My Italian immigrant grandmother, Margaret, was extremely religious, but not the variety I had experienced in Church. She practiced a folk Catholicism that entailed petitions to specific saints and special devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Her bedroom housed scores of statues of these saints as well as many Madonnas. I would sit there for hours, awed. Perhaps that was where I first learned to make altars of my own, always to the Mother, and in my case always outdoors. At the same time, the Church brought out in me a lifelong propensity to rebel. By early adolescence, deeply and finally frustrated with the emptiness of the spiritual experience that was offered by the institution, I quit.

This early intuition of female cosmic powers never left me. Now living in New Mexico, I recognize, though I have not actively participated in, a popular tradition of Goddess worship in the reverence accorded the Virgin of Guadalupe. Her image, from sacred high art to votive candles, tattoos and T-shirts, is ubiquitous in Mexican and Mexican American cultures. She appears not only in these religious and popular cultural contexts but also in overtly political ones. Her image mobilized and guided the movement to gain Mexican independence from Spain and, more recently, graced the banner of the United Farmworkers Union. Contemporary Chicana artists such as Esther Hernández and Yolanda Lopez reclaim her as a radically unsubmissive, indigenous, simultaneously ancient and utterly modern Goddess.

Goddess of the Americas begins with a prayer. Indeed, its overall purpose is a reverent one: to pay “homage to Our Mother, at the end of this century and the end of a millennium of migrations, miscegenation, conquests, and endless hope and prayer.” Essays in the collection range over the history of the Virgen de Guadalupe; her significance to Mexicans, Mexican Americans and others; the subversive powers of her iconography, particularly her special relationships with the indigenous, with women, and with the poor; her sexuality; her relationship to divine and folk figures from other traditions; and her mystery.

The anthology includes a diverse range of voices, political stances and beliefs: the message seems to be that Guadalupe is for all of us. As Chicana novelist, poet and essayist Ana Castillo notes in her preface, all contributors—believers and nonbelievers, Catholics and Jews, Mexicans, Mexican Americans and others, feminists and non-feminists, women and men—are bound “by common respect for Her and Her power over the spiritual life of millions.” Any of us can embrace her and, Castillo believes, we should: “These writings also all serve as impassioned testimony of the need for recognition of the Mother in a world that is hanging by a thin thread of hope.”

The history of Our Lady of Guadalupe is told most completely by F. Gonzalez-Crussi in “The Anatomy of a Virgin.” Her story begins with attempted deicide. “When the Spaniards first arrived at the sacred hill of Tepeyacac … they encountered, on top of a low hill, the temple to the goddess Tonantzin, meaning ‘Our Mother.’” Her image scandalized the Spaniards, who deemed it indecent, and they ordered her demolition and replacement by a cross. Tonantzin was linked then and continues to be linked to the “Snake Woman” goddesses, Cihuacoatl and Coatlicue, and the “sex goddesses” Tlazolteotl and Totzin.

Guadalupe was the name of a child-holding Madonna from Extremadura, Spain, and the Spaniards soon installed her in Tonantzin's site. Yet, as Gonzalez-Crussi reads it, the chthonic Tonantzin, gaining strength from her burial in the earth, effects a means to indigenize the imported Virgin. According to the “rationalist” account of her origins, soon after the conquest an anonymous Indian painter transferred the features of the Virgin onto a fabric made of agave fibers. She now wears a rebozo-like mantle, holds her palms in an Indian gesture of prayer and is framed by the sun while her feet rest upon a crescent moon. Her complexion is bronze, as is that of the angel beneath her.

In the far more widely accepted “apparitionist tradition,” the Virgin appeared on December 12th, 1531, several times to an Indian, Cuautlatóhuac, known also as Juan Diego, imprinting her image on his cloak and giving him roses in the midst of winter to prove the miracle to a doubting bishop. A great festival commemorating this event is celebrated in Mexico each December.

Clearly, the phenomenon of Guadalupe-Tonantzin facilitated the conversion of the Indians to Catholicism, yet it is the belief of all the contributors to this volume that her cult transcends and powerfully subverts that form of colonization, working eventually not only to absorb Catholicism into Indian spirituality but to revitalize a people who, through conquest, were “spiritually dead, abandoned by their gods.” Her “coming restored the people's reason to live and to hope.” Gonzalez-Crussi points out that the shade of her skin and her features mark her not as an Indian but a “mestizo woman … her physiology is prophetic, announcing the foundation of a new race.”

The Guadalupe's power to instill devotion is remarkable. She is, as Gloria Anzaldúa writes,

the single most potent religious, political and cultural image of the Chicano/mexicano … She is the symbol of the mestizo true to his or her Indian values … Because Guadalupe took upon herself the psychological and physical devastation of the conquered and oppressed indio, she is our spiritual, political and psychological symbol. As a symbol of hope and faith, she sustains and insures our survival. The Indian, despite extreme despair, suffering and near genocide, has survived. To Mexicans on both sides of the border, Guadalupe is the symbol of our rebellion against the rich, upper and middle class; against their subjugation of the poor and the indio.

(pp. 53–54)

This theme resounds throughout the anthology. Pilgrimages to Guadalupe take the supplicant to Mexico City on December 12th, and to the “immigration jail.” Chicano activist Reubén Martinez names her the “Undocumented Virgin.” Through her, he claims, we can learn of a national connectedness relevant to the current debate over the “illegal” immigration of people to the America that is now dominated by immigrant European peoples. As Martinez sees it, European-American deification of individualism would probably make the togetherness of the annual Mexican festival of la Virgen incomprehensible if not distasteful. Yet, “what Americans misunderstand about Mexicans is precisely what they need the most. Americans need to embrace themselves. I've found in Mexico, through Guadalupe-Tonantzin, what I'd lost in Prop 187, three-strikes-you're-out California.”

Guadalupe is also the guardian of gang members, the Mother figure who through ritual can lead men away from violence and into rebirth. She is “an exhorter to social action” on behalf of the poor and homeless. And she is the face and body of female divinity, empowering women to honor ourselves and resist the oppressions of patriarchy.

Ana Castillo tells a powerful story of the way her abuelita (grandmother) and other women honor the Virgen, protect themselves and aid the young through a secret abortion rite for a teenage member of the family. Luisah Teish, the feminist activist, storyteller and priestess in the Yoruba Lucumi tradition, links Guadalupe to African and African American traditions and offers one of her unfailingly potent rituals to be performed for the Guadalupe during times of strife in women's communities.

Cherríe Moraga pays tribute to the Moon Goddess Coyolxauhqui, the divine being who is recognized in patriarchal culture only through such acceptable representatives as the Catholicized Virgin of Guadalupe. In Mexico, Moraga attends a ceremony marking the moon's eclipse of the sun: “During those six minutes of darkness … I understood for the first time the depth and wonder of the feminine, although I confess I have been awed by it before, as my own female face gazes upon its glory and I press my lips to that apex in the woman I love.”

Also reclaiming the associations with the female divine with sex is Sandra Cisneros, in an exquisitely impudent essay, “Guadalupe, the Sex Goddess.” Cisneros details the ways in which Latinas' bodies are rendered taboo, forbidden zones even to themselves, and the dangers to which this profound silencing exposed her as a young adult. At first, in her rebellion against this personal oppression, she understood Guadalupe only as a “goody goody,” pointing the way to the living death of patriarchal marriage and motherhood. But as she matured as a feminist she realized an alternate presence—“Guadalupe the sex goddess, a goddess who makes me feel good about my sexual power, my sexual energy … My Virgen de Guadalupe is not the mother of God. She is God.”

Cisneros writes of a horrifying image from a porn movie:

The film star's panocha—a tidy, elliptical opening, pink and shiny like a rabbit's ear. To make matters worse, it was shaved and looked especially childlike and unsexual … my own sex has no resemblance to this woman's. My sex, dark as an orchid, rubbery and blue as pulpo, an octopus, does not look nice and tidy, but otherworldly … When I see la Virgen de Guadalupe I want to lift her dress as I did my dolls' and look to see if she comes with chones [underwear], and does her panocha look like mine, and does she have dark nipples too? Yes, I am certain she does. She is not neuter like Barbie. She gave birth. She has a womb. Blessed art thou and blessed is the fruit of thy womb … Blessed art thou, Lupe, and, therefore blessed am I.

(p. 51)

Cisneros and many of the other activist-authors here are testifying to and accomplishing a type of contemporary myth-making, what performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña describes as a radical and empowering popular revision and use of a mythically charged mainstream symbol. In his experience in Mexico, Guadalupe was used as a “demagogic tool of control.” But in the States, Chicanas and Chicanos “had expropriated it, reactivated it, recontextualized it, and turned it into a symbol of resistance”—an anti-racist warrior goddess and muse who “in the Chicano feminist Olympus … stood defiant and compassionate as a symbol of female strength, right next to la Malinche, Frida, Sor Juana, and more recently, Selena.”

Reading this, I was surprised to find, a few pages later, Octavio Paz's “The Sons of La Malinche,” a 1950 essay which many Chicanas have pointed to as troubling if not misogynist because of its identification of the “feminine condition” with “Nothingness” and its projection of woman's alleged psychological and biological “openness,” leading inevitably to passivity, submission and an utter lack of agency. Here some editorial commentary or contextualization would have been especially helpful.

Anthologies—even ones that, like Goddess of the Americas, grace their readers with insight and passion—frequently mete out such frustrations. In general I would have welcomed a greater presence from the editor, Ana Castillo, in more extensive introductions to the individual contributions, as well as a concluding essay reflecting on Guadalupe from the vantage-point of the diverse perspectives the reader experiences as she reads the essays. The homage is to Our Mother at the end of a millennium; but what does She tell us about the next?