Hello divine readers and welcome to Idiot Parade.
Today is the annual feast day of everybody’s favorite 493-year-old Mexican Catholic Femininomenon, better known as Our Lady of Guadalupe. This feast day contains all my favorite things—cultic worship, bespoke fashion, Mexico City, women ordering men around, etc.—so I felt it couldn’t go unobserved.
I promise this essay is not another downer; I confess it is only half-free to read. This probably does not align with the spirit of Christian charity but it definitely aligns with the spirit of me making rent. Idiot Parade 2025 is going to have a lot of fun things for paid subscribers, so if you’d like to upgrade to paid, please do, and also I love you. If you can’t, no sweat. I still plan on writing freebies for the love of the game.
I cannot recall a time in my life when I did not know who the Virgin of Guadalupe was or that she was important.
I have no Mexican ancestry. My early exposure to her was entirely by chance, in that I happened to be raised in a region where the Mexican-majority Latino community accounts for upwards of 20% of the total population. This meant she was everywhere. Her image was iconic in the pre-internet sense of the word and ubiquitous enough to be unremarkable. She was there because of course she was. She was a given.
Even in my aggressively secular school, where the slightest whiff of Christianity (e.g. the inclusion of “Silent Night” in the holiday concert program) was inevitably met with a hilarious if well-meaning overcorrection (e.g. three risers of lily-white fourth graders belting a Kwanzaa song), several weeks of seventh grade Spanish were devoted to learning about Our Lady of Guadalupe. She was presented entirely matter-of-factly, no more or less essential to our understanding of Mexican culture and history than the units on Frida Kahlo and Pancho Villa. Eventually the entire classroom of suburban 11-year-olds, most of whom were being raised in some strain of low-effort American Protestantism, could recite in broken Spanish the major plot points of the visitations of the Virgin Mary to the Aztec peasant Juan Diego.
For the unfamiliar, here it is in English: over the course of four days in December 1531, the Virgin Mary appeared several times to an illiterate indigenous man named Juan Diego on Tepeyac Hill in present-day Mexico City. During her first appearance, she instructed Juan Diego to build her a church on the hill. Juan Diego relayed this order to the archbishop, who naturally did not believe him.
Divine beings generally dislike being told no, so the Virgin appeared again and told Juan Diego to insist. Once again, the archbishop did not believe him. Juan Diego went back to the Virgin to request proof, which she agreed to provide the following day. The next day Juan Diego was delayed on account of caring for his dying uncle, whose condition by nightfall warranted the summoning of a priest for last confession. At this point, Juan Diego was both in a hurry and embarrassed enough about ghosting the Mother of God that he took a different route around the hill to avoid running into her.
Upon intercepting him, the Virgin said, ¿No estoy aquí, yo, que soy tu madre? which is best translated as “Am I not here, I who am your mother?” with a sprinkling of “Nice try, bucko.” She then told him his uncle was healed and to go pluck the (non-native) Castilian roses now blooming (in winter) at the bottom of the hill. She arranged the roses in his tilma, an Aztec cloak often worn like an apron, and sent him back to the archbishop.
When Juan Diego arrived at the archbishop’s, he opened his tilma to reveal not only the roses but the miraculously imprinted image of the Virgin. The archbishop said, one presumes, “Well, JD, you got me there,” and built the requested church. It has since ballooned into an enormous compound with gift shops, an art museum, and 40 million annual visitors.
The Virgin of Guadalupe was apparently ubiquitous enough that I was genuinely shocked to learn, at age 12, that she was not the only Marian apparition in history. This revelation happened in after-school religious ed class, when I was assigned a short presentation of Our Lady of Fátima. (I’m sure I responded with an incredulous “Who?”) It had simply not occurred to me that the Virgin Mary would or could appear elsewhere to other people, let alone to a bunch of Europeans.
I disliked Our Lady of Fátima right away. She dealt in frightful secrets, apocalyptic portents, and bizarrely specific instructions pertaining to Russia. Guadalupe would never be so dreadfully pessimistic and tedious. Unlike Fátima—a cheap imitation at best and a brazen imposter at worst—Guadalupe concerned herself not with doom and gloom but beauty and creation: roses in winter, her portrait on a tilma, and that church she explicitly ordered. She also dressed better.
However I feel now about Catholicism or the Vatican or the existence of God, I maintain a certain affection for and loyalty to the Virgin of Guadalupe. And when I suspend my disbelief in her miraculousness, I arrive at a peculiar art historical conclusion.
The Virgin of Guadalupe is the New World’s first great woman artist.
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