Virgin Of Guadalupe Quotes

something about giving himself over to a woman was worse than having lunch with the devil...

When our mother is seen only as the one-dimensional Mary of modern times, instead of the great dual force of life and death, She is relegated to the same second-class status of most women in the world. She is without desires of Her own, selfless and sexless except for Her womb. She is the cook, the mistress, bearer and caretaker of children and men. Men call upon Her and carry Her love and magic to form a formidable fortress, a team of cannons to protect them against their enemies. But for a long, long time the wars that women have been left to wage on behalf of men, on behalf of the human race, have started much sooner, in the home, in front of the hearth, in the womb. We do what we must to protect and provide for our young our families, our tribes

There was a twofold awkwardness attached to Juan Diego’s attempts to have sex with the life-size Guadalupe doll—better said, the awkwardness of Juan Diego’s imagining he was having sex with the plastic virgin.

One of the great creations of Mexican Catholicism was the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to a Mexican Indian, on the same hill where, before the Conquest, a pre-Hispanic goddess had been worshiped. Catholicism was able to take root in Mexico by transforming the ancient gods into the saints, virgins, and devils of the new religion. Nothing similar could occur in India with Muslim monotheism or Protestant Christianity, both of which saw the cult of images, of saints and virgins, as idolatry. The Christianity imported by the British was poor in rites and ceremonies, but full of moral and sexual rigidity. In other words: the exact opposite of popular Hinduism. Similarly, in Christian asceticism, the central concept is redemption; in India, it is liberation. These two words encompass opposite ideas of this world and the next, of the body and the soul.

All, whether believers or not, find something to love, and to love intensely, in the Virgin of Guadalupe. Against her in this land, no man blasphemes. She is the ideal, the light that shines above our strife and our incredulity.

By the waters of baptism, the active European was entirely absorbed within the contemplation of the Indian. The faith that Europe imposed in the sixteenth century was, by virtue of the Guadalupe, embraced by the Indian. Catholicism has become an Indian religion. By the twenty-first century, the locus of the Catholic Church, by virtue of numbers, will be Latin America, by which time Catholicism itself will have assumed the aspect of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Brown skin.

But Lupe both genuinely worshiped Our Lady of Guadalupe and fiercely doubted her; Lupe’s doubt was borne by the child’s judgmental sense that Guadalupe had submitted to the Virgin Mary—that Guadalupe was complicitous in allowing Mother Mary to be in control.

As a self-described Guadalupe girl, Lupe was sensitive to Guadalupe being overshadowed by the “Mary Monster.” Lupe not only meant that Mary was the most dominant of the Catholic Church’s “stable” of virgins; Lupe believed that the Virgin Mary was also “a domineering virgin.

The Solitude Virgin, Lupe said, was “a white-faced pinhead in a fancy gown.” It further irked Lupe that Guadalupe got second-class treatment in the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad; the Guadalupe altar was off to the left side of the center aisle—an unlit portrait of the dark-skinned virgin (not even a statue) was her sole recognition. And Our Lady of Guadalupe was indigenous; she was a native, an Indian; she was what Lupe meant by “one of us.

In Charly Cruz’s garage there was a mural painted on one of the cement walls. The mural was six feet tall and maybe ten feet long and showed the Virgin of Guadalupe in the middle of a lush landscape of rivers and forests and gold mines and silver mines and oil rigs and giant cornfields and wheat fields and vast meadows where cattle grazed. The Virgin had her arms spread wide, as if offering all of these riches in exchange for nothing. But despite being drunk, Fate noticed right away there was something wrong about her face. One of the Virgin’s eyes was open and the other eye was closed.

The Virgin Mary is a girl gang leader in Heaven. She is a Hell’s Angel and she rides a Harley. This I know for I come from people who think axle grease is holy water. They hold Mass out in the driveway under the hood on Saturdays. The engine is their altar. They genuflect and say prayers all day, and baptize themselves in crankcase oil. The soles of their shoes always smell like gasoline. I come from people who think Confession a necessity only the moment before a head-on collision.

On December 9, 1531, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to an Indian named Juan Diego. A carpet of roses blossoming in the dead of winter and a Madonna with a coffee-colored face appearing on Juan Diego’s robe were enough further evidence to convince the local bishop to erect a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. There are those who say Guadalupe is Tonantzin, an Aztec goddess who existed years before Juan Diego came along. The Spanish missionaries, knowing that she had quite a local following,

I thank the dark Virgin, morena like me... There are many who will tell you that the dark-skinned girls, las morenitas, have got no chance. But when Iwas a girl, I noted the Virgen de Guadalupe, her with the important job of taking care of all the pueblitos, and standing in every home with candles and all the respect, and her own day of Guadalupe with people crawling across zócalo and up the cathedral steps on raw knees and singing themselves ronca all night long

...the Virgin of Guadalupe was not a mere Christian front for the worship of a pagan goddess. The adoration of Guadalupe represented a profound change of Aztec religious belief...The pagan Tonantzin was a dual-natured earth goddess who fed her Mexican children and devoured their corpses. She wore a necklace of human hands and hearts with a human skull hanging over her flaccid breasts, which nursed both gods and men. her idol depicts her as a monster with two streams of blood shaped like serpents flowing from her neck. Like other major deities in the Aztec pantheon, Tonantzin was both a creator and destroyer...The Christian ideals of beauty, love, and mercy associated with the Virgin of Guadalupe were never attributed to the pagan deity." William Madsen, "Religious Syncretism", Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 6, p.378.

The only one I ever liked was Jesus, the baby, the boy. I was always impatient with the crucifixion bit, and I was always mad at his so-called father. God, [...] You know, my grandmother mainly prayed to the Virgin, and, in fact, she told me the Virgin appeared to her in dreams, and once, she said, in a vision. I think she secretly didn't like that God guy either. In fact, if anything, it was as though she emotionally lumped God and the Devil together. Distant, threatening - one threatened if you did, one threatened if you didn't. Both masculine, isolated entities. [...] That God guy has us in a bind. Too isolated, not enough joy. He needs a lover, that's what I think. [...] Yeah, I think God needs some pussy.

The front hall doubled as an art gallery. The exhibition was a series of modern interpretations of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Virgin as seamstress. The Virgin wearing boxing gloves. The Virgin working the drive-thru window at McDonald’s.

Virgin of Guadalupe—a syncretism of the Aztec mother goddess Tonantzin and Mary of Bethlehem—that’s the focus of veneration in Mexican Catholicism.

Pídele a casi cualquier chicana o chicano fuera de la academia que nombre a una mujer famosa de origen mexicano y probablemente vas a escuchar "Dolores Huerta". Si la persona conoce a nuestras escritoras contemporáneas, quizá mencione a "Sandra Cisneros" o "Ana Castillo". Si preguntas por un nombre de los primeros tiempos, te podrán decir Sor Juana, la monja rebelde de los mil seiscientos. Cuando trates de profundizar, la persona a tu lado tal vez va a decir, "iMe doy por vencido!, pero, bueno... ahí está la Virgen de Guadalupe, que creo, está en muchísimas camisetas. Era inevitable entonces, que la necesidad de un libro como este sea finalmente reconocida. Ask almost anyone outside of academia to name famous US women of Mexican origin and you will probably hear ‘Dolores Huerta.’ If the person knows our contemporary writers, maybe ‘Sandra Cisneros’ and ‘Ana Castillo.’ If you ask for a name from earlier times, you might get ‘Sor Juana’-the rebel nun of the 1600’s. When you try to dig deeper, your companion may whimper, ‘I give up! Well…there’s the Virgin of Guadalupe, she’s on a lot of T-shirts. It was inevitable, then, that the need for a book like this would be recognized.

Thus Juan as a child had loved her very deeply and had trusted her, and his father had told him that she was the one set aside especially to watch over Mexicans. When he saw German or Gringo children in the streets he knew that his Virgin didn’t give a damn about them because they were not Mexicans. When you add to this the fact that Juan did not believe in her with his mind and did with every sense, you have his attitude toward Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Carrying signs that read “Peregrinación, Penitencia, Revolución”—Pilgrimage, Penance, Revolution—the group passed through rural communities along the way, led by a man hoisting a cloth banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe.