One paper down...

" Luisa: You have to make the clitoris your best friend.
Tenoch: What kind of friend is always hiding?"

-Y Tu Mama Tambien

So I just finished my final paper for my class on Latin American Cinema. In it I focused on female identity in Mexican films.
The paper was tough, and I'm glad it's done with, but at least I learned a bit. Here in New Mexico, we see many images of the sacred Virgin of Guadalupe. I'd never known exactly what the significance of the image was until I did my recent research.

Basically, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a representation of the Virgin Mary in the Americas. More specifically, as Joanne Hershfield describes in her book Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman, the legend goes like this: "a dark-skinned apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared to an Indian named Juan Diego in 1531, just ten years after the Spanish destruction of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan.”

While the Virgin of Guadalupe could have potentially been seen as a threat to standard European Christianity, Hershfield suggests a certain undermining of Aztec culture: “By building the symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe upon the existing structure of Tonantzin [the hill on which the Virgin apparently appeared, also dedicated to the Aztec virgin Tonantzin]…indigenous groups were able to incorporate the idea of a Christian universe into an existing religious discourse. However, it appears that by seemingly allowing the Indians to construct their own meaning of the Virgin, the Catholic Church was more easily able to achieve its larger colonial intent.”

So I'm sort of cheating on my blog by rehashing what I just wrote twenty minutes ago. But this is cool stuff, and I'm excited to know the significance of this prevalent image. If you have a chance, Wikipedia "La Malinche," another image of Mexican identity usually intertwined with the Virgin. La Malinche happens to be Hernan Cortez's Aztec "lover." Her story is also quite fascinating.