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9 Holy Girl Power Locally and Globally the marian visions of garabandal, spain jessamy harvey In a journalistic article on the importance of the 1917 Marian apparitions in Fatima (Portugal) for understanding the history of the Cold War, Joseph Bottum recasts the part of the cold warrior. Bottum speculates that the real shaper of the Cold War is not, in fact, an adult political leader but a young peasant girl: Here’s a curious thought. Maybe the single most important person in the 20th century’s long struggle against communism wasn’t Ronald Reagan. Maybe it wasn’t Karol Wojtyla or Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Mikhail Gorbachev. Maybe it wasn’t anyone whose name might leap to a cold warrior’s mind—for the most important figure in that long, dark struggle might have been a 10-yearold girl named Lucia dos Santos.1 Bottum makes the intriguing proposition that Lucia, a Portuguese Catholic peasant girl visionary, played a significant role in international politics. Individual girls, as well as the category of girlhood itself, can be understood to serve as a vehicle for the expression of any number of identities, values, and histories. As Ann Kordas notes elsewhere in this section, girls were endowed with great symbolic value during the Cold War, but whereas she examines the ideological use of images of American and Soviet gymnasts, I focus on the symbolic value of four Catholic girls from rural Spain to a transnational religious community. On June 18, 1961, María Concepción [Conchita] González (b. 1949) and three other girls of similar age, Mari Cruz González, Jacinta González, and María Dolores [Loli] Mazón, from San Sebastian de Garabandal (Spain), an isolated mountain community in the northern region of Cantabria, claimed to have a religious vision, the first of many.2 The experiences of these four girls, based on their account of seeing and communicating with Saint Michael the Archangel, the Virgin Mary, and the infant Jesus between 1961 179 and 1965, were rapidly transformed into socially constructed events that have become part of what Paolo Apolito calls “Catholic visionary culture,”3 a transnational religious culture with a long tradition. As William A. Christian notes, “Visions of the divine are as old as humanity. They have continued in the postindustrial age.”4 In visionary culture, the participants share, to use Manuel Vásquez and Marie Marquardt’s phrase, “generalised apparition scripts” that shape and make sense of their personal experiences.5 In this chapter, I do not address the question essential to many believers: did these girls really see and speak with divine beings? Here I contend that these girls established their participation in culture and society through the experience of visions, and the believers and promoters who recognized and validated this experience then found ways of defining and articulating their beliefs, values, and hopes through the girls. These girls came to see themselves , over time, as significant not only in relation to their own lives but also in relation to a broader moral order. Although as grown women these girls are no longer primary actors in a global religious community, for the duration of the apparitions they took on a distinctive role, that of holy messengers who not only reversed everyday structures of authority at the time but also can be seen, in the longer term, to have shaped the local landscape as well as contributed to manifestations of global devotional culture. Although the impact of the visionaries on the national stage was inhibited, to a certain extent, through coercive measures by both the Diocese of Santander and the National-Catholic dictatorial regime led by General Franco (1939–1975), the cult spread internationally through European and American promoters.6 Today not only are there Garabandal centers in Europe, the United States, South Africa, and Australia, but the Internet is a powerful tool in the dissemination of the movement’s information and beliefs.7 Both still and moving images of the girls, individual and collective memories, and prescriptive messages of salvation continue to circulate in contemporary culture in a wide variety of formats thanks to the efforts of the Workers of Garabandal and other devotees. In this chapter I do not ponder the veracity of the girls’ visions; instead, by working within a culture-centered girlhood studies approach, I consider to what extent, and in which ways, the girls were able to achieve a form of social...

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