Suzanne Kulperger Photography made some amazing photos for me of the first object I ever made in the Female Power Project. So I am taking this opportunity to finally post the text I finally wrote for this piece in 2022. You can order the shawl and scarf for La Guadalupana on my Etsy site at this link.

Her attention reminds us that we are human.

Let me explain how this design for the Virgin of Guadalupe was the beginning of the Female Power Project. 

In 2015 the Pope came to Washington D.C. and celebrated mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, near my studio. I wanted to make some shawls that people might buy when they came to see him. As usually happens for me, the project took longer than I thought, and the pieces I created were not ready in time! Still, I pressed ahead with production. 

Why did I choose the Virgin of Guadalupe for the project? Primarily, she was part of where I grew up, literally part of my geography, because the street where I grew up in New Mexico was a dead end road that came off a road called Guadalupe Trail. She was everywhere I looked in the Spanish culture of New Mexico and the Latinx culture around me in California and Texas, places I lived later. So when I wanted a Catholic image that was meaningful to me, the Virgin of Guadalupe came first to mind. 

At that time I hadn’t made work with religious imagery. Since then I have made more such works, enough that I named a series for them: the Divines. I am fascinated by religious images, symbols, and stories because they seem to have a direct access into our brains, more than other images. Since La Guadalupana was at the beginning of the Project, at the time I hadn’t developed a method for making or writing about divine females. I now understand better what I am doing in the Divines Series: I don’t retell the stories or depict the deities, I interpret aspects of the stories in reworked images and reinterpret their messages in the context of my point of view as a non-religious feminist, living here and now. 

The Virgin of Guadalupe is Mexico’s Virgin Mary. There is an important story for the Mexican and Mexican-American people about Mary appearing to and communicating with a local man, Juan Diego. This is a true story to the people, but it is not corroborated in the historic records of the time. The story involves local prelates, in the upper hierarchy, but there is no church record of the events, and there should be if the story is historical. It looks like the story was published later to help legitimize a legend and a cult that had developed over time. According to my research, the Church resisted acknowledging Mary’s visit to Mexico, and the cult of the Virgin that arose in Tepeyac, until it was impossible to deny for political and social reasons. The visitation, which was supposed to have taken place in the 1550s, cannot be separated from the complicated politics of the Mexican Church 100 years later, when the story was published and later accepted by the Church. 

A more recent Guadalupana story is that her cult at Tepeyac arose on the site of a shrine sacred to an Aztec goddess called Tonanzin. The implication is that somehow Guadalupana worship was really Tonanzin worship, or a mash-up of the two. But this also should be questioned. As Rosemary Radford Ruether writes in Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, A Western Religious History, “Tonanzin was a title for the maternal aspect of any Aztec goddess, not the name of a particular goddess.” Therefore, a local person referring to the Virgin as “Tonanzin” was saying she is a holy mother, which is not unchristian. The locals calling Mary “Tonantzin” did worry the priests. They were very anxious about the purity of the object of worship of the native people. This anxiety was behind the institutional resistance to the Guadalupana cult. Any native-derived worship must be demonic, they thought.

So these cherished stories about the Virgin of Guadalupe are … complicated. But I maintain that powerful stories are meaningful even if they are not true in a literal or historic sense. I like to ask how they are meaningful, and, in this case, why is this design meaningful to me: an artist, an atheist, feminist, Jew?

Why might La Guadalupana be so important to Mexican identity? I think I may have found at least part of an answer recently in the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (pub. 2020). She writes that Christian colonizers did not consider the non-Christians they met to be human. The colonizers were allowed by their laws and customs to treat these people like animals, or like any other exploitable natural resource. Once the colonized people became Christians, they and their mixed-blood descendants did gain some human dignity in the eyes of the colonizers, and were absorbed into the caste system, although they were considered to be lower caste, or even “untouchable.” When I read this I immediately thought of the native Nahuas having their own Virgin Mary speaking to them. She even required a native man to carry a message to a member of the Church hierarchy, and when the Church man doubted Juan Diego, the Virgin produced a miracle to prove Juan Diego was worthy of her (and his) attention. This was proof that the people in Mexico must be real Christians, that is, human beings. This was proof that Mexico is a place in Christendom, and not a place outside of civilization. The place of worship of La Guadalupana was established by her, and that place is Mexico.

Although I created the La Guadalupana shawl in 2015, I am writing this now in 2022. It’s taken me till now to think of ways to frame this design, and talk about its message in the context of the Female Power Project. It is very easy for me to get lost in historical detail, so I had to let my researches settle for a while, to let the details fade and the edges get rounded, so I could find a figure in the noise. 

The shawl references parts of the divine image of La Guadalupana at her shrine in Mexico: the mantle of stars she wears (I especially love this idea of wearing the sky); the flames representing rays of light; and the clouds around the flames. The roses, out of season and of a different region, are a miracle that proves the divine message to the sceptical curate. These things depict Mary’s situation, but not her self. 

It is amazing that a divine mother has persisted even in a patriarchal faith. It often seems to me that female power pushes through fissures in history, because our species needs it. Here is the message as I understand it: Mary did not forsake her child, and her power is mercy. Her cult is of devotion, more than worship, and the emotion she embodies is love without fear. Her attention makes us human, as she had made human her son, and she mediates between humans and the non-female divine. People who wear the shawl will have their own meanings, of course.

Back in 2015, I remember standing in front of a mirror in my studio, near that Basilica, trying on the shawl I had just finished, and something seemed to happen, because I felt like I was putting on the power of someone else, like in a ritual. I found it remarkable and meaningful, in a quiet way. (No fireworks!) My very next thought was, I wonder what other women I can make a shawl for, so that I can put on their power, too? 

And that, dear reader, was the beginning of the Female Power Project: my explorations of the stories of transformative women and divine females made into images, words, and objects—messages that we can try on, powers that can fit us, or situations we can inhabit.

I think if I were Catholic, I might feel like the Virgin had sent me a message.