Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Am I not your Mother?" she asked him in his language, Nahuatl. "Are you not in the folds of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms?" The Virgin of Guadalupe appeared first in 1531 to a man named Cuauhtlatohuac - He Who Speaks Like an Eagle - but known since his baptism as Juan Diego, on the hill of Tepeyacac, where the mother-goddess Tonantzin had been worshiped by his people. She appears today on bolo ties, playing cards, tattooed on the skins of cholos in East L.A. and South Phoenix, on belts, pillows, towels, cigar boxes, lamp-shades, "among horns honking, ambulances running, children crying, all the people groaning and dancing and making love," in the struggles of farm workers, in the places of the sick and dying, carved in soup bones, and in ravines on the border between Mexico and the United States, helping her people make the crossing north in the middle of the night by distracting the border patrols. She is - in a litany taken from this volume - Tequatlanopeuh (She Whose Origins Were in the Rocky Summit), Tlecuauhtlaupeuh (She Who Comes Flying from the Light Like an Eagle of Fire), Tequantlaxopeuh (She Who Banishes Those That Ate Us), Coatlaxopeuh (She Who Crushed the Serpent's Head), Mother of Mexico, Mother of Orphans, Our Lady of Tepeyac, la Santa Patrona de los Mexicanos, Empress of the Americas, Mother of the True God, Mother of the Giver of Life, Mother of the Lord of Near and Far, Mother of the Lord of Heaven and Earth, Mother Who Never Turns Her Back, Sister in Suffering, Subversive Virgin, Undocumented Virgin, la tele Virgen, "the sustainer of life, the one who protects us against danger, the one who comforts our sorrows," she who "understands everything," Our Lady of the Cannery Workers, Vessel of the Indigenous Spirit, Madrecita, la madre querida, la Morenita, la Diosa, Guadalupe-Tonantzin, Ms. Lupe, la Virgencita, la Virgencita tan bella, the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Poet and novelist Ana Castillo commissioned a distinguished group of mainly Latino artists and writers, at "the end of a millennium of migrations, miscegenation, conquests, and endless hope and prayer," to contemplate Guadalupe anew. Many found the invitation troubling, Castillo reports, and the evidence of the essays is that they had reason to be apprehensive. These are not works of sweet nostalgia and childhood memory but fierce, troubled, and troubling accounts of the writers' reengagement with la Morenita in the circumstances of their lives now, often long after some of them had rejected her. The essays, poetry, and fiction in this extraordinary collection record what becomes possible and necessary in the presence of la Virgencita, what experiences, perceptions, and feelings she makes accessible. As Felipe Ehrenberg says, in her "elongated, seedlike, vulva-shaped figure," la Lupe offers "unending possibilities of transformation." The book is an enactment of the transformative power of this encounter.

Guadalupe-Tonantzin is a boundary-crossing mestiza, a woman of mixed European and Indian ancestry. When she appeared on the sacred hill to Cuauhtlatohuac/Juan Diego she was already pregnant with a new race; she embodies traditions and wounds of the past, the violence and courage of the present, and the hopes of the future, at once of Mexico and of the families and individuals that call on her. She has the power to dissolve the common boundaries of time and space and the usual categories of self; the distinction between past and present, here and there, now and then evaporates in her presence. "I am snuggled under a thick Mexican wool blanket," Ruben Martinez finds when he accepts Castillo's invitation, "warm as in the womb, at my grandparents' house late at night." Castillo curls up again in the lap of her abuelita, "nestling my head against her sagging breasts, and feeling the eternal, abounding assurance of Our Mother from her warm breath on my brow." Each of the essays speaks with multiple voices - the writers seem to be all their ages at once, to be writing from both sides of the border, in all possible attitudes toward the Virgin, simultaneously trangressive and humbly obedient, child and parent and grandparent. La Morenita makes the self protean. Some of the writers are shocked to find this happening to them, and the works record their resistance to la Virgencita's enduring power in their experience even as they are "dazed by her beauty," as Liliana Valenzuela writes, - "and the warmth emanating from her."

The cholos have one thing right: Guadalupe lives on the skin, in the vulnerable, sexy, wounded, strong body: Many of the works are deeply erotic, both in their imagining of la Virgencita tan bella and in their reports of what opens up in the self standing before her. This will not shock or surprise anyone who has been to a shrine and witnessed the desires that the Madonna and saints provoke and sanction. Devotionalism is the space where the body, otherwise denied, insists on itself in Catholic cultures. The pervasive eroticism of the collection reminds us that devotionalism is the embodiment of desire and that prayer is desire's search for a voice with which to speak to God and the saints. It challenges any attempt to draw a line between the erotic and the political, moreover, or to construe devotionalism and a commitment to social justice as competing, even antithetical, forms of Catholic experience. The erotic here signals the refusal of the writers to be rendered other by an image of the sacred that excludes or denies them or that would prohibit them, for whatever politically repressive, racist, homophobic reason, from living inside their skins. What he loved most about the huge statue of la Morenita in his grandmother's living room in L.A., Martinez writes, was that "her olive skin, tinged with the glow of the omnipresent red light, was as dark as my own." This recognition of the Virgin's skin becomes the ground of the confidence to resist and to imagine otherwise. Not surprisingly, Guadalupe has been showing her skin again to her people in the wake of Proposition 187, California's anti-immigration referendum.

Guillermo Gomez-Pena says that the Guadalupe of this collection is the creation of this side of the border. To become "American Catholic" once meant, among other things, to turn away from the dark-skinned, full-bodied madonnas, who seemed to bear the weight of histories too heavy for this culture, toward the thin, pale blue virgins of suburban parishes. But it is a fact of Catholic history that the tradition has always existed in relation to the chthonic it has absorbed around the world. To read this only as a history of conquest denies the resilient - erotic - imagination and spirituality of Cuauhtlatohuac/Juan Diego. Catholic culture is fundamentally constituted by what anthropologist Lawrence Taylor, writing about contemporary Ireland, calls the "ancient dialectic" between the "edge" and the "center," or what the Virgin of Guadalupe discloses as the truth and power of the mestizo.

Robert Orsi's most recent book is Thank You, Saint Jude (Yale). He teaches at Indiana University.