My dad is from Mexico City. When I was very young, I was taken to DF to receive my traditional catholic baptism. My maternal grandmother has a shrine to La Virgen with a picture of Pope Francis below it. Before we married, my wife was a catechist who always carried a chain with La Virgen on it. Working in hundreds of people's houses installing DirecTV with my dad growing up, every single Latinx house we worked on had a portrait or candle of the Virgen. I think growing up in a Mexican culture, she is inescapable.
When my parents divorced, my mom looked to multiple sects of Christianity in an effort to both assimilate into the new culture, and distance herself from my father. We dabbled in the Latter Day Saints church down the street. We tried the evangelical church, Calvary Chapel, in Pomona and Chino Hills. Their go-to stance on catholicism is that "we don't worship idols." That is to say, I've had a lot of contact with the Virgen's image, and very little contact with her religious meaning. We were driving through Mexico City last year and saw signs for the Basilica of Our Lady. My wife, nearly screaming in her excitement, said she wanted to take holy water to her grandma. I just scratched my head in confusion.
After joining the Chicanx studies program at UCLA, I've learned that natives used various forms of opposition to their colonization. In Mexico Profundo by Bonfil-Batalla, he argues that native used methods of resistance, innovation, and appropriation. Professor Gaspar's theory is that the Catholic Church appropriated the Mexica Goddess, Tonantzin to help assimilate the Mexican natives. Bonfil would say that the natives appropriated the Virgin Mary as a form of opposition. I believe it's a little of both.
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