"CRAWLING TO GUADALUPE"
Volume 27 - July 9, 1999
ANNOUNCEMENT
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WANTED - ADVOCACY STORIES!
As you may know, I am currently writing a new guidebook for citizen activists - "Democracy: A Citizens' Guide" - and I'd like your help! I'm looking for good stories and anecdotes about lobbying, media, coalition, and organizing campaigns. If you are an activist or a reporter with a good story or example to share please send me a short note in reply to this e-mail. I'll get back to you for details and if we use your story in the book, The Democracy Center will send you a free copy.
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Dear Readers,
While most people who receive this newsletter are wickedly interested in political stories, not all are. So in the interest of variety this issue brings you, not a political story from Latin America, but a cultural one, drawn from my recent work visit to Mexico - the legend of Guadalupe. In a part of the world where religious faith runs deep, it is one of the most intriguing incarnations of that faith and a window into Latin American culture. I look forward to your reactions. If, however, you'd rather have something more about politics I invite you to look my recent article in the San Jose Mercury News on the unsteady rise of Latin American democracy, "Dictators to Democracy", available on the Mercury's Web site at:
http://www.mercurycenter.com/archives/reprints/democracy062799.htm
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
"CRAWLING TO GUADALUPE"
La Basilica de Guadalupe - Mexico City
The young woman with long black hair crawls slowly on
her knees across the unforgiving marble floor. Her small
daughter, in a bright yellow dress, shuffles slowly at her
side to keep the same snail's pace. The basilica is cavernous
and huge, dimly lit by a hundred hanging hexagon fixtures
that look like bronze hat boxes dangling from the wooden
ceiling. Slowly mother and child inch closer to their destination,
the gold framed image of a young Jewish woman, her head
tilted slightly to the left, palms joined at her chest.
As thousands do each year, they are crawling to Guadalupe,
the image of Mary painted on an ancient poncho. If you have
been inside a Catholic church anywhere in the Americas most
likely you have seen her. Knowing Guadalupe's story and
her power here is a part of knowing the culture of Latin
America.
ROSES IN DECEMBER
It began, according to belief, on the small hill just outside Mexico City on December 9, 1531. Juan Diego, an Aztec Indian converted to Christianity, was said to have been walking past the hill on his way to church when a voice called to him from atop. According to legend, the voice and the woman who appeared to Juan Diego was Mary, who instructed him to tell the local bishop to build a church on the hill, where the local poor might pray to her for miracles. The bishop's response was a request for proof. It is said that when Juan Diego told this to Mary, who appeared to him again several days later, she instructed him to climb the hill where he would find the impossible - blossoms of fresh roses in winter - proof enough to carry to the Bishop. On the frost covered hill Juan Diego took the roses and wrapped them in his flimsy poncho made of woven cactus fiber.
Juan Diego carried the poncho, with the roses wrapped inside, to the bishop and when he unfurled it, legend has it, the roses fell to the floor and on the poncho appeared the painted image of Mary. It is this very poncho and image, 450 years later, that hangs behind bullet proof glass in the basilica on the outskirts of Mexico City, blessed by the Pope, worshipped by thousands, and replicated throughout the world.
Science took a turn at the legend in 1979, when a small investigative team was given the rare chance to analyze the image. The bejeweled frame was opened, investigators took close up photographs, many with infrared film, and snipped a few thread samples from the edge. Their conclusions only added to Guadalupe's mystique. The paint, they reported, was unlike any used in Mexico at the time. The cactus fiber of Juan Diego's poncho, they concluded, should have nearly dissolved in a few decades but instead was well in-tact after four centuries. All evidence enough to keep the Latin American legend well-alive.
A WOMAN ATOP THE CHURCH
Whatever one chooses to believe about the legend, there is no doubt that Guadalupe and its parallel Mary legends are a powerful force in the life and soul of Latin America. Here in Bolivia, a few miles from us in the small town of Quillacollo, one of the country's largest annual events is the August commemoration of Mary's reported appearance to a poor shepherd girl. On a chilly winter morning a few weeks from now tens of thousands of Bolivians, rich and poor, will leave their houses before dawn and walk for hours to the small hill where the Virgin of Urkupiña reportedly appeared. Even the Bolivian president often makes an appearance.
The legends of Guadalupe and Urkupiña mirror something
deep about Latin American culture. In a part of the world
where the vast majority are poor it is always to the poor
to whom she is said to appear. In a region where political
justice is sparse it is always miracles she is said to offer,
to people for whom miracles are often the only hope. And
there is also this - Mary is a woman. Before the Spaniards
and before Latin America's conversion to Christianity the
Indian faiths here were full of female images of the divine,
Earth and mother goddesses all pushed aside by the new faith
brought from Europe. Many students of religion believe that
Guadalupe and the other traditions of Mary worship are the
veiled resurrection of those female divinities that were
lost. It is not a coincidence that the small Mexican hill
where Guadalupe now sits, half a millenium before, was a
shrine to the Aztec mother goddess. It may also not be a
coincidence that in a church where only men can be Popes
and priests, that so many chose to worship the image of
a woman - young, poor, and humble.
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