Latorre: How can we correct the lack of scholarship on Chican@ and Latin@ art, especially when the little scholarship that exists is male-dominated?
Lopez: La Virgen de Guadalupe serves as a unifying cultural symbol for Latina/@ and Chicana/@ communities because of her ubiquity and her embodiment of Anzaldúa’s famed “borderlands”.
As I was lucky enough to have the chance to take a class on the Virgin Mary with Sharon Elkins in the religion department, I was already familiar with the works and writings of the brilliant Alma Lopez. I was given the opportunity to read her collection Our Lady of Controversy, which contained the Cisneros piece she alludes to in “Silencing Our Lady: La Respuesta de Alma”, as well as see beautiful reproductions of her work and the work of her fellow Chicana artists. Lopez boldly reclaims La Virgen, interprets her in her own way and unapologetically shares that interpretation with us. She sees La Virgen in herself and in her fellow Latinas/Chicanas. As Cisneros ponders in her essay “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess, doesn’t La Virgen have dark nipples and a dark vulva like her? Is La Virgen not a mirror of Chicana/Latina identity, characterized by multiplicity, located on Anzaldúa’s fronteras? It is the tension caused by a history of racism, colonialism, and sexism, a complicated mélange reincarnated in la Virgen, whose body is a familiar “brown and round” as pointed out by one of Lopez’s supporters.
La Virgen suffered in her life, and Lopez draws a parallel between her suffering and the suffering of the multiply marginalized Chicana/Latina. She is, however, not complacent or weak in her suffering. She is instead interpreted by Lopez as empowering, as a strong woman like all the strong, unsung women heros of Lopez’s own life. It is this strength, this resilience, it seems, that terrifies the male viewer. The very body of the young Chicana depicted in Lopez’s work is denounced, seen as sinful, derogatory to Our Lady. But why? For its very femininity? I am brought back to an astute comment made by our classmate Camylle, who suggested the last time we met that the female body is seen as inherently sexual and, by extension, sinful and wrong. This fear of the feminine is in itself terrifying to me – for when will we, the feminine and the women of the world, ever be seen as anything but one side of a dichotomy? Will women be forever denied a sexuality or classified as hypersexual? How can women artists like Lopez rid us of this nonsensical double-standard?