Traveling Virgins

In 2002, Mary Louise Pratt gave a key note address at the Hemispheric Institute’s Third Annual Encuentro in Lima, Peru entitled “¿Por qué la Virgen de Zapopan fue a los Ángeles?”. In that lecture, Pratt suggested we begin “thinking through mobility”. She wrote, “ particularly intriguing in this respect is the Virgen de Zapopan’s strategy of self-duplication, desdoblamiento in Spanish, which enables her to be in more than one place at once, and to both go and stay at the same time. Though she exists in statue form, this ability to move and self-multiply makes her a kind of anti-monument, a genuine roving signifier.” Around the same period and in part because of Pratt’s productive intervention, many of us who are interested in migration, globalization, transnationalism, and other late capitalist movements and reconcentrations of people, goods and capital began to notice and be interested in the ways that objects of devotion were not staying put any more than those devoted to them do. Of the many circulating religious icons, it began to seem, as Pratt argues, that the Virgin Mary indeed has special powers of desdoblamiento, or self-duplication, enabling her to “be in more than one place at once” and “go and stay at the same time”. While we do not all share a single disciplinary approach, an ethnographic focus, or even the self-consciousness of belonging to a collective, it soon began to seem as if many people were talking about traveling virgins, las vírgenes viajeras, in many places in the Americas.

Of course, the study of Marianism is not new to scholarship in the Americas and a glance at the paucity of attention to it in the programs of major academic congresses in recent years is proof that in and of itself it is no longer considered particularly “sexy.” Less mainstream, uncanonized “folk” saints command the lion’s share of current scholarly focus, such as Santa Muerte and Juan Soldado in Mexico, and la Difunta Correa and Gaucho Gil in Argentina, and Sarita Colonia in Perú. However, if we set aside for a moment the distinctions frequently made between authorized and unauthorized saints, and “official” and “folk” religion which have shaped so much of scholarship on religion in recent decades and focus instead on the circulation of figures of devotion along the same paths as the people who are devoted to them, we see that it is, perhaps, the movement itself that is truly interesting whether the saint that is moving is an officially sanctioned devotion like our Lady of Zapopan or a narco-saint like Jesús Malverde.

This movement, resettlement and redoubling of diverse images icons and representations of traveling virgins drew our attention, along with those whose work is included here. This issue of e-misférica brings together work by scholars, artists and activists who follow the paths of las vírgenes viajeras in distinct spatial and temporal contexts, from arid Antofagasta, Chile, to the roads of Patagonia, Argentina, touching down in the Bolivian Andes, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, the United States and even Italy. We bring a broad perspective to our focus on the Virgins who are the objects of devotion, their travels, their places of worship and their devotees.

Some of this work emerged over the course of several meetings in New York City and Buenos Aires in 2007 and conversations amongst many of the participants over the last several years. Indeed, many of those included here know one another, but, interestingly, some of the areas of greatest overlap are between people who have not yet met, evidence, we think not only of important trends in the ways that images of devotion move, but also in the attentiveness of observers to such movements. Some of the common foci that connect the different works in this issue are the following:

First, several authors here share the assertion that devotional figures have always moved. Of course, the arrival of the Spanish to the Western hemisphere represents the initial movement, par excellence, of the Virgin Mary. While images of Mary had moved around Europe for centuries, accompanying various efforts at Christian imperialism and reconquista, her journey to the “New World” as standard bearer for Spanish conquest, colonization and evangelization is as complex and contradictory as the Spanish imperial project itself. Looking at that period, Paolo Vignolo explores the role of the cult of Santa Maria de la Antigua, traveling virgin/virgen viajera between Seville y Darién, in the material and symbolic appropriation of the Americas in the sixteenth century. Tobias Reu writes about Mary of Urqupiña in Bolivia, whose name in Quechua means “She is already on the hill”, linking the colonial-era apparition story to pre-Columbian worship on the same spot, a huaca. The hill Mary of the Assumption chose was already “a node within paths of migration since time immemorial”. Even though the Incan mit’a and contemporary late capitalist labor migration differ, Mary of Urqupiña already boasted of a tradition of movement, desdoblamiento and attachment to the places that are important to her devotees which enabled her not only to keep up with them, but to always be several steps ahead of them. In Reiland’s photo essay too we have a devotion which has always traveled, but whose movement is resignified in different historical contexts.

Another common thread in these works is the importance of ritual practice, the efforts that the faithful make to travel to the sites of their devotions or bring their devotions to the places in which they find themselves. We see these efforts in the works by Alicia Carmona, Angelina Tallaj, Shinji Hirai, Carrie Viarnes, María Zúñiga Barba with Joel Merino and María Rosa Jijón. Such efforts are complicated by obstacles including clerical censure of lay practice, economic expense, and immigration law, all of which hinders the efforts of the faithful to reunite in the “traditional” epicenters of devotion. Such obstacles foster creativity in practice and in symbolism in which images self-duplicate to be in two places at once, travel to the faithful who cannot travel, or make sacred people, places and practices left out of authorized religion.

Finally, a key aspect of focus amongst the various works is the tension between spaces always already sacralized and “the non-places” of contemporary life. The ruptures between people, place and sacred space represented by migration and globalization have contributed to the apparition of known figures in unlikely places (Our Lady of Guadalupe has appeared on a microwave oven plate, a Mexico City metro station, and a glass wall of a skyscraper, to name a few) as well as less known figures who appear at just the right moment to attract a strong following (like Juan Soldado who is said to aid migrants in their border crossings between the U.S. and Mexico). Renée de la Torre and Katherine Fritis Lattus focus on non-places in which devotion takes hold. De la Torre looks at the “need to grant a sacred frame of reference to the anonymous spaces in which many transient people live a good portion of their lives”. Fritis looks at the way that devotional practice makes claims over the non-places which are a necessity for capitalist development, reclaiming these spaces and taking them out of calculi based on profit and productive capacity.

The theme of devotions in movement and the tensions between places, people and the sacred is taken up again in the artistic work of Lidia Milani and Teresa Ascencao and the activist work of María Zúniga Barba and María Rosa Jijón. In each of these works we refract our focus, from the minutely intimate to the transnational, from internal faith to public displays of devotion, from the personal to the political. A similar movement of moving inward toward the local and intimate and outward toward the global is seen in Points of View, a conversation between Pedro Lasch, Renato Rosaldo and Jean Franco centering on a story about very local pilgrimages but which prompts us to think about faith, research, narrative, neighbors and difference.

Together, the artists, activists and scholars herein provide a rich mosaic of practices located throughout the Americas but sharing a common unifying theme, the movement of devotion, more specifically, traveling virgins. This movement provides an opportunity to reflect on movement and migration and the connections between these in public and private spaces, places and non-places. What we learn is that while before much work on intraregional and transnational migration focused on the struggles for human rights, labor rights and social rights, now activists, artists and scholars are employing a more integrated approach in which culture counts too. Even while many people in the Americas might worship the Virgin Mary, everywhere she manifests and is worshipped in locally specific ways. Globality and locality are connected in recognition of these parallels and differences providing new articulations of identity and public action through idioms of faith.