Hermann Herlinghaus
University of Pittsburgh
Email: hxh@pitt.edu

Virtuous, Stainless - Seductive and Melodramatic: Our Lady of Guadalupe and Mexican Modernity

The cult of 'Our Lady of Guadalupe' has not only constituted a particular, sometimes radically alternative tradition regarding the history of Christianity, it has also become an astonishing phenomenon of Mexico's modernity. It points towards deep-rooted blindspots of hegemonic concepts of image, imagination, and praxis as much as it affects recent discussions on heterogeneous secularization, transgression, and performance.
Numerous discursive and political constructions have adscribed to the cult of Guadalupe the integral and general features of a framework of 'national identity', 'mestizaje', and 'baroque'. What these perspectives tend to underestimate are culturally dynamic relationships between 'imagination' and 'transgression' where religious and symbolic practices work beyond their adscribed logics.
During the last century the cult as lived an enormous intercultural and intermedial dissemination: through film and audiovisual performance: the images of Our Lady of Guadalupe became part of a new mimetic and ambiguously gendered culture. Two films of the Mexican melodramatic tradition are choosen to illustrate how the religious image is becoming reshaped and itself transgressed, giving way to modern (heterogeneous) experiences of the sacred: Río Escondido (Emilio Fernández, 1947) and Tizok. Amor Indio (Ismael Rodríguez).