Goddess of the America sedited by Ana Castillo

...Each of the essays speaks with multi-ple voices-the writers seem to be all their ages at once, to be writing from both sides of the border, in all possible attitudes toward the Virgin, simulta-neously trangressive and humbly obe-dient, child and parent and grandparent...

...she asked him in his language, Nahuatl...

...The Virgin of Guadalupe appeared first in 1531 to a man named Cuauhtlatohuac-He Who Speaks Like an Eagle-but known since his baptism as Juan Diego, on the hill of Tepeyacac, where the mother-goddess Tonantzin had been worshiped by his people...

...She has the power to dissolve the common bound-aries of time and space and the usual categories of self...

...The pervasive eroticism of the collection re-minds us that devotionalism is the em-bodiment of desire and that prayer is desire's search for a voice with which to speak to God and the saints...

...Guillermo Gomez-Pena says that the Guadalupe of this collection is the cre-ation of this side of the border...

...Lupe, la Virgencita, la Virgencita tan bella, the Virgin of Guad-alupe...

...La Morenita makes the self protean...

...Many found the invitation troubling, Castillo reports, and the evi-dence of the essays is that they had rea-son to be apprehensive...

...This will not shock or surprise anyone who has been to a shrine and witnessed the desires that the Madonna and saints provoke and sanction...

...As Felipe Ehrenberg says, in her "elongated, seedlike, vulva-shaped figure," la Lupe offers "unend-ing possibilities of transformation...

...she embodies traditions and wounds of the past, the violence and courage of the present, and the hopes of the future, at once of Mexico and of the families and individuals that call on her...

...The essays, poetry, and fiction in this ex-traordinary collection record what be-comes possible and necessary in the presence of la Virgencita, what experi-ences, perceptions, and feelings she makes accessible...

...Castillo curls up again in the lap of her abuelita, "nestling my head against her sagging breasts, and feeling the eternal, abounding assurance of Our Mother from her warm breath on my brow...

...What he loved most about the huge statue of la Morenita in his grandmoth-er's living room in L.A., Martinez writes, was that "her olive skin, tinged with the glow of the omnipresent red light, was as dark as my own...

...Devotionalism is the space where the body, otherwise denied, in-sists on itself in Catholic cultures...

...It chal-lenges any attempt to draw a line be-tween the erotic and the political, moreover, or to construe devotionalism and a commitment to social justice as competing, even antithetical, forms of Catholic experience...

...These are not works of sweet nostalgia and child-hood memory but fierce, troubled, and troubling accounts of the writers' re-engagement with la Morenita in the cir-cumstances of their lives now, often long after some of them had rejected her...

...Catholic culture is fundamentally constituted by what anthropologist Lawrence Taylor, writing about con-temporary Ireland, calls the "ancient dialectic" between the "edge" and the "center," or what the Virgin of Guada-lupe discloses as the truth and power of the mestizo...

...To be-come "American Catholic" once meant, among other things, to turn away from the dark-skinned, full-bodied madonnas, who seemed to bear the weight of his-tories too heavy for this culture, toward the thin, pale blue virgins of suburban parishes...

...This recognition of the Virgin's skin becomes the ground of the confidence to resist and to imagine otherwise...

...the distinction be-tween past and present, here and there, now and then evaporates in her pres-ence...

...She is-in a litany taken from this vol-ume-Tequatlanopeuh (She Whose Origins Were in the Rocky Summit), Tlecuauhtlaupeuh (She Who Comes Flying from the Light Like an Eagle of Fire), Tequantlaxopeuh (She Who Banishes Those That Ate Us), Coatlaxo-peuh (She Who Crushed the Serpent's Head), Mother of Mexico, Mother of Orphans, Our Lady of Tepeyac, la Santa Patrona de los Mexicanos, Empress of the Americas, Mother of the True God, Mother of the Giver of Life, Mother of the Lord of Near and Far, Mother of the Lord of Heaven and Earth, Mother Who Never Turns Her Back, Sister in Suffering, Subversive Virgin, Undocumented Virgin, la tele Virgen, "the sustainer of life, the one who protects us against danger, the one who comforts our sorrows," she who "understands everything," Our Lady of the Cannery Workers, Vessel of the Indigenous Spirit, Madrecita, la madre querida, la Morenita, la Diosa, Guadalupe-Tonantzin, Ms...

...The book is an enactment of the transfor-mative power of this encounter...

...I am snuggled under a thick Mexican wool blanket," Ruben Martin-ez finds when he accepts Castillo's in-vitation, "warm as in the womb, at my grandparents' house late at night...

...But it is a fact of Catholic his-tory that the tradition has always exist-ed in relation to the chthonic it has absorbed around the world...

...Poet and novelist Ana Castillo com-missioned a distinguished group of mainly Latino artists and writers, at "the end of a millennium of migrations, miscegenation, conquests, and endless hope and prayer," to contemplate Guad-alupe anew...

...Some of the writers are shocked to find this happening to them, and the works record their resistance to la Virgencita's enduring power in their experience even as they are "dazed by her beau-ty," as Liliana Valenzuela writes, "and the warmth emanating from her...

...Many of the works are deeply erotic, both in their imagining of la Virgencita tan bella and in their reports of what opens up in the self standing before her...

...The erotic here sig-nals the refusal of the writers to be ren-dered other by an image of the sacred that excludes or denies them or that would prohibit them, for whatever po-litically repressive, racist, homophobic reason, from living inside their skins...

...The cholos have one thing right: Guad-alupe lives on the skin, in the vulnera-ble, sexy, wounded, strong body...

...Robert Orsi Am I not your Mother...

...Are you not in the folds of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms...

...When she appeared on the sacred hill to Cu-auhtlatohuac/Juan Diego she was al-ready pregnant with a new race...

...Not surprisingly, Guadalupe has been showing her skin again to her people in the wake of Proposition 187, California's anti-immigration referen-dum...

...To read this only as a history of conquest denies the resilient-erotic-imagination and spirituality of Cuauhtlatohuac/Juan Diego...

...Guadalupe-Tonantzin is a bound-ary-crossing mestiza, a woman of mixed European and Indian ancestry...

...She appears today on bolo ties, playing cards, tattooed on the skins of cholos in East L. A. and South Phoenix, on belts, pillows, towels, cigar boxes, lamp-shades, "among horns honking, ambu-lances running, children crying, all the people groaning and dancing and mak-ing love," in the struggles of farm work-ers, in the places of the sick and dying, carved in soup bones, and in ravines on the border between Mexico and the United States, helping her people make the crossing north in the middle of the night by distracting the border patrols...