Guadalupe: From sacred image in Mexico to U.S. pop-culture icon
Shining gloriously amid all the stuff is a vinyl sinkhole-of-a-chair bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, with decorative dangling furballs. Unfortunately for you, this item is not for sale, but Knudson has sold a Guadalupe recliner or two in her time. Once, she gave her brother a pair of chairs — one featuring Guadalupe, the other John Wayne — and four years ago, she says, she made a Guadalupe chair for singer Lucinda Williams.
"I have all kinds of religious art," the blond Everett native says, "but Guadalupe is my favorite."
Yes, there's something about Mary — this Marian apparition in particular. It was the mother of God's reputed appearance to an indigenous peasant that ushered the spread of Christianity in modern-day Mexico; it was her image that inspired those who fought for Mexican independence and farmworker rights in the 1960s; it's her image you'll find on bamboo curtains at Archie McPhee's for $74.99.
Hold up. How did that happen? How did one of Mexico's most prominent national and religious symbols become an icon of American pop culture?
"It doesn't surprise me," says Isaac Govea, director of Latino/Hispanic ministry resources for Seattle's Catholic Archdiocese. "Personally, I'm glad that it has. It only shows you the power of the image to reach all sorts of people."
At Casita, a Latin folk-art store on Capitol Hill, customers can buy Guadalupe puzzles ($5) or handbags ($24). Some want her even closer and buy tin earrings bearing the image. "They like to know she is with them," says sales clerk Emiliya Lane.
As far as Lane knows, none of those customers was Latino. They're people who've traveled to Mexico, who've returned with the image imprinted in their memories. For them, she says, Guadalupe isn't a religious symbol; she's folk art, a trademark of Mexican culture. Lane grew up in Russia in a Russian Orthodox family and at first balked when she saw Mary on mousepads and switchplates. "I couldn't understand why I saw images all over the place. It is not common in our church. But the more I learn, the more I love it."
She has a Guadalupe scarf. "I think I'm going to get a sculpture," she says. "I'm used to being around it now. It's like a part of me."
OF COURSE, 'TWAS not always this way. To understand the power of the image, you must go back to 1531, when evangelizing, conquistadoring Spaniards were mostly failing in their attempts to convert the indigenous population. The natives of what would become Mexico were being baptized, but they weren't really buying into the whole Christianity thing.
And then along comes Mary. (Or so many believe.) "She came as an answer to what was not really happening," says the Seattle Archdiocese's Govea. As word spread of her appearance to lowly Juan Diego on a hill the locals considered sacred, "it was a clear sign to them that they truly needed to convert to Christianity."
It was an opportune cameo, one that left Juan Diego's poncho with an imprint of what he said he'd seen — a dark-skinned woman silhouetted in sunlight and standing on a crescent moon. Her manner and accoutrements reflected a blend of Biblical and native symbolism. That reputed poncho, resisting the temptation to dissolve into 472-year-old dust, still rests behind glass in the enormous basilica adjoining the original site in Mexico City. Today — Dia de la Virgen de Guadalupe — that basilica will be flooded with thousands of followers, some crawling on their knees for blocks in penitence.
Whether the vision — and the poncho — are authentic might never be resolved, but it doesn't matter: The image, and its influence, has taken on a life of its own.
Professor Carolyn Dean, who teaches a seminar on the image at the University of California, Santa Cruz, recalls meeting a blond, blue-eyed teenager who'd gotten a Guadalupe tattoo, yet knew nothing of its religious or historical significance.
For that girl, who was seeking a positive female icon, there weren't many options at the tattoo parlor. "It's very rare to see a pop image that has some kind of appeal," Dean says. "(Guadalupe) is one of the few. There's this sweet, lovely woman surrounded by an aura of light, standing on a crescent moon, and that just has an appeal."
Chicana artists have painted Guadalupe in running gear or in a martial-arts get-up, as amiable Mexican grandmas or as self-portraits in bikinis. She's been adopted by Chicana lesbians as a feminist role model.
For some, such images sometimes cross the line. "I definitely don't like to see Guadalupe or any other Virgin Mary minimized or used for carpet or anything," says Ted Rodriguez, the Jalisco-born owner of Torero's Mexican restaurants throughout King County. "Some people really get offended."
But Dean says the more familiar an image becomes, the more likely it is to be turned into kitsch. Increasing visibility begins to feed on itself.
Consequently, "the more you see the image, the more you see the image," she says. "And so it moves from the interior of a church onto somebody's T-shirt, and even onto somebody's skin and into all sorts of completely unexpected territory."
At Archie McPhee's, where the bamboo curtains complement bobblehead Jesuses and glow-in-the-dark Marys, "the whole religious kitsch thing is pretty big," assistant manager Pete Gibson says. "Part of it is — if you come from a religious background and being around ceremony and ritual — keeping in touch, even if you're not participating anymore."
Most customers who buy Guadalupe kitsch know she's a continental homegirl, not a European transplant. Unlike other Marian apparitions, Guadalupe was native to the New World.
But beyond that, he says, "the Guadalupe is just a cool image, more so than the rest. It's just pretty to look at. The light radiating, the bright blue cloak, the little angel — it's an appealing image."
Govea agrees. While the image exhibits tenderness and accessibility, he says, it's also visually attractive, packing symbolism to a degree most icons of Western civilization don't.
"It's easy for anyone in front of the image to lose themselves in contemplation," he says. "It's an experience in and of itself."
WHILE THEY MIGHT seem unlikely sites for Mary to appear, beach towels and snow globes can't hold a candle to the places the image has shown up uninvited. Our Lady has alighted on street corners and roadsides, in the form of yucca tree branches or deteriorating billboards, with reverent faithful assembling soon afterward.
"I was just reading an account that she was seen in spilled ice cream in Houston," says Dean, adding that such sightings mostly occur in the U.S. Southwest, in areas with large Latino populations.
Last week in Seattle, the archdiocese commemorated Guadalupe's feast day with its ninth annual procession and celebration. On a tiny float, a young woman dressed as the Virgin, satiny green cape whipping violently in the wind, stood near a man representing Juan Diego.
Two hundred people, mostly Latinos, braved a gusty December morning for the half-mile walk from Seattle University's St. Ignatius Chapel to St. James Cathedral. Afterward, at the tamales-and-coffee reception that followed the Mass that followed the story's reenactment, Felipe Maqueda, a Seattle engineer, wore the bright red Guadalupe poncho that he pulls from his closet once a year. Next to the Mexican flag, he says, the Virgin of Guadalupe is Mexico's most important symbol.
The image is always part of him. "We take her everywhere with us," he says. "We were born Guadalupano, and we will die Guadalupano."
Even those who aren't practicing Catholics have found ways to keep the Virgin in their lives, keeping her close in the form of decorated wallets, jewelry or wall hangings.
Rodriguez, the owner of Torero's, says the image is so culturally embedded that "we cannot go outside Mexico and not bring, in our heart and in our soul, the Virgin of Guadalupe."
More than two-thirds of the nation's 32.8 million Latinos claim Mexican ancestry. "Everywhere there are Mexicans, there is going to be Our Lady of Guadalupe," Maqueda says.
"She's uniquely American," says Dean of UC-Santa Cruz. "She was born here. She's patron of the Americas. She's everywhere in Latin America. She's not just Mexican anymore."
Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 and mramirez@seattletimes.com.