My Virgen de Guadalupe Is a Feminist. Some Men Can’t Seem to Handle That.
She’s an icon of Mexican culture, but women have interpreted her differently than those who support our machismo institutions
“When I look at La Virgen de Guadalupe now, she is not the Lupe of my childhood, no longer the one in my grandparents’ house in Tepeyac,” writes Sandra Cisneros in her 1996 essay “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess.” “Nor is she the one of the Roman Catholic Church, the one I bolted the door against in my teens and twenties. Like every woman who matters to me, I have had to search for her in the rubble of history. And I have found her.”
Most of the women I grew up around had shrines of the Virgencita in their home. They had her image tattooed on their bodies, hanging as fresheners in the rearview mirrors of their cars, wrapped around the candles that lit up their homes, or spread across the warm blankets that covered their bodies at night. Still, for many of us, her image stirs up complex, often contradictory, sentiments — ones riddled with questions about cultural authenticity and whether or not her image can ever be fully uprooted from its anchor in machismo or disconnected from feelings of shame and guilt.
