Virgin de Guadalupe

 My earliest encounters with the image of the Virgin de Guadalupe were a mixture of the various ways that the image was used by my relatives. My mother and father separated when I was 3 years old and my father lived with my grandmother who was a devoted Catholic. Thus, whenever I went to spend the weekend with my father, I would go to church with my grandmother. There I encountered the way that the catholic religion presented the Virgin de Guadalupe. This was in the was of praying the rosary to her and having life-sized images of her in the church. My grandmother also had a frame of her image in her apartment where she had a few other frames with the images of saints around her. She would often point to her whenever we’d get ready to leave to my mother’s house and tell us that shed take care of us until she saw us again. My mother portrayed the Virgin in a different way. Even though, my mother was not catholic she still idolized the Virgin and had many different areas of our house devoted to her. She had a few candles with the image of the Virgin that she would light in times of struggle or when she had a request for the Virgin to grant. One of the most prominent ways that I remember first seeing the Virgin was when my mother got her tattooed on her arm. Around that time she told me the story of why she still believes in the Virgin even though she is not Catholic. My mother, at a young age started to break away from the church and from the catholic practices as she was starting to gravitate more towards her indigenous roots. She named both me and my brother with aztec names and began to take aztec dancing classes and be more immersed in indigenous communities. She never let go of her devotion to the Virgin and this used to puzzle me because of the history that the Catholic Church had with the indigenous communities. However, she told me that the reason she still respects and idolized the image of the Virgin is because it served as a way to preserve the image of Tonantzin, “our Sacred Mother” for the aztecs. My mother believed it served as a testament to the ingenuity of the natives, who mixed the two images and worshiped the catholic Virgin and the image of Tonantzin as one.