The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy by Nichole M. Flores

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy by Nichole M. Flores Michael A. Romero The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy. By Nichole M. Flores. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2021. 184 pp. $49.95. Nichole Flores engages the fields of religion, aesthetics, and political theology in her monograph, The Aesthetics of Solidarity. The book is an examination of how aesthetic experience informs, fosters, and builds political and religious solidarity. She challenges the modern liberal presupposition that religion threatens the stability of secular law and political institutions by examining how aesthetic experience can help shape society's basic structures, especially those pertaining to justice. Religious symbol and sensibilities should not be rejected from political philosophy, in her view, because the aesthetic experience central to religious life does offer valid examples of how the particularities of the experiences and the concerns of racial minorities, especially "Black and Brown people," are irrevocable from one's identity and so are central to constructing a just society based on solidarity. The Guadalupe event—the Catholic tradition that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, appeared in 1531 to Juan Diego, a Native American convert, on Tepeyac hill in colonial Mexico leaving her image emblazoned on his tilma—informs Flores's political theology as the religious-cultural-political symbol that exemplifies solidarity needed for a just and pluralistic democratic society. As a work of Latine theology (her own designation) Flores also engages black and brown voices of communities in Denver, Colorado as examples of how aesthetic solidarity works in a modern U.S. context. The performance of The Miracle at Tepeyac, a play that portrays a struggling Hispanic parish in Denver alongside the story of the apparition, is one of many qualitative [End Page 59] examples of aesthetic engagement that show religious and cultural particularities as valid points for the cultivation of a common good in a democratic society. To this end, Flores takes on prominent political and feminist voices like John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum to construct her argument that religious affections and particularities should not simply have a place in deliberating about society's basic structures but are central tenets of basic human functioning. Similarly, Latine theological voices like those of Alejandro García-Rivera, Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz, and Néstor Medina provide a balance and focus on aesthetic theory, Latine theological tenets like lo cotidiano, and the limits of the symbol of Guadalupe on claims of justice. Flores's book is laudable for its apt critiques of a twenty-first century liberalism that largely excludes religious voices. The connections she makes between political and feminist theory and theological aesthetics enacts her own vision of aesthetic solidarity, which she defines as an imaginative and affective basis for relationships characterized by mutuality, equality, and participation, predicated on fundamental human dignity (141). A weakness of the book is that Flores takes her reading of the story of Guadalupe primarily through Roberto Goizueta. Because the "symbol of Guadalupe" possesses the central force of meaning, Flores's adopting of the Nican mopohua as the basis for her interpretation of the Guadalupe event means that a critical reading of that text is called for. This absence allows Flores to import political interpretations that are questionable. For example, that Juan Diego was simply a passive victim likened to "the people's dung" (32) prior to his encounter with Mary, that his relationship with Mary can be characterized by equality and mutuality, and that it is a story of political empowerment that makes evident his capacity for autonomy in his "confrontation" with the colonial church (37). Additionally, Flores's treatment of Guadalupe may lead to some unexpected conclusions. She employs the Eastern Orthodox translation of Luke 1, for example, that Mary is magnified by the Lord, instead of "my soul magnifies" the Lord. This supports her argument but is unexpected because Guadalupe is a paradigmatic western Catholic symbol. This appropriation of non-Catholic views on Mary resonates with the treatment Guadalupe receives throughout the book. For Guadalupe to fit into the type of aesthetic solidarity of a pluralistic society the book calls for, Guadalupe is de-Catholicized in a sense...