, she became associated and conflated with, as well as changed by and changing, indigenous notions of the sacred. The Spanish brought the Virgin Mary to their New World as a comforting presence, a focus of reverence, an emblem of Spanish nationalism , a war leader who inspired them to victory against the Muslims. They had placed Mary’s image in Muslim sacred spaces, and they did the same in native holy spaces in the Americas. But the Virgin, and Christianity more generally, had competition. In Mexico and Peru, the areas on which we will focus in the next three chapters, there were already strong notions of the sacred feminine. Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that the Virgin interacted only with notions of the feminine. Rather, reverence for Mary was intermingled with larger cosmic and sacred schemes, regardless of how or if they were gendered in the pre-Columbian world. It should be kept in mind that several issues particularly disturbed the Spanish in regard to native culture in Mexico. In the spiritual realm, human sacrifice and the use of hallucinogens to open a window into the sacred concerned them greatly. In regard to family structure, the polygamy within the Mexica nobility was troubling. All three of these concerns are woven into the evolution of the Marian cult in Mexico. The idea of Mary that emerged was a result not only of confrontation of spiritual systems but also of accommodations on both sides.The new forms
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of reverence and worship that developed out of the cultural mix of Spanish Catholicism and existing religious systems in Mexico were in no way static or uniform.The Iberian vision itself was not entirely unified and singular, of course, and both Iberians and the Africans who accompanied them brought all sorts of practices that were not strictly controlled by the principles of the Church. Moreover, the various advocations of Mary recognized by the Church had different uses, responded to different populations, and seemed to have different personalities. Although the theology was reasonably consistent, popular reverence was not. As the Virgin became an object of devotion in Mexico, the cosmic systems and visions encountered were multiple, even within theValley of Mexico. Moreover, rural and urban contexts were quite different, including, not unimportantly, access to actual priests of the Church. As a result, the visions of Our Lady that emerged, the role she fulfilled, and the ways in which she was revered varied enormously from place to place. Nor was the system static. Rather, it was dynamic, changing over time, as it continues to change to this day. The Church had been using the Virgin Mary in conversion attempts in Western Europe for centuries. Often she became an antidote to what churchmen viewed as magic.They redefined, reformed, and reinterpreted practices as they found them, but according to Christian principles. TheVirgin had a powerful influence on these changes. In the Reconquest and in the Spanish NewWorld, Mary continued to be invoked against indigenous religions that the Spanish termed “idolatry.”The Church had two techniques, with a continuum between them—repression on the one hand and toleration and incorporation of other religions and “magic” within a Christian framework on the other. The Virgin figured in both techniques but was more effective in the latter. This effectiveness in the New World was enhanced by the importance of the sacred feminine in these regions and the similarities in iconography . Goddesses were associated with earth, water, mountains and high places, and serpents. Most often, the Virgin Mary herself was not directly conflated with these goddesses, which the Spanish identified, rather, with Eve, the anti-Mary. Secondly, appearances of the sacred feminine could be glossed as appearances of theVirgin and evidence that she had accompanied the Iberians, and perhaps even preceded them, to Latin America.Thirdly, she may have been more appealing than indigenous goddesses. After all, rather than being terrifying or remote, she was near, tender, human, often portrayed holding her “precious Son,” the infant Christ, in her arms. In fact, theVirgin Mary was used as a major counterforce in the struggle against Satan, who was...