Elaine A. Peña
Department of Performance Studies
Northwestern University
Email: e-pena@northwestern.edu

"La Virgen de Guadalupe as Apparition and Illegal Alien: Performances of Spirituality and Migratory Histories"

La Virgen de Guadalupe is an illegal alien. She resides in the United States without documentation, yet she is resilient, invincible. As political, social, and artistic movements have washed over the Americas, She has made do with her people, but more importantly, she has traversed boundaries with her people. She has marched with martyrs and she has taken criticism with the feminists. In this respect She is a transnational figure moving effortlessly across imagined historic, political, and economic borders. She exists in a realm of simultaneity, across the Americas, within nations, institutions and communities.
La Virgen de Guadalupe's recent apparition and appearance in Rogers Park, the northernmost neighborhood in Chicago, and Des Plaines, IL, a northwest suburb of Chicago, provides the basis for this study which brings a specific Mexican diaspora into critical focus. These two developing centers of spirituality illuminate a particular Mexican diaspora because of their location in the Midwest, which geographically in an anomaly for Mexican migration. Nevertheless Chicago has functioned as a colonial outpost for Mexicans since the late 19th century. These sacred spaces devoted to la Virgen de Guadalupe thus perform as gateways for the development of multivalent performances of Mexican spirituality and a larger Latino identity but they also provide a stage for the force and control exercised by the state.
The Rogers Park shrine is located on a sidewalk behind Pace Bus Stop #290. It is a humble shrine filled with candles, roses, promesas and photographs. The shrine is cared for by many hands in the neighborhood and is used nightly by a core group of devotees who pray the rosary. Demographically, the shrine is located in one of Chicago's most diverse neighborhoods with an comparable amount of White, Black and Hispanic residents at 31.7%, 29.5% and 27.7% respectively but this diversity has made these culturally specific performances of Mexican spirituality and nationalism threatening to the balance of race relations in the neighborhood. This humble shrine, literally an eight by twelve foot space, performs on multiple levels: it allows the Mexican community to celebrate their faith, history and politics but it simultaneously alerts the state and other hegemonic entities to these performances of entitlement and empowerment.
Des Plaines, a suburb just Northwest of Chicago has about a 14% Hispanic population but amazingly the "second Tepeyac of North America" has manifested itself there. Mexico City officials from the Institute for Theological Studies and historic worship of la Virgen de Guadalupe (founded by the eminent Norberto Carrera the primary archbishop of Mexico) proclaimed the Church of Maryville to be an extension of Tepeyac, Mexico's most powerful sacred space (Macias 10). The coordinators of this project have literally recreated the hill of Tepeyac in Des Plaines, IL to signify the transfer of this sacred space from Mexico City to the Chicago area. The hill's artificiality is both exaggerated and softened by the beautiful cascades falling into a clear pool of water, hundreds if not thousands of silk roses and magnificent bronze statues of la Virgencita y Juan Diego re-performing that fateful moment in 1531. Fields of green grass and the quiet roads of a sleepy suburb protect this shrine yet since its proclamation as the "Second Tepeyac of North America," this isolated Midwestern space has been transformed into a pilgrimage site visited by thousands of devotees from all over the United States.
These complex urban and suburban spiritual centers are part of the ongoing establishment of what Timothy Matovina and Gerald E. Poyo refer to as a "Mexico de afuera" necessitated by influxes of Spanish-speaking communities in the United States (Matovina 147). The United States has a long history of Hispanic communities attempting to create a "Mexico de afuera" via national or "ethnic churches." In 1871, "a coalition of Spanish-speaking Catholics at San Francisco successfully promoted the establishment of a national parish. The consuls of Chile, Peru, Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, Costa Rica and Spain, as well as various other Hispanic residents, comprised this coalition" to accommodate Spanish speaking communities (Matovina 95). These national or ethnic-churches established at the turn of the century inevitably encountered resistance. Policies supporting ethnic-churches were reversed in the 1920s when Chicago's cardinal George Mundelein asserted that these parishes "increased nativist anti-Catholic sentiment and the rise of the second generation among immigrant groups warranted a greater use of English and a more integrationist approach" (95).
Both of these sites provide a space for a Mexico de Afuera, but they differ greatly in terms of their approaches to consolidating power within diverse demographics and their performances of spirituality. Michel de Certeau's discussion of strategies and tactics illuminates the complexity of these efforts particularly those by marginalized peoples to establish visibility. As a grassroots effort, Rogers Park utilizes tactics or the spaces and crevices within hegemonic structures, such as the state, to advance their agenda while Des Plaines uses a combination of tactics and strategies. As a space for Spanish speaking communities it inevitably resorts to a tactical approach to establish visibility, yet it is afforded the luxury of strategic planning because of its association with the Catholic Church's institutional power and influence.
These developing spaces and approaches invoke Foucault's complex notion of heterotopias. These spaces, "have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such as way as to suspect, neutralize or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect" (5). These shrines are not only associated with the establishment of a Mexico de Afuera which mirrors a history of specific cultural and spiritual performances but are simultaneously and antagonistically associated with the city and the state. The reflective qualities of these shrines produce heterotopias or spaces where tension and dialogue between these marginalized voices and state apparatuses reveal themselves. These heterotopic shrines thus perform on multiple levels: as vehicles for mobilization and resistance, vehicles for the consolidation of a larger Latino identity and vehicles for the expansion of Mexican Catholicism in the United States. Simultaneously, these vehicles are establishing visible counter-narratives that produce gaps and questions in the state's seamless production of American history.
My larger project engages the gaps and questions produced by the disjunction between the state and these immigrant communities as well as the disjunction between the church-sponsored effort and the grassroots effort creating this Mexico de Afuera. What are the differences between the apparition in Rogers Park and the institutional effort to produce the effect of an apparition based on a replica of a holy space in the homeland? How will these private-turned-public practices of worship influence immigration policy, possible political realignments, and integration? How is increasing visibility of Latino communities challenged or opposed and how can we learn from the policies (spoken and unspoken) that are enforced within these spaces? What are the possibilities for dialogue outside of Mexican networks?
The point of this paper is not to answer these overarching questions nor is it to posit conclusions about why the apparition of la Virgen de Guadalupe occurred on a tree in Rogers Park or the fact that the "Second Tepeyac of North America" was established in Des Plaines, IL. At this point in my fieldwork it would be irresponsible for me to speculate if or how the people I work with at these two spiritual centers have willed these apparitions through their faith. These developing communities operate on multiple and complex levels which warrants a nuanced understanding of these practices through extended ethnographic fieldwork and relationship development. Undertaking this ambitious study has led me to seek out historical, political and economic resources to understand the processes of re-location that may have instigated these apparitions.
Clearly, the establishment of these two Mexican and Latino communities in Rogers Park and Des Plaines, respectively, provides the basis for an alternative analysis based on macro politico economic forces. Regardless of the power differential between these two efforts, the apparition in Rogers Park and what I call a simulated apparition in Des Plaines, IL may be explained, in part, by migration practices across the U.S./Mexico border in the twentieth century. This transnational movement by actors was spurred by political and economic turmoil in Mexico, specifically the infamous border movement of 1848 and the Mexican Revolution in 1910, as well as U.S. labor demands necessitated by the first and second World Wars.
The first major wave of mexicanas/os did not arrive in the Midwest until World War I when they were contracted to replace soldiers and European ethnic workers in steel mills, meatpacking houses and light industries like candymaking and clothing manufacture. There was earlier movement to the Chicago area before the turn of the century but these were mostly entertainers. My great-grandfather, Jesus Ojeda, was a traveling medicine man/actor, or "hobo" as my mom refers to him, traveled to the Chicago area and to the East coast in search of fame and fortune. Until the early 1920s most new Mexican migrants to the city were single young men, but by the end of the decade chain migration increased the number of Mexicans to almost 20,000, one-third of whom were, by then, women, children, and other family members.
By 1929 Chicago was known to emigrating labor migrants as the largest colonial outpost outside of the Southwest. Geographically, Chicago as a final destination is an anomaly. This incongruity is explained in part by World War II labor needs, which hired Mexicans as railroad track laborers to replace the loss of men to military service. Indeed, contracting undocumented workers proved to be a lucrative enterprise for the United States. This labor source is essentially cheap, fearful and expendable. They do not require benefits, work for sub-minimum wages and will not contest harsh labor conditions for fear of deportation or incarceration. The driving force behind persevering through these dismal working conditions is sending remittances to their families in Mexico.
Today the "official count" posits Latinos as approximately 25% of Chicago's population. Of course, this is only the official count. Working with people in Rogers Park I have found similarities and differences in these migration narratives. Current labor conditions are comparable to past working conditions but gender wise, the workforce looks different. Many of the women that I have met are the primary breadwinners of their families because they are able to hold steady factory jobs while the men's employment is uncertain as they work seasonally. So, although historically men worked to sustain families here in the U.S. and Mexico, today women sustain these connections through labor in formal and informal economies.
These migration patterns based on U.S. labor needs and then ensuing chain migration illuminate why and how la Virgen de Guadalupe came to reside in Chicago. Although these processes began during the early twentieth century, Douglas Massey has rightly pointed out they cannot be turned on and off like a faucet (Massey 683). Therefore, Mexican community formation and thus the apparition and appearance of Guadalupe in Rogers Park and Des Plaines may be explained in part by the rushing tides of labor and war. Tracing the overarching effects of these migration processes as a component of these apparitions requires an on the ground study at both of these shrines and their development of imagined spiritual communities. These apparitions create more than a spiritual community; they forge complex social, political and economic alliances between Spanish speaking communities in urban and suburban spaces.
The liminal space established by these migratory processes and the Virgen de Guadalupe's apparition in Rogers Park stages both a resistant Mexican identity and an ongoing counter-narrative to anti-immigrant rhetoric pervading domestic and international policy. These performances of spirituality and nationalism inherently resist these forces and in the process articulate an ethnoreligious identity that continues a history of resistance begun as early as the U.S. expansionist takeover of Mexico in the 19th century. Historically Mexican as well as Central and South American immigrants, "in the face of oppositional forces such as military conquest and occupation, indiscriminate violence and lawlessness, political and economic displacement, rapid demographic change [practiced] Spanish-speaking Catholic feasts and devotions [that] provided ongoing means of communal expression" (Poyo 56). This performance of communal expression by documented and undocumented immigrants via the worship of la Virgen de Guadalupe resides betwixt and between a collective sense of Mexican spiritual and nationalistic identity and the individual realities of immigrant life in the city.
A closer look at the institutional effort in the suburb of Des Plaines allows for an extended analysis of labor and Mexican migration in the Midwest. I suggest that the 14.01% Hispanic population in Des Plaines is not merely a product of class mobility but rather evidence of job possibilities for ethnic workers as domestics and day laborers in the suburbs. Nevertheless this movement creates possibilities for creating and sustaining Mexican and larger Latino visibility in historically white spaces. This migration to El Norte and then to the suburbs necessitates the formation of community and political solidarity through dialogue within larger Spanish speaking peoples. These political realignments are made possible by this institutionalized pilgrimage site, which provides a space for dialogue and the establishment of a powerful Latino identity veiled by the larger effort by the expansion of Mexican Catholicism in the United States.
The Church of Maryville in Des Plaines is re-establishing this tradition of a national ethnic-church, a Mexico de Afuera, with spectacular results. On December 12, 2002, the Virgen de Guadalupe's feast day, approximately 20,000 people journeyed to Des Plaines to celebrate. There were three walking pilgrimages from the Chicago suburbs of Cicero, Rolling Meadows and Northbrook and various pilgrimages from surrounding states of Michigan, Wisconsin and as far away as California. The demographics of these surrounding suburbs provide an interesting point of entry into our understanding of national ethnic-churches. These pilgrimages convey the scope of the Virgen's power as an institutional symbol but also raise the obvious question: How did these disparate areas come together to create a unifying performance of spirituality?
Des Plaines success as a pilgrimage site is due in part to its presence as an extension of Tepeyac which associatively includes the institutional legitimation provided by the Catholic Church. Des Plaines success also rests in what Eric Wolf suggests is the power of master symbols like la Virgen de Guadalupe. Her image "provide[s] the cultural idiom of behaviors and ideal representations through which different groups of the same society can pursue and manipulate their different fates within a coordinated framework" (34). Clearly, Guadalupe's image is performing as a master symbol for the people of Rogers Park and Des Plaines by offering them a sense of empowerment and community against oppositional forces such as the Chicago police and larger anti-immigrant rhetoric; but it also alerts these oppositional forces of threatening mobilization and empowerment.
James C. Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance engages the tension created by these cultural performances as both empowering for these marginalized peoples and as evidence of threatening mobilization to the state. Scott suggests, "what permits subordinate groups to undercut the authorized cultural norms is the fact that cultural expression by virtue of its polyvalent symbolism and metaphor lends itself to disguise" (158). As a master symbol, Guadalupe's image establishes the basis for an imagined community whose common language is established within and around the political and social power of the Virgen de Guadalupe. The cultural productions surrounding her image create detectable visibility for these marginalized groups but they also create an undetected maneuvering space for these voices and their social and political agendas that strive to create networks and safe spaces outside of their respective homelands.
Historically, both these efforts by Spanish speaking communities in the United States and the resistance to these performances of spirituality and nationalism signal that these apparitions are another component to the social processes of migration and integration in the United States. This continuing visibility is an ongoing phenomenon that not only affects race relations within these urban and suburban neighborhoods but it will no doubt have lasting effects on how Chicago police and other arms of surveillance influence the state's understanding of immigration thus affecting how immigration policy is shapes and implemented. The question remains, how will this visibility continue to mobilize forces within these immigrant communities and how will their economic and political journeys towards be affected?

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