Ojo de la Diosa

Abstract

The essay interprets Delilah Montoya’s artworks in the context of so-called feminist theology, drawing from its ideas about desire, natality, and self-divination. After discussing the theme of desire and the quest for women’s religious agency in some of Montoya’s earlier works, the essay focuses on the photo-installation La Guadalupana, elucidating the artist’s technique in reorganizing the parameters of the “proto-subject” of Chicano cultural nationalism. One of the reified embodiments of this subject allegedly is el pinto, the Mexican American male convict or ex-convict. Elaborating upon Montoya’s working methods and her motivation to extract the pinto image from the prison confines and spirit his body into the museum, the essay finally argues that the installation engages in a bi-gendering performance that ritualizes the male body as the site of suffering. At the same time, the vernacular religious aesthetics of the work situate the artist herself as the “Eye” of a Mexican American community—that is, as an embodied subject whose religious authority dismantles the myth that only the male body can act as the writer and reader of culture.