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Writing about the “La Guadalupana” shawl
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.
Further FEARLESS Adventures in the Female Power Project
Now I will write about the development of the “Fearless” designs honoring Harriet Tubman. When I was surveying people about their heroes, Harriet Tubman came up many times. I didn’t know much about her. Like many famous people I have researched, a library search comes up with more books targeted to a juvenile audience than to an adult one. So one afternoon I was picking up my kid at the library after school and I had grabbed a few books about Tubman. My kid said, “Oh, don’t do something about her, every year someone does a report on Harriet Tubman, I am so tired of her!” So my kid knew more about Harriet than I did, but maybe not enough.
There are some things about Harriet that I can imagine show up in every “Black History Month” oral report: 1.) Born a slave in Maryland in 1822. 2.) At 12 years old was hit in the head, nearly died, and suffered the effects for the rest of her life (heard voices and had sleeping spells). 3.) She was an entrepreneur. Her owner allowed her to hire herself out and keep some of the proceeds. She invested in some horses to help with her jobs. 4.) She was extremely physically strong, as strong or stronger than most men. 5.) She was soaked in the Christian faith and believed she spoke directly with God. 6.) In 1849, after one failed attempt with her brothers (who were too afraid and gave up), she succeeds in emancipating herself by escaping to Pennsylvania. 7.) Between 1850 and 1860, she comes back to Maryland about 10 times to help her family and friends escape slavery. She helps free about 70 people this way and became a famous conductor on the Underground Railway, never losing a passenger. Many escapes are quite dramatic, showing her intelligence, dedication, and fearlessness. 8.) 1862–1865: during the American Civil War Tubman works for the Union forces, including as a scout and a spy. She also develops programs to help emancipated slaves figure out how to make a living. In 1863 she becomes the first woman to lead an armed raid for the U.S. Among other things, she helps free over 700 slaves from Confederate territory. She is never paid for this service, neither does she receive a pension for this work. 9.) After the war she works as a public speaker and a women’s suffrage supporter. 10.) She works to establish a home for elderly and poor African Americans in Auburn, New York. She dies there in 1913.
So, those are the basics. That’s the oral report. Now where’s the art? I was in the middle of “Bride of Hurricanes” when I dropped everything to go to “Tubman Days” on the Eastern Shore. How lucky for me that Harriet was from Dorchester County Maryland, only a couple hours from my studio! How lucky for me that the Maryland Park Service and the National Park Service both have Harriet Tubman Parks, together with the Underground Railroad National Byway, and that on March 10 (Tubman Day!) there was to be a symposium with leading scholars and historians about Harriet and the meaning of freedom, along with presentations, seminars, and tours over several days. I did the Tubman driving tour whilst listening to the Tubman app! I met her most recent biographer, whose (non-juvenile!) book I subsequently read. But the art, I found that in the marshy landscape of the Blackwater Preserve, which has changed little since Harriet was six and hired out to a farmer who set her to work checking muskrat traps, in winter, while she was sick with the measles. (I felt like a Harriet groupie, going from one “point of interest” to another.) There was art, also, in Harriet’s words.
Here I would like to pursue a tangent about muskrat. After I had heard the story about the muskrat traps and six-year-old sick Araminta (she changed her name to Harriet later), after I left the Blackwater Preserve, I was thinking, “I wonder what the muskrat were for—to eat? Do they still use muskrat?” Driving into Cambridge I saw a sign in front of a store, “Local Fresh Muskrat.” I did not go in. Should I have gone in? I had oysters for lunch instead. And then later that day I visited the museum in Dover, Delaware, where, in a vitrine, I saw a stuffed muskrat and the answer to my question. “Muskrats, or marsh rabbits, have been trapped for many decades. ‘Ratting’ is the farmer-waterman’s job. At one time, their pelts were sold for fur clothing and meat was served in most homes and restaurants.”
Imagery
Her knowledge of the landscape of the Eastern Shore was essential to Harriet’s success as a conductor. She had to navigate the waterways and woods at night. She had to travel in the winter months when the nights were longest. This land was in her flesh; her flesh was of this land. Knowledge of the underground railroad traveled along the waterways which were populated by strong communities of freed black watermen. Harriet would have had access to these people while she hired herself out. I photographed the marsh grasses from below, as if I were hiding in them. I photographed the water, something I have been doing in many places for years. On the other side of the water: a marshy shore.
Another image I used was a printer’s dingbat from the time showing a woman slave escaping, a satchel in her hand. These were used again and again for runaway slave notices in the newspaper. I also used the printed notice of “Minty’s” (Araminta’s) first unsuccessful escape with her brothers in 1849.
Note that in the advert, Minty is described as “fine looking.” Harriet was a good looking young woman. And small.
These are the words I have chosen to print on these pieces: “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person.” This is how Harriet describes what she did when she emancipated herself. She had to look at herself to see that she was the same person, only that now that she was in a free state, there had been a qualitative change. Her body belonged to herself. Those were HER hands now, not her owner’s. One’s hands are the easiest part of one’s own body to see, but they also represent any work that you do, your action upon the world. That action was now hers to govern. The fruits of her actions were to be her wealth now. Here is the whole quote as written in Sarah Bradford’s 1869 biography: “When I found I had crossed that line I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything, the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.” This moment of looking at light through the trees (it must have been dawn) I have tried to capture in the depiction of hands on these pieces.
The largest word on the scarf and shawl is “FEARLESS.” I have been thinking about Harriet’s fearlessness. It was described by her “passengers” as a single-minded (almost uncanny) and fierce dedication to achieving escape. She threatened to shoot those who gave up along the way, because they would be a threat to the success of the other passengers. I have a hypothesis that this fearlessness, which should not be confused with recklessness—she was very cautious and understood danger—this fearlessness might have come about as a result of her head injury. She just was not afraid. Danger would not stop her. She would be free, and she would free her family too, because, “There was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land. But I was free, and they [her family] should be free.” God spoke to her, told her what to do, and she was not afraid. This may be the central attribute of Sister Harriet. It is no less admirable if it came about by a physical accident. Through her fearlessness she took possession of her own body, her own self. Wear that.
Epilogue
When Minty was lying on the bed of the loom, her blood crusted on her crazy unkempt hair, and she was still not dying, her owner brought by one potential buyer after another. One man looked at her and said, “She ain’t worth sixpence!” And now, as everyone knows, Harriet Tubman’s visage will soon appear on the American twenty dollar bill. The following depiction is a perfectly appropriate interpretation of Harriet Tubman, born Araminta Ross.
Addendum:
FEAR LESS perSISTERS prints
Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross; c. 1822 – March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist, humanitarian, and an armed scout and spy for the United States Army during the American Civil War. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some thirteen missions to rescue approximately seventy enslaved families and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She later helped abolitionist John Brown recruit men for his raid on Harpers Ferry, and in the post-war era was an active participant in the struggle for women’s suffrage.
This design is based on a previously undocumented photograph which has emerged from the ether of history, showing the Underground Railroad “conductor” in her younger days — slim, impeccably dressed and confident. The late 1860s carte-de-visite photo comes from fellow abolitionist Emily Howland’s album. It is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Wikipedia and Smithsonian Magazine
DESIGN NOTE
I had made a shawl design for Harriet before starting the perSISTERS series. When the new image of Tubman surfaced, I knew I needed to make a print about her, too. This gave me the opportunity to play with the word “FEARLESS” and pull it apart into two words. Fear is the emotion that fuels a despot’s power. So one place to start the work is to fear less.
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