Wandering the Streets of Guanajuato with the Spirit of La Virgen Maria.

One of the best parts of travel is learning about the local culture. In Mexico, the cult of Mary is pretty much omnipresent. It started in 1531, only ten years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, when an indigenous peasant named Juan Diego (Aztec name Cuahtlatoatzin) had a series of visions in which the Virgin Mary appeared to him. The image that was painted from these visions is now known as Our Lady of Guadalupe, and is the most famous piece of religious iconography in Mexico. 

I'm always fascinated by the syncretism that develops as indigenous cultures, forced to profess the religion of the colonizers, strive subversively to incorporate their own cosmology and deities into the symbology of the oppressor. The Aztec painter who created the famous image, thought to be Marcos Cipac de Aquino, managed to do this, consciously or not. The color of her mantle was originally reserved for the divine couple Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, two fertility gods. The spiked rays behind her symbolize the leaves of the maguey, source of the divine beverage, pulque. And the fact that she appeared on the hill in Tepeyac that was sacred to the goddess Tonantzin (whose name means "our mother") makes clear that this is a continuation of a much older system of worship.

The Catholic hierarchy of the time was well aware of this and for many years denounced the image as idolatrous and Satanic. But the veneration of the image continued to grow in popularity, and eventually the spirit of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" won out. In 1754, Pope Benedict XIV declared Our Lady of Guadalupe as the patroness of New Spain. Cuahtlatoatzin himself, under his colonizer name of Juan Diego, was canonized as a saint in 1990.

Which is a long way of getting to our experience of the Marian imagery that abounds in Guanajuato.

The callejones that we take from our apartment to various places in town feature many small shrines like this one. I especially like the little donkeys on the right side.

And this one, featuring a guest appearance by...wait...is that Donald Duck?

It sure is.

Another part of the iconography of Our Lady is the prominence of flowers, also associated with the worship of Tonantzin.

A more modern abstraction of the image.

The images are not just painted. There are also statues of different sizes and colors.

Some shrines are more elaborate than others.

There are even nativity scenes randomly placed in little niches along the alleyways.

Many of the images feature Mary with the darker skin of an indigenous person.

This ties to the cult of Cristo Negro (Black Christ) that is popular in many parts of Mexico and Central America. This cult originated in Guatemala with a wooden effigy of Christ sculpted in 1594 that blacked over time and began to be associated with miraculous occurrences. 

The largest shrine to Cristo Negro in Mexico is in Chalma, just south of Mexico City.

I like to see this a an illustration of the continued resistance of indigenous people to the oppression of the colonizer. 

By the way, despite the ubiquity of religious iconography here, almost every younger local person we talk to, especially the more educated ones, are indifferent to or actively opposed to organized religion.

P.