Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe (review)

Performing Piety explores the embodied, social, and representational connections among five sacred spaces of Guadalupan devotion across Mexico and the United States. Deliberately avoiding an essentialist argument that would rank sacred space against an authentic original, namely Tepeyac in Mexico City, Peña demonstrates that prayers, oral traditions, songs, gestures, and mundane activities, such as sweeping and cleaning, create divinity and grace. The veneration of Guadalupe turns both public sites and individuals into sacred sites that are physically and perhaps ideologically outside of institutional Catholicism. In this way, Peña captures the simultaneity of Guadalupan devotion that informs the transnational circulation of images, sentiment, and practices.

The book is divided into three sections: Building, Walking, and Conquering. The first section is comprised of one chapter that describes the Second Tepeyac of North America, a Guadalupan shrine in Des Plaines, Illinois, created in 2001. Although identified as a replica of Mexico City’s shrine, the chapter makes clear that it is an authentic sacred space. “Walking” contains two chapters, each one devoted to an all-female pilgrimage, and it offers a brilliant materialist analysis of the ways class and gender distinctions are enacted through the journeys from Querétero and Michoacan. “Conquering” has one chapter which analyzes a sacred shrine and its demise in the multi-ethnic working-class neighborhood of Rogers Park in Chicago, Illinois. It is the most compelling chapter in the book as it makes clear that sacred space can be ephemeral and yet profound for the devout.

The book makes several contributions to religious studies. For example, Peña shows how the sacred and the profane inhabit without contradiction the same spaces and activities. “Religious doctrine and practice do not circulate separate from secular forces” (149). Here it also advances paradigms of American, Third World feminist, and ethnic studies, namely the challenge to Western dualities. Peña also documents how devotees transcend the nationalist representation of Guadalupe, a point that should not be missed by scholars of religion and ethnicity. The faithful who attend the Second Tepeyac pray and sing songs with nationalist components but leave aside the secular grounding for the virgin’s sacred power to protect them as immigrants and people in need of material support. In focusing on people of Latin American descent, however, Peña does not reduce the phenomena to a pan-Latino identity. More critically, Chapter Four illustrates how site-specific sacred space can become permanent as well as fleeting, not simply because divine grace is temporal and ineffable but also as it exists in fields of unequal power dynamics. As she notes in the conclusion, “political economy shapes worship practices as much as religious doctrine” (145). Finally, scholars of Chicana feminism will enjoy Peña’s attention to multiplicity. The devotional performances of travelers from Michoacan and Querétero share the apparition narrative, prayers, songs, and Catholic faith but their journeys are distinct due to their economic, cultural, and aesthetic differences. Piety and the sacred are thus “a series of site-specific interchanges” (146). Devotional capital is negotiated; a point that students and scholars of Latina feminist theology studies likely identify as examples of Latina feminist theology, mestiza theology, and mujerista theology. These aspects of the work make the book ideal for upper division courses and graduate students.