Hail Mary, mother of Mexico.

Mexican Phoenix
Our Lady of Guadalupe:
Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries
David A. Brading
Cambridge University Press,
$34.95, 444 pp.

In describing the history of Our Lady of Guadalupe, David A. Brading also tells the history of Mexico, impressing on readers the inseparability of the nation and its Marian tradition. The tradition has been a complicated one, marked from the beginning by controversies over the historical and theological veracity and significance of the apparition and the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As Brading notes, cults of holy images have been the subject of a long debate in Christianity. At the beginning of the modern era, the Council of Trent (1545- 63) attempted to resolve the debate by affirming the veneration of images, while guarding against idolatry by placing cults under the careful supervision of bishops. Just before Trent, Spain brought Mexico under European domination and into Christian history with the bloody conquest of the Aztecs, completed about 1521.

Christian New Spain, in Brading's account, begins with two Marian images. One was an import. The small statue of Our Lady of Los Remedios reportedly came to the New World with the conquistadors and became a symbol of Spain in America. The image of Guadalupe, on the other hand, emerged on Mexican soil and that fact helps to explain the source of its power for centuries to come.

Mexico's chief religious symbol came into existence in 1531, when the Virgin appeared to the Indian Juan Diego and imprinted her likeness on his cape. Or maybe not. The first written account of the apparition was published over a century later in a book by Miguel Sanchez in 1648. It is clear that Sanchez did not invent devotion to the Guadalupe, since there had already been sanctuaries dedicated to her. Still, the earlier silence became one of the sources of debate about the accuracy of Sanchez's account and the truth of the apparition. For the Creole clergy of New Spain, though, the Guadalupe of Sanchez became the spiritual foundation of their own homeland. In addition, Miguel Sanchez provided the beginnings of an Indian and Mestizo religious identity. Juan Diego was an Indian, and this fact drew attention to the fact that the Guadalupe Virgin had brown skin and dark hair. Just after Sanchez's version of the Guadalupe apparition, Luis Laso de la Vega published a tract containing the text known as the Nican Mopohua, a version of the Juan Diego story in Nahuatl.

Writers continued to attack and defend the Guadalupe story, and to offer revisionist accounts of it, but devotion to the Guadalupe became continually deeper and broader. In 1737, Our Lady of Guadalupe was officially accepted as the patron of Mexico City. The Mexican Virgin was acclaimed as the patron of all New Spain in 1746, and Pope Benedict XIV approved her election as national patron in 1754. The coronation of the image in 1895 shook Mexicans from an age of religious indifference and brought new life to the Mexican church. Ultimately, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Our Lady of Guadalupe as patron of the whole American hemisphere in 1999.

Throughout these years, the identification of the Mexican Virgin with Mexico became progressively closer. When Miguel Hidalgo raised the standard of revolt against Spanish rule in 1810, he handed out an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe to his followers, and the Indians and Mestizos who joined the movement of independence called on the Mother of Guadalupe in their fight against the Spanish. When Mexico did achieve independence in 1821 under the rule of Agustin de Iturbide, the Mexican clergy gave thanks to Our Lady of Guadalupe for saving the Mexican church from the anticlericalism of the Spanish Cortes. During Mexico's own periods of anticlericalism, in the nineteenth century under Juarez and the liberals, and in the twentieth century under Calles and the revolutionary forces, the Guadalupe image became a rallying point for Mexican Catholics. When the Cristeros rose up against the suppression and persecution of the church by the Calles government, they marched under flags imprinted with the Mexican Virgin. Even the anticlerical radicals often saw the tradition of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a valuable part of the popular history of the nation.

Illustrated with black-and-white plates, Mexican Phoenix offers a detailed and provocative discussion of a subject of central importance for all those interested in iconography, history of religion, or Mexican culture. Brading approaches his topic chiefly from the perspective of intellectual history rather than social history, and this approach has limitations. No one can treat every angle of a matter as complex as the tradition of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Still, while reading this impressive book, I often had the feeling that the most important part of the story took place away from the writing tables of the historians, theologians, and artists described by Brading. Since most of the writers were European, by ancestry or by culture, Brading tends to place his history of the Guadalupe image within a European tradition dating back to ancient controversies over iconoclasm. Only when he reaches the most recent interpreters, those influenced by liberation theology, does he consider the role of indigenous American traditions in shaping the Guadalupe devotion. Even then, the liberation theologians are often people coming out of a European background talking about indigenous people.

I have no strong ideological objection to so-called Eurocentrism. In the case of the Guadalupe image, however, we are faced with the historic expansion of religious commitment among non-Europeans. Some of the early critics of the Guadalupe devotion claimed that the native adherents were maintaining a surreptitious worship of the Tonantzin, the Aztec mother of the gods. The liberation theologians have turned this accusation on its head, finding a "Saint Mary Tonantzin" of the oppressed in the pages of the Nican Mopohua. Both of these kinds of claims leave open the question of how pre-Hispanic traditions, as well as those of Europe, contributed to the acceptance and the interpretation of the Guadalupe image. In addition, when Sanchez wrote the first account, the painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe already had intense popular appeal, and when Miguel Hidalgo invoked the name of Guadalupe, it was a name with profound significance for the nonliterate masses of Mexico. I wonder, then, whether the intellectuals so ably portrayed by Brading really shaped faith in Our Lady of Guadalupe, as Brading suggests, or whether these heirs to European thought were only responding to the slow growth of an indigenous, popular Christian tradition.

Carl L. Bankson III teaches in the sociology and anthropology department at Tulane.