Jeanette Favrot Peterson

The Virgin of Guadalupe

Of the many images of the Virgin Immaculate venerated in Mexico, only the Virgin of Guadalupe has an overarching political significance. This essay will challenge two myths concerning her role as national emblem: first, that her cult spontaneously welded together all the strata of New Spain; and second, that Guadalupe from the sixteenth century on served as a symbol of freedom for the oppressed native populations. Instead, her meaning was reinterpreted for different ruling parties primarily in those times when existing sociopolitical institutions were being reconstituted.

The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.

Examines in detail the murals painted on the vault walls of the Augustinian monastery at Malinalco, southwest of Mexico City, which have been progressively uncovered from layers of whitewash and restored since the 1970s. Shows how the combination of motives promoted the political and religious agendas of the Spanish conquerors, but also preserved a

Creating the Virgin of Guadalupe: The Cloth, The Artist, and Sources in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

It was in 1531 that, according to the apparition legend first recorded over a hundred years later in 1648, Juan Diego’s visionary experience of the Virgin of Guadalupe was miraculously mapped onto his tilma (tilmatli in Nahuatl) or woven cloak. This painted cloth, hereafter referred to as the tilma image, is said to be the same relic venerated today in the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City (fig. 1). However, no sacred image is invented from whole cloth, to use a highly appropriate metaphor here, and the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe is no exception. Moreover, its very materiality makes it vulnerable to the passage of time, the laws of physics and human intervention. As an object of human craft produced post-Conquest, it has a traceable genealogy within the combustible mix of art modes, mixed media and theological tracts found circulating in early colonial New Spain.

Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico (review)

As a companion to Laras first book on the sixteenth-century monastic architecture of New Spain, this volume emphasizes the liturgical and performative activities that took place within the ambitious complexes built to Christianize and civilize the indigenous population. The author shifts his attention from the theological and artistic sources for the newly constructed buildings and their decorative programs, to a more compelling narrative of how these spaces produced meaning for their primary constituencies, the Amerindian neophyte. In describing the bodily enactment of Christian tenets and liturgical practices, Lara puts flesh on the bricks and mortar he so richly explored in his first book.