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Ethnohistory 50.2 (2003) 407-410



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Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature. By Louise M. Burkhart. (Austin: University of Texas Press for the Institute of Mesoamerican Studies, SUNY, Albany, 2001. viii + 165 pp., preface, introduction, illustrations, bibliography, index. $25.00 paper.)
Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries. By D. A. Brading. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xvii + 444 pp., preface, introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography. $35.00 cloth.)

Among recent Mesoamerican ethnohistorical studies, one strand consists of examination of the origins, meanings, and early texts relating to Mexico's patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe. 1 The two books reviewed here deal with varying aspects of this general theme: Louise Burkhart investigates what early priests taught Nahuas in their own language about the Virgin Mary (prior, but perhaps related, to the emergence of the Guadalupe apparition stories); David Brading explores the meanings of the Guadalupe tradition in colonial and modern Mexican society. The books complement each other in interesting ways, yet they also show the differences in approach of an ethnohistorian and an intellectual historian, each fascinated by Mexican society's responses to Christianity's most notable female personage.

Louise Burkhart's Before Guadalupe provides translations and analyses of texts generated by a variety of Spanish friars writing, in Nahuatl, on the subject of Mary. The texts date from the 1540s through the 1620s and are organized by Burkhart around Mary's life course. Each text is translated, with the Nahuatl and English placed side by side. Burkhart opens every chapter, each covering a stage in Mary's life, with a theological overview of that stage and provides a brief commentary about each author and text [End Page 407] as well. These accurate and very readable translations show that the major influence on the introduction of Mary as a key religious figure was medieval European devotional beliefs and practices. Yet if Mary is no syncretistic figure, a certain Nahuatlization of her image took place, as she became described, and perhaps viewed, as a compassionate mother figure who may have served a Nahua need for "an indulgent protector and intermediary" (4). In this theme, of differing understandings by Spaniards and Nahuas, Burkhart follows and extends a line of analysis found in her pathbreaking book, The Slippery Earth. 2 She points out how, for colonial Nahuas, Mary may have been a symbol of female empowerment, encompassing some of the gender parallelism of the pre-Hispanic era. But she might also have served as a model of "submission to patriarchal and colonial norms" with whom Nahua women felt a special bond (150). The picture provided by Burkhart of an early colonial religiosity embracing both Nahua and Christian traditions is compelling and contributes further to our understanding of the complex interactions of those traditions in the early sixteenth century. It also throws into even sharper relief Brading's interpretation of the seventeenth-century origins of the Guadalupe story as lying in a Creole effort to articulate, as early as the mid–seventeenth century, a hybrid Mexican identity.

In a tour de force of careful research and textual analysis, David Brading—author of many important studies in colonial Mexican history, including the magisterial The First America, an examination of the intellectual origins of Mexican identity and nationalism—analyzes numerous texts relating to Guadalupe. 3 These treat the origins and meaning of this most-popular devotional figure for Mexican Catholics and date from the seventeenth century through the twentieth century. His careful readings of unpublished and published writings, with many of the unpublished ones consisting of sermons given at the chapel, later basilica, of Tepeyacac, place the remarkably consistent lines of thinking about Guadalupe in the context of long-lived church debates over popular religious devotion. The extent to which practices—whether in Europe or the Americas—focusing on icons and images should or should not be encouraged was intensely debated. Such images became extremely popular in New Spain, where the veneration of...

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