Our Lady of Everyday Life: La Virgen de Guadalupe and the Catholic Imagination of Mexican Women in America by Maria del Socorro Castañeda-Liles (review)

In this new monograph, religious studies scholar Maria del Socorro Castañeda-Liles offers a groundbreaking perspective of the relationship between Mexican women in the US and the Virgin of Guadalupe. She brings together three generations of first-generation heterosexual Mexican women and ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico to fill the gap between disciplines that often do not dialogue: religious studies and theology eschew Latinx sexuality, and secular disciplines tend to avoid religious subjectivity, practice, and belief. In so doing, she convincingly argues that through their fluid Catholic devotional practices, Catholic first-generation Mexican women adapt their faith so that they break with oppressive Catholic norms of womanhood but maintain features of their religion that sustain them (23).

Castañeda-Liles's study offers an in-depth contextualization of the social world and life experiences that inform the participating women's beliefs and practices as well as the ways these women practice agency. Chapters 1 and 2 present the symbolic meaning of the Virgin of Guadalupe. After leading her readers through a well-organized summary of existing scholarly discussion of the Virgin of Guadalupe across disciplines, Castañeda-Liles invites us to understand the Virgin of Guadalupe by paying attention to the words of the women in her study. She grounds the importance of these words in chapter 2, when the participant Esperanza uses the metaphor café con leche to explain that la Virgen is inseparably Catholic and Mexican, just as café con leche cannot be separated into coffee and milk. Castañeda-Liles then analyzes the socialization of Mexican Catholic children through material objects, family traditions, and a devotional triangle created by a mother-daughter-Virgin of Guadalupe.

The study deepens the analysis of the gendered socialization that takes places within the Catholic Mexican imagination through careful attention to the detail of women's everyday lives. In chapter 3 Castañeda-Liles examines how mothers introduce daughters into the gender expectations of the Catholic Church; in chapter 4 she extrapolates how the Mexican Catholic imagination values obedience, respect, and responsibility for girls at the cost of agency. In chapter 5 Castañeda-Liles discusses what the participants in her study learned about the female body and sexuality, what information was kept from them—often with traumatizing results—and how the women complied with and/or circumvented codes of conduct. These chapters palpably recreate the affective importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe even as they reveal how secular and religious sexism combine to shape women's lives at times in shocking ways.

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 vibrantly expand on the ability of the women studied to exercise agency through their Catholic faith, a central tenant of this book. Chapter 6 explores the fluid nature of the Mexican Catholic imagination, in which devotion to and faith in the Virgin of Guadalupe is always deepened by life experience. Chapter 7 delineates how Mexican women see the Virgin of Guadalupe as omnipresent and therefore nonjudgmental, which allows them to remain Catholic while transgressing Catholic norms of "good Catholic women," and asks the women what feminism means to them. In this chapter, the importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a figure of justice who helps navigate situations of domestic violence stands out. The final chapter explores how the study's participants respond to controversial Chicana feminist artistic representations of Our Lady of Guadalupe from their intersectional Catholic positions, informed by their own definitions and understandings of faith. She demonstrates that the participants' reactions to these images, often negative, must be understood through an intersectional understanding of these women, in which their generation and levels of education proved to be determining factors in their perspectives (206).

Castañeda-Liles's contribution to our understanding of the Catholic Mexican imaginary provides methodological and conceptual frameworks crucial to intersectional analysis of...