The Dark Virgin

"On the northeastern edge of Mexico City but three miles from its Zacalo, at Villa Gustavo Madero, formerly Guadalupe, is the nation's religious shrine. On a Sunday afternoon, the public square and large church are filled with people of all stations in life but predominantly Indian. Clearly, here is something which has captured the emotions and souls of the people .... Nothing to be seen in Canada or Europe equals it in the volume or the vitality of its moving quality or in the depth...
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"On the northeastern edge of Mexico City but three miles from its Zacalo, at Villa Gustavo Madero, formerly Guadalupe, is the nation's religious shrine. On a Sunday afternoon, the public square and large church are filled with people of all stations in life but predominantly Indian. Clearly, here is something which has captured the emotions and souls of the people .... Nothing to be seen in Canada or Europe equals it in the volume or the vitality of its moving quality or in the depth of its spirit of religious devotion."She is the first thing you notice in Mexico: In the taxi taking you from the airport or railway station, in your first tentative busses, in the small stores you step into for cigarettes or to ask directions. You will find her in the first houses to which you are invited. You can scarcely avoid her if you go into any Mexican churches. In the taxis and busses it will probably be a colored postcard of a dark-skinned girl, dressed in blue and rose, encased in a sort of golden shell, balanced on a crescent moon held up by an angel. It will hang over the driver of the bus or taxi, framed in small electric lights or artificial flowers - with perhaps a pair of baby shoes beside it or perhaps another post-card (this time of a bullfighter or a soccer player). In the stores she will have a wax votive candle and fresh flowers, probably daisies or carnations. And in the homes (the richer and more cosmopolitan ones to which you will probably have earlier access) she may be represented in a modernistic mural or a colonialprimitive painting, as a statue built into a niche or as part of a tapestry.In these better-off homes (which run the Mexican architectural gamut from Bauhaus modern through Spanish and Beverley Hills Moorish to almost anything ever dreamed up by Frank Lloyd Wright, Wilson Mizener or Churriguera) she will be an essential part of the decoration, a key-note, a motif. In the poorer homes you get to see later, she will be a fixture, like the stove or the ice-box. In the poorest homes, her altar with the flowers and candles will be the only solid fixture in a household which sleeps on straw mats, cooks outdoors on a charcoal brazier, and counts its possessions in livestock. You will find every imaginable representation of her in the churches - from altar paintings to the crudest ex-voto offerings.You may find her outlined in neon as part of a downtown spectacular, chalked into a hillside, on a throwaway advertising a mouthwash, pricked out in flowers in public parks; clowns and hucksters will distribute booklets about her as a preliminary to hawking patent medicines; over the radio and television marathon charity campaigns will be conducted by the leading Mexican film stars in her name. Bullfighters have her image woven into their parade capes; she is a popular tattoo subject; almost everyone wears her medal. Visitors might find something vulgar, even sacrilegious, in this reiteration - which sometimes resembles other countries' symbols for Mother, Liberty, Sweetheart, Country, rolled into one. But the Mexicans are quick to appreciate the spirit in which she is represented- even when the representation is in the most appalling aesthetic taste. When the noted left-wing painter Diego Rivera started putting her into a comic mural for the new Insurgentes Theater, the public outrage was immediate, overwhelming and more than vocal. The Most Holy Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas - to give Her full title - is such an indelible and inextricable part of Mexican life that it is almost impossible to describe contemporary Mexico, or explain its history, except as it refers to Her. She, as a recent politician has acknowledged, is the only unifying factor that holds together a country and a people separated from the earliest times by extraordinary barriers of geography, language, culture, conquest, revolution, poverty and persecution.