Art comes for the Archbishop: The Semiotics of Contemporary Chicana Feminism and the Work of Alma Lopez

The Virgin of Guadalupe is omnipresent in Chicano/a visual space. She is painted on car windows, tattooed on shoulders or backs, emblazoned on neighborhood walls, and silk-screened on t-shirts sold at local flea markets. Periodically, her presence is manifested in miraculous apparitions: on a tree near Watsonville, California; on a water tank, a car bumper, or a freshly made tortilla.¹ She is the sorrowful mother, a figure who embodies the suffering of Chicano/a and Mexican populations in the context of colonization, racism, and economic disenfranchisement.

The Virgin of Guadalupe is a polyvalent sign, able to convey multiple and divergent meanings and deployed by different groups for contradictory political ends. For example, the Catholic Church deploys the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in service of its regressive sexual politics. However, progressive movements have also carried the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe to signify resistance to colonization and economic exploitation, as in the War of Mexican Independence and in the United Farm Workers' struggle for economic justice. Chicano/a cultural workers—from graffiti artists to novelists—use the Virgin of Guadalupe as a sign of racial solidarity, for she is imagined to have brown skin,² or as a sign of transnational solidarity, for she is the patron saint of Mexico. Chicano/a artists have reproduced and reinterpreted the Virgin of Guadalupe in their retablos, paintings, murals, posters, films, performance, and literature. Almost without exception, Chicano/a films include the image of Guadalupe in their sets, nodding to her importance in Chicano/a visual space. And merchants in Chicano/a neighborhoods use the Virgin of Guadalupe to sell their product: it is commonplace to see a mural devoted to the Virgin on the outside of a neighborhood liquor store or to find Virgin of Guadalupe auto "air fresheners" at the car wash.

Because of her ubiquity and her polyvalence, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is a sign that is especially available for semiotic re-signification and cultural transformation. Alma Lopez, a Chicana lesbian artist, has seized this semiotic possibility, creating a series of digital images that break open and transfigure previous interpretations and uses of the Virgin. Lopez's images make manifest the sexuality and desire that are embedded in Chicano/a attachments to the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As might be expected, Lopez's work has been quite controversial. Her 1999 digital collage Our Lady (fig. 1) incited demonstrations, community meetings, and letters to the editor when it was displayed at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.³ Angered by Lopez's image, a vocal group of Chicano and Catholic activists called for its removal from the museum. Rhetorically reducing the image to the language of fashion, these activists repeatedly described Lopez's piece as a depiction of "the Virgin of Guadalupe in a bikini." The demonstrators gained the support of Santa Fe Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan, who called the piece "insulting and sacrilegious," asserting that in Lopez's image the Virgin is "shown as a tart or a street woman" (Office of Communications, Archdiocese of Santa Fe, 2001). Chicano nationalists tried to maintain control over the meaning of the Virgin of Guadalupe and contain her within the semiotic structure of the Catholic Church.

The protests that surrounded Our Lady caused considerable consternation and debate within Chicano/a communities in New Mexico and beyond.⁴ Ultimately, however, Lopez's defenders successfully deployed First Amendment arguments and the New Mexico museum's Committee on Sensitive Materials decided that the work would remain on display. Undoubtedly, free speech arguments have strategic value—that is, they protect a space for the public articulation of queer desire and the display of images that contest fixed and static ideas about cultural identity. However, First Amendment arguments cannot begin to...