This study of contemporary devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe begins outside of Chicago at a “Second Tepeyac” shrine in Des Plaines, Illinois. By starting far from Juan Diego’s hillock in Mexico, Elaine Peña demands a fundamental rethinking of what it means to be Mexican, Catholic, and pious. She takes a transnational approach to explore the current state of the nearly five-centuries-old Guadalupan devotion. Chapters unfold well beyond church sanctuaries, capturing the creation of new, often temporal sacred spaces such as Mexican highways and Midwestern street corners. Peña brings to life multiple, evolving devotional acts and proves that “there is not one set path toward the sacred” (p. 145).Peña is not a historian, yet her work will interest students of religious history, Mexican immigration, and women’s studies. While Peña pays some attention to history (for example, she reviews the literature on the evolution of worship at Tepeyac), her approach is decidedly interdisciplinary, informed by ethnography, Chicano studies, and especially by performance studies. This study’s premise is that spaces are made sacred by performance: singing, building, walking, or other actions by pious women and men can make spaces holy.Peña’s stress on the actions (or “devotional labor”) of sacred space creation proves effective as she examines the growing popularity, starting in 1987, of the suburban Chicago Second Tepeyac. The faithful created a replica of Tepeyac with statuary of the apparition and Juan Diego. “No one denies that the Second Tepeyac is a sacred space,” Peña observes, “despite the fact that there is no tradition of a Marian apparition” (p. 36). The scene and scholarly approach evokes the work of US Catholic historian Robert Orsi. In both Italian Harlem and Des Plaines, it is faith and action that make space sacred. Detailing a long December 12, as guadalupanos (devotees of the Virgin of Guadalupe) walked all night across Chicago’s frigid cityscape, awaited and welcomed into Second Tepeyac’s makeshift chapel, Peña convincingly argues that with such actions, “the replica becomes a sacred space” (p. 43).Performing Piety best documents faith on the move. Two chapters richly detail all-female pilgrimages by guadalupanas within Mexico: a massive, official nine-day trek from Querétaro and a more modest, unsanctioned walk from Michoacán, both ending at Tepeyac’s basilica. Peña joined (or “co-performatively witnessed”) each pilgrimage and she deftly records the women’s experiences, both sacred and secular. The pilgrims embody the interplay between traditional and modern values and practices in Mexico, especially in women’s lives. Many women, for example, participate in the annual pilgrimages partly because this devotional activity is accepted by male kin who might otherwise restrict female mobility. The pilgrimages also reveal much about the economics and class dynamics of provincial life.Peña returns to Mexican Chicago as she recounts the 2001 apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe on a tree in the multiethnic Rogers Park neighborhood and how a devotional site emerged there. While the local parish ignored the devotion, Mexican immigrants created a makeshift shrine using a bus shelter, regularly prayed the rosary, and organized fund-raising and annual fiestas for several years. Like similar devotional sites across the United States, the street corner shrine was embraced by immigrants who, hampered by poverty or legal status, cannot visit shrines in their homeland. For the Mexican diaspora, Peña observes: “She will be anywhere they can be” (p. 117). Reverence to the Virgin of Guadalupe lives on in places sanctioned and unsanctioned.By detailing the organization and ongoing devotion at the two lay-led shrines in the Chicago area, Peña makes a strong case for the ways that devotional labor may yield positive, regenerative effects for immigrant participants. In the secular realm, the ongoing or even annual performances of piety afford immigrants opportunities to make social connections and to improve their lives in an unfamiliar city by learning of job or housing leads. These same socioeconomic benefits, I would add, benefit immigrants who take part in recognized churches. Peña may be strongest at capturing these secular, less pietistic aspects of sacred space creation and devotion.This study privileges the laity and their actions: the guadalupanos are making, creating, performing. Mexican Catholics act on their faith with little support from the Catholic hierarchy and, at times, in the face of clerical disapproval. Peña, in fact, says little about the Catholic hierarchy; the few mentions of priests tend to be negative. She ignores the long, rich history of priests in the United States collaborating with guadalupano devotees within traditional parish settings (for example, Timothy Matovina’s study of San Antonio). Peña might have considered how devotion to La Morenita is performed in dozens of Chicago parishes. In the end, this lively and truly transnational study successfully reminds us that lived religion, how women and men interact with the divine, reveals a great deal about the “transformation of religious life in the Americas” (p. 149).
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Nov 14, 2014
Robert Mcnown + 3
Open Access