It’s not about the Virgen of the Conquest, but about the Conquest of the Virgen: Making Privates Public

It’s not about the Virgen of the Conquest, but about the Conquest of the Virgen: Making Privates Public

Deena J. González Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Alma Lopez, eds.

Our Lady of Controversy: AlmaLopez’s Irreverent Apparition (Univ. of Texas Press, 2011)

What happens when controversy over an art piece in a museum develops in an environment redolent of religious tradition, cultural lifeways and manners, and extreme wealth or poverty? These are the historical contexts in which the controversy that developed over Alma López’s Our Lady must be read. The manner in which López’s interpretation of the mestiza Virgen de Guadalupe would affront a small but exceedingly vocal, media-savvy group of New Mexican protestors has historical origins in devotional practices that date back to the sixteenth century as much as in the economic and cultural colonization that has taken place in the region since the nineteenth century. As I Am Joaquín, a film and manifesto in Chicano history from the 1960s recognized, Mexicans in the conquered territory of the north “had won the battle for cultural survival, but lost the one for resources.”