Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (review)

Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries. By D. A. BRADING. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Photographs. Plates. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvii, 444 pp. Cloth.

 

There is no closure to mysteries, only another story, another translation

—Greg Dening

Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe remains an elusive subject, especially for the early colonial period. Little has been established with much certainty about the nature and scope of the devotion during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There just is not much to go on. And the four seventeenth-century Guadalupan hagiographers—Miguel Sánchez, Luis Lasso de la Vega, Luis Becerra Tanco, and Francisco de Florencia—whose ready-made narratives are cited over and over are, by themselves, of limited use for a history of faith in the Virgin Mary through this image. Nevertheless, few Latin American traditions have attracted more interest across classes and places, whether in scholarly, devotional, or polemical ways. The interest seems inexhaustible, and with good reason. This image of the Virgin Mary, widely believed and officially recognized to have occurred miraculously in association with Marian apparitions to humble Indian Juan Diego near Mexico City in 1531, is so closely connected with Mexico as "imagined community" that the origins and development of Guadalupan devotion go to the heart of Mexican patriotism, belief, and politics of identity.

Now David Brading, the dean of foreign students of Mexican history, takes aim at the subject from an intellectual history vantage point reminiscent of his celebrated book about creole nationalism in Spanish America, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (1991). Observing in the preface that "in almost every generation since the middle years of the seventeenth century something of note or interest had been written about the Virgin of Tepeyac" (p. xv), Brading proceeds to discuss notable publications and debates across the centuries in thematic chapters that manage to convey a sense both of generations and continuity. As usual, he has read his published primary sources with care and sympathy, and presents them, their historical moments, and the debates in which they were situated in richly contextualized ways.

Mexican Phoenix's main contributions to a greater understanding of guadalupanismo are achieved by (1) ranging widely in time (giving considerable attention to the colonial period, but carrying the story up to the sad disgrace of the basilica's abbot, Guillermo Schulenberg, in 1996 for doubting the historical Juan Diego and, by extension, the historicity of the apparition story as first published in Miguel Sanchez's Imagen de la Virgen María in 1648), and (2) examining published sermons and devotional histories from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries for a theology of Marian devotion and guadalupanismo.

The fruits of Mexican Phoenix's telescopic historical vision and its key works/ generational approach are many, especially for the nineteenth century. Brading's treatment of a new burst of devotion and controversy in the 1880s and 1890s as religion returned to public life under Porfirio Díaz is especially illuminating. Joaquín García Icazbalceta's famous 1883Letter to Archbishop Labastida y Dávalos is paired with Fortino Vera's copious defense during the 1890s of the apparition narrative's historicity for a memorable view of the bitter apparitionist-"antiapparitionist" polemics of the time. The interpretations of both protagonists now depended on historical records (or their absence) as the "measure of truth about the origins of the Guadalupe tradition" (p. 287). Set next to a chapter on the extraordinarily popular official coronation of our Lady of Guadalupe in 1895, the hardening and deepening of the apparitionist position among prelates and laity becomes clear. Looking back from 1990s, Brading concludes that "In effect, the current controversy which surrounds the image derives from a nineteenth-century concern with 'historicity' and is animated on both sides of the...