Second Saturday of Advent: Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe
“Now, my dearest son,
you have heard my breath, my word:
Go, do what you are responsible for.”
Nican Mopohua Ch1 line 37
My story of Guadalupe began well before I was born, with my parents’ wedding on 12 December 1970. The date was arbitrary, chosen by my grandparents given its proximity to Christmas—arguably the most popular holiday in the Philippines. But they also hailed from Cebu, a former Spanish colonial outpost known for its sizable devotees to Guadalupe. Whatever their reasons, the choice exists among memories long forgotten.
For most Filipinos, memory—perhaps more than land—grounds one’s sense of “home.” I spent most of my life in diaspora. Artifacts and iconographies weave fragments of “self” into some cohesive narrative. The story of Guadalupe and its (ir)relevance to my family functioned, in some way, as one of these memorial anchors.
While the Tepeyac account occupied a prominent place in this mythology, I learned later on that our Cebuano version featured its own set of characters, circumstances, and artifacts. It was to Juan Digo that La Morenita appeared, in a cave, by a water source (1). And like the great Nahua seer, our “Juan” was also indigenous, a trapper who eked out a living at the periphery of the colonial center. Much later, I will learn that an even more ancient Guadalupe thrived in the hills of Cáceres, Spain, mapped along familiar tropes: this time a black Virgin appears before Gil Cordero, a campesino, a person of no circumstance (2).
“Guadalupe,” it seems, is a collection of stories, meandering across continental and temporal gaps. Resonant with similar precepts, their implicit competition for authenticity, however, compels me to ask: Whose story gets told? And more importantly, why?
For immigrants, memory and home are contentious mechanisms of belonging. Stories of the “old country” are told over and again to allay threats of erasure. Whoever claims accuracy wields the power to validate one’s existence. But perhaps, we need to consider the impulse behind this insistence on what is real. Perhaps, we need to interrogate this fetish for an original claim?
To what extent do characters and artifacts like Juan Diego, Juan Digo, Gil Cordero, and the various las Morenitas unravel the illusory singularity of a colonial narrative?
Could we, instead, affirm multiple stories and so pierce through the suffocating discourse of empire?
In the Nican Mopohua, La Morenita’s words are also called “breath” (3). Rather than imposing a “singular claim,” she draws in her forgotten people. At a time when colonial narratives condemned indigenous histories to oblivion, La Morenita animated her pueblo into a world where their stories mattered.
Indeed, this weaving of speech and respiration offers us a way to penetrate through anxieties of our times—
when Black Lives asphyxiate beneath state-sanctioned violence;
when the politicization of a pandemic leaves our bodies vulnerable to the contagion of breath.
La Morenita’s invitation breathes through the impermeability of power. Beside her, silenced bodies speak themselves to life.
More than a counter-narrative, Guadalupe is a cacophony of voices.
They cohere in between elusive moments and spaces.
They evoke the same liminality to which we are drawn as an Advent people.
Standing in anticipation of God’s shalom, we claim the promise of a world-to-come even as we contend with an arbitrary present.
We re-tell our many stories, over and over again, meandering into a world where bodies are revered, labor is honored, and truths are expansive (rather than negotiable).
To the extent that memory nestles the past into the present, it cannot but weave multiple stories into the other.
And as an Advent people—like this Morenita—we attend closely to the words and breath of those who live in the interstice, the in between, the periphery. For theirs is the place of privileged unveiling.
I may never know the “real story” behind my parents’ decision to wed on the feast of Guadalupe. But its negligibility might well reveal the potency of a story to slip beyond the limits of a single narrative.
This “forgetting” evokes a different kind of memory—an anamnesis—a recollection of a deeper truth at once familiar as it is revelatory. Attending to voices from the margins, might we more clearly discern the emergence of the Word-made-Flesh, this breath, this ruah, that will reanimate a world stifled by the paucity of its own imagination.
(1) La Morenita (Eng., “little brown one”) is a nickname used by devotees for La Virgen in Mexico.
(2) For a more comprehensive comparison of the Cebuano and Spanish versions, see Mojares, Resid B. “Stalking the Virgin: The Genealogy of the Cebuano Virgin of Guadalupe.” Philippine Quarter of Culture and Society, Saints and Fiestas, 30, no. 1/2 (June 2002): 138–71.
(3) In a notation to verses 37 and 38 of Chapter 1, anthropologist David K. Jordan identifies the phrase ihïyötl in tlahtölli (Eng., “the breath, the words") as a signifier of reverential address. See Jordan, David K., trans. “Nican Mopohua (1).” Nican Mopohua: Here It Is Told, January 21, 2019. http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan//nahuatl/nican/nican1.html.
Bibliography
Anonymous. The Virgin of Guadalupe. 1745. Oil on Canvas. 445281. Wellcome Library. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/e6fu9h82.
Campos, Michael. Guadalupe. March 1999. Pen and Ink.
Ellismendez. Our Lady of Guadalupe de Cebú. August 8, 2011. Photography, 752 × 1014 (228 KB). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Guadalupe_de_Cebu_2010_101.jpg.
Jordan, David K., trans. “Nican Mopohua (1).” Nican Mopohua: Here It Is Told, January 21, 2019. http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan//nahuatl/nican/nican1.html.
Mojares, Resid B. “Stalking the Virgin: The Genealogy of the Cebuano Virgin of Guadalupe.” Philippine Quarter of Culture and Society, Saints and Fiestas, 30, no. 1/2 (June 2002): 138–71.
San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble. Nican Mopohua. Guadalupe: Virgen Delos Indios. Talking Taco, 1999.
