Goddess of the Américasin the Decolonial Imaginary:

Beyond the Virtuous Virgen/PaganPuta Dichotomy

Irene Lara

T h e v i r g i n / w h o r e d i c h o t o m y , largely represented in the Américasby La Virgen de Guadalupe as spiritually pure mother and La Malinche asphysically defiled concubine, is a foundational theme in Chicana feministthought, along with this dichotomy’s negative effects in the developmentof female subjectivity. Religiously sanctioned ideologies of the good Maryversus bad Eve female figures in Spanish Christian medieval and early-modern discourse were given racialized “New World” faces with Guada -lupe, an indigenous or mestiza Marian figure, and Malinche, thein digenous mis tress of, and translator for, conqueror Hernán Cortés.Their status as iconic good and bad mothers was affirmed as they becamesymbolic tools in perpetuating a nationalist Mexican identity. Guadalupewas crowned the Patron Saint of New Spain and the Queen of Mexico inthe mid-eighteenth century, while Malinche became known as la Chingadaafter the Mexican Revolution, the violated, “fucked” mother of the firstmestizo.1 In the colonial imaginary, this insidious dichotomy pits thetraditionally religious mestiza woman against the superstitious, demo-nized native woman. To advance a non-dichotomizing “decolonial imagi-nary” now, I refer to the conventional binary between proper and deviantfemale sexual behavior as one between a virtuous virgen and pagan puta inorder to underscore how its disciplining of sexuality interweaves with its

Feminist Studies 34, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2008). © 2008 by Feminist Studies, Inc.

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disciplining of spirituality.2 Healing this dichotomy, I argue, entails decon-structing the ways it simultaneously regulates spiritual and sexual prac-tices. More over, I use the Spanish words for virgin and whore toemphasize the specific cultural contexts at play in the colonial-modernimaginary of the Américas whose legacy persists.

Tonantzin, revered as “Our Mother” by the Nahua, was associatedwith Guadalupe since her apparition on the site of present-day Mexico Cityin 1531. “Nahua” does not refer to any one indigenous ethnic group, but Iuse it to refer “to the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of Postclassic [C.E. 900-1521]highland central Mexico,” including the Mexica (Aztecs) who were thedominating power at the time of the colonial encounter and contempo-rary peoples who trace their genealogies to these groups.3 Tonantzin formspart of the story of “transculturation,” that is, of cul tural loss, culturalpersistence, and the creation of hybrid cultural forms mediated throughpower relations in sixteenth-century Mesoamerica.4 However, althoughthe construction of Malinche as Guadalupe’s “monstrous double” has beenwidely discussed, there have been fewer attempts to analyze the signifi-cance of Tonantzin as Guada lupe’s bruja-ized (witched) Other in colonialdiscourse.5 Like other so-called pagan figures subjected to patriarchal reli-gious imperialism, Tonantzin is among a group of indigenous goddesseswho were demonized by Christianity. I use “goddess” here, as do theauthors I discuss, even though this term does not adequately convey thesignificance of Tonantzin and related figures as honored elements ofnature or sacred energies representing creation and/or destruction, sexuali -ty, and motherhood within a Nahua religious cosmology.

Informed by a rigid Western dichotomy between good and evil and anideology of distrust toward women, especially racialized women, andanxious about Mexica “idols,” the colonizing Spanish transformed Tonant -zin into Guadalupe’s pagan Other. In the foundational mid-sixteenth-century chronicle of Nahua beliefs and practices, the Historia general de lascosas de la Nueva España (General History of the Things of New Spain), widely knownas the Florentine Codex, the Spanish friar and ethnographer Bernardino deSahagún, for example, skeptically describes indigenous devotion toGuadalupe on Tepeyac Hill–the site of her initial appearance and also thesite of an ancient temple to Tonantzin. The encyclopedic Florentine Codex’s

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mandated purpose “was to provide priests and other Spaniards with adetailed description of Nahua culture . . . in order better to recognize ‘idol-atry’ in everyday colonial life and attempt to stamp it out forever.”6 Thus,it is not surprising that it railed against the Nahua’s linking of the “idol”Tonantzin with Guadalupe, calling such a connection “a satanic” equivo-cation and an “idolatrous dissembling.”7 Although some Spanish priestsencouraged this “identification of Christian saints with native deities” aspart of the colonial strategy of conversion and assimilation, the figure ofTonantzin has largely remained marginalized in modern scholarship.8

In the colonial period, Christian beliefs about paganism, the devil, andfemale transgression as symbolized by Eve merge in depictions of Tonant -zin and related goddesses. For example, Cihuacoatl (“Serpent Wom an”),the Toltec earth mother, was also called Tonantzin.9 In his descriptions,Sahagún identified Tonantzin-Cihuacoatl as “our mother Eve, who isdeceived by the serpent,” rather than engaging the more multivalentNahua perspective of the serpent as an earth figure.10 As Cecelia F. Kleinargues, colonial representations of Cihuacoatl emphasized “the goddess’sdestructive powers . . . [and not] her creative potential.” For example, oneimage depicted Cihuacoatl with “her long hair hanging loose and herlarge, snarling mouth wide open, with her teeth exposed and her tongueprotruding,” which Klein observes, resembles the Florentine Codex’s illustra-tion of an Aztec “harlot, whose loose windblown hair con trasts so mar ked -ly with the bound-up hair characteristic of married Aztec wom en.”11

Tonantzin-Cihuacoatl was also associated with Coatlicue (“Serpent Skirt”),as Cihuacoatl’s “Mexica variant,” and her complex duality was similarlynegated (fig. 1).12 In addition, Tlazolteotl (“Filth Goddess”), a so-calledcarnal goddess associated with Tonantzin, is depicted as “‘another Venus,’explicitly associated with the morally transgressive Eve”: Fray Juan deTorque mada said of her, “[for] a goddess of loves and sensualities, what canshe be but a dirty, filthy, and stained goddess?”13 Thus colonizing Christiansnegatively associated the Christian serpent, devil, Eve, evil, and sin withthese Nahua sacred energies. Although “masculine” Nahua deities werealso demonized, I suggest that by being associated with a human woman,the fallen Eve, the maligning of the goddesses transposes to the maligningof actual Nahua women, particularly healers, midwives, and “harlots.”

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As Rebecca Overmyer-Veláz -quez shows, such colonial projec-tions of gendered beliefs aboutspirituality and sexuality show a“Christian disregard for Nahuacomplementarity and balance.”14

This gendered and racialized other-ing process links indigenous deitiesand women to a particularly dan -gerous sexuality associated withpaganism, that is, with dangerousspirituality.15 Perhaps the most ex -plicit example in the Florentine Codexof this association is the representa-tion of the “bad [female] physician”who is depicted as having “a fric-tion-loving vulva” and harmingpeople through her deceitful, be -witching practices: “She has a vulva,a crushed vulva, a friction-lovingvulva. [She is] a doer of evil. She be -witches–a sorceress, a person of

sor cery, a possessed one. She makes one drink potions, kills people withmedications, causes them to worsen. . . . She deceives people, ridiculesthem, seduces them, perverts them, bewitches them, blows [evil] uponthem. . . . ”16 This hypersexualized representation of the bad healer thatspecifically links evil-doing to the female sexual body rings of Christianmedieval representations, such as in the infamous Malleus Male ficarum. Infact, Sahagún does not depict bad male physicians in ways that directlylink their genitalia with their misuse of spiritual and healing power.17

Given that most Nahua documents were destroyed and the knowl-edge we have about ancient Nahua culture is laden with Christian colo-nial and Nahua male bias, it is challenging to discern pre-transculturatedNahua beliefs and practices. However, if we attempt to interpret primarydocuments according to an ancient Nahua lens that privileged comple-

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Fig. 1 Coatlicue (from the Pyramid Court,Tenochtitlan), Mexica, fourteenth tofifteenth century. Stone. 11 ! ft x 4 " ft.Instituto Nacional de Antropología eHistoria, Mexico City.

mentarity and balance, the notions of “dual duality” and fluidity, and thevalue of moderation rather than abstinence, we might imagine thatNahua ideals did not judge women according to a rigid virgin/whore di -chotomy, as understood within a Spanish Christian framework.18 In deed,because Nahuatl does not have a word for “virgin,” Christians used theNahuatl word for a post-pubescent girl, ichpochtli, to mean virgin. More -over, the closest word to “whore” in Nahuatl was auiani (or ahuiani), “thejoyful one,” that refers to “pleasure girls,” women who provided sexualpleasure in state-controlled or independent “Houses of Joy” and partici-pated in ceremonial festivals, but who were not associated with “sin” asputas were within a Spanish moral system.19 Although the Florentine Codexdiscusses the qualities of good versus bad indigenous women along thelines of sexual behavior, such representations are influenced by theclassed, patriarchal, and binary colonial projections of both Spanishmissionaries and Mexica imperialists, but not necessarily Nahua society asa whole.20 As neither “virgins” nor “whores” in classic Nahua thought,Tonantzin, Cihuacoatl, Coatlicue, Tlazolteotl, and similar sacred energiesrepresent a perspective from which to analyze and transform the preva-lent postcolonial dichotomy between virtuous virgen and pagan puta.

Re-membering Tonantzin-Guadalupe in the Decolonial ImaginarySeveral contemporary Chicana writers further the project of constructinga “decolonial imaginary” by re-membering Tonantzin, affiliated“goddesses,” and the indigenous “conocimientos” that they all represent aspart of Guadalupe’s cultural genealogy.21 I argue that through their re-memberings, Tonantzin-Guadalupe becomes a decolonial figure capableof healing the virtuous virgen/pagan puta split perpetuated by Western patri-archal thought. As I discuss in an essay about visual renderings ofTonantzin-Guadalupe, “‘[r]e-membering’ evokes the act of memory as aprocess of recovering and constructing knowledge . . . and as a potentiallyhealing gathering of dismembered parts.”22 Focusing on the complex rela-tionship between Tonantzin and Guadalupe is an act of decolonial resist-ance against the racist discursive violence that aims to erase Tonantzin as aliving symbol of indigeneity and dynamic indigenous conocimientos.

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I hyphenate Tonantzin-Guadalupe to visually mark the process of re-membering the figures and their multiple cultural conocimientos; for the re la-tionship between Guadalupe and Tonantzin is alive in the culturalmemory and practices of many Mexicans and Chicana/os, particularlythose who are still connected to their indigenous identities in spite of acolonial legacy that attempts to erase or delegitimize the indigenous link.For example, the annual pilgrimages to the Basilica in Tepeyac/MexicoCity and worldwide celebrations of Tonantzin-Guadalupe’s Feast Dayevery December 12th are replete with allusions to Tonantzin. The Tonant -zin connection also remains intact in indigenous ceremonial dancing,such as Danza Azteca and Danza Conchera.23 In the Tonantzin-Guadalupeconfiguration, however, the hyphen doubles as connector and as separatorbecause it signifies the distinct cultural genealogies that discourses ofconnection and hybridity may potentially, even if inadvertently, erase.Moreover, I privilege Tonantzin to counter the dominant history of hermarginalization.

According to Aztec elder and folklorist Señora Angelbertha Cobb,Tonantzin connotes a human mother as well as mother earth.24 Tonant -zin’s association with the Mesoamerican indigenous feminine energy of“agricultural and human fertility,” as well as the energy of creation-destruction that has “military associations,” further links Guada lupe toindigenous, non-dichotomizing conceptions of duality.25 As such,Tonantzin-Guadalupe deconstructs the Christian spiritual virgin/sexualwhore binary from an indigenous worldview that does not fragment thebody and the spirit as gendered binary opposites nor promote an alwaysalready impossible ideal of virgin mother for women to emulate.26

Tonantzin’s motherhood is distinct from the idealized pure virginal moth-erhood of Guadalupe as a Marian figure whose spiritual powers originatefrom her association with a male God and the Son of God. To the Nahua,who believed in the feminine and masculine “dual duality” of “God,”Tonantzin is “God.” Indeed, Ana Castillo’s edited anthology, Goddess of theAmericas/La Diosa de las Américas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, marks forthe literary world this discursive shift, which already existed in the imagi-nations of many devotees: from Tonantzin-Guadalupe as the “mother ofGod” to Tonantzin-Guadalupe as a God dess in her own right. Castillo’s

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unique collection challenges dominant depictions of Tonantzin-Guada -lupe as solely a symbol of the Church and/or the Mexican nation. As areclaimed “feminine face of God,” Tonant zin-Guadalupe’s linkage toMesoamerican indigenous cosmologies of duality and understandings ofthe sacred is foregrounded, in addition to principles of moderation andbalance.27

However, lest we romanticize indigenous conocimientos, Nahua ideals, likeany culture’s ideals, have not always been practiced. For example, as theMexica rose to power and built their empire in the fifteenth century, theytransformed Coatlicue, one of Tonantzin’s faces, from a powerful “motherGoddess” into a more passive “mother of God” when they represented heras miraculously conceiving Huitzilopochtli from “a ball of feathers” with-out engaging in sexual intercourse.28 In fact, as the myth is typically told,Coatlicue’s questionable conception is the cause of distress and shame byher children, which presumably leads to their murderous plot against theirunborn brother and mother. Coatlicue is saved when her adult sonHuitzilopochtli is born in warrior regalia and kills his sister Coyolxauhqui,the ringleader. As some feminist scholars have argued, the shift from moregender egalitarian societies to more patriarchal ones is coupled with theemergence of myths such as this one that depicts the ousting of a goddessby a male god.29 Noemí Quezada suggests that in this story of “cosmiccombat,” Coyolxauhqui, along with fellow feminine deity, sister, andperhaps leader of a matrilineal ethnic group Malinal xóchitl, “play the roleof dissidents to the masculinist new order that was trying to forcefullyimpose the warrior god.”30 Although the imperialistic Mexica subsumeCoatlicue and the duality that she represents into the warrior Huitzilo -pochtli, it is also significant that Huitzilopochtli’s birth as a warrior allowedhim to protect Coatlicue from Coyolxauhqui and the other siblings whowere about to commit matricide.31 Granted, the sup posed instigation tomurder Coatlicue, shame over her illegitimate pregnancy and presumablyputa behavior, is suspiciously Christian. Instead, Coyolxauhqui may havebeen aiming to sacrifice her brother to keep patriarchy at bay.32 What everthe case, working to understand the complexity of such god dess stories asdocumented in colonial and contemporary sources, written and oral, isvaluable in the forging of a “decolonial imaginary.”

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Deconstructing such patriarchal myths has been part of the criticalwork of Chicana feminists. My own work furthers the recodifying processof Guadalupe and Malinche by arguing that Chicanas can reject thedichotomous construction the two figures represent while also redefiningboth their spirituality and sexuality in ways that are personally andsocially empowering. If our sexual and spiritual subjection have gonehand in hand, then feminist decolonizing cultural practice must also seri-ously attend to both in relation to each other. As Cherríe Moraga states,“if sexuality and spirituality have been combined for our repression thenobviously they have to be combined for our liberation.”33

Granted, critically exploring and practicing indigenous, mestiza,hybrid, nepantla, or so-called alternative spiritualities that value “the femi-nine principle” have often been a challenge for Chicanas and other wom -en of color. As heirs of a modern-colonial legacy that marginalizes thefeminine and the indigenous and often dismisses spirituality as un scien-tific, apolitical, or as too essentialist from the perspective of postmodernfeminism, many women struggle to define and integrate spirituality inrelationship to sexuality on their own terms.34 If putting “flesh back on theobject” transforms the object into a subject, as I argue, Chicana culturalproducers’ engagement with indigenous goddesses from a decolonial femi-nist perspective helps put “flesh back on the [spiritual] object,” as well asspirit back on the sexual object of Tonantzin-Guadalupe.35 As writings byGloria Anzaldúa, Liliana Valenzuela, Sandra Cisneros, and Cherríe Mo ra gathat transform the virtuous virgen/pagan puta split show us, Tonant zin-Guadalupe can be a powerful force of healing and creativity.

Seeing the Serpent in the Mother:Gloria Anzaldúa’s Tonantzin-Guadalupe As part of the legacy of decolonial imagining initiated by Chicana artists,such as Ester Hernández in the 1960s and Yolanda López in the 1970s,Anzaldúa was among the first writers to theorize about Tonantzin-Guadalupe from a Chicana feminist perspective. In Borderlands/La Frontera:The New Mestiza, Tonantzin-Guadalupe appears as a symbol of the spiritualborderlands “connecting [Chicana/os] to [their] Indian ancestry.”36 Sheinhabits “los intersticios,” defined by Anzaldúa as “the spaces between the

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different worlds,” of the spirit and the flesh influenced by the des/conocimien-tos of indigenous, European, and mestizo, or mixed race, cultures (20). Increating empowering “new images of identity” that counter oppressive,monolithic ways of representing Chicana spirituality and sexuality, Anzal -dúa is not so much appropriating a patriarchal image of Guadalupe as sheis re-membering her multiple and indigenous histories (87). Anzaldúa’sovarial writings complicate Tonantzin-Guadalupe’s cultural histories bycritically linking her to a pantheon of Mesoamerican indigenous god -desses, thus becoming an inspiration to many other Chicanas seeking tore-sexualize the “sacred” image of Tonantzin-Guadalupe.

Anzaldúa fleshes the spirit of Tonantzin-Guadalupe through thememory of her grandmother, who feels Tonantzin-Guadalupe’s presenceviscerally (27). Growing up in rural south Texas, Anzaldúa followed herMamagrande’s example of imbuing Tonantzin-Guadalupe with powers thatextend beyond traditionally Catholic ones and that Anzaldúa associateswith indigenousness.37 Anzaldúa views Guadalupe as “an aspect of la MadreTierra [Mother Earth], Tonantzin,” beyond the socially sanctified “mother”role and toward an understanding of the Great Goddess. She elaborates, “Ithink of a lot of these cultural figures and goddesses as part of a largerEspíritu [Spirit] but localized. . . . So my relationship to her [them] . . . is . . .that they’re part of the soul of the earth and that the earth has aconsciousness and all the thoughts of all humanity are in that conscious-ness, all the ideas are there, all the feelings are there.”38 Indeed, Anzaldúadescribes her own mestiza spiritual practice of keeping an altar with aburning candle with an image of the “Virgen of Coatlalopeuh” on top of hercomputer monitor in addition to keeping a feathered serpent staff as a“companion” at her side as she creates (75). The feathered serpent is asymbol of the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl, described as androgy-nous or coupled with Tonantzin, Coatlicue, and Cihuacoatl in Nahuathought.39 As we see, Tonantzin-Guadalupe is not a disembodied symbolthat Anzaldúa rejects along with the oppressive tenets of her religious andcultural upbringing. Instead, she is an indigenous reminder that the spiri-tual matters and that “s/Spirit(s)” is/are present in women’s lives in spite ofthe colonial and patriarchal legacy of violence in the Américas.40 Anzaldúa’sreconstruction of Tonantzin-Guadalupe’s genealogy suggests that patriar-

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chal damage to feminine orgender-balanced spiritualities hasperpetuated the oppression againstwomen and indigenous peoples allover the world.

In her writing, Anzaldúatraces Guadalupe’s cultural originsto an entire genealogy of Nahuagod desses. She follows the exam-ple of indigenis tas, Mexican advo-cates for interpreting Guadalupefrom an indigenous hermeneuticperspective, by renaming Guada -lupe her “Indian name . . .Coatlalopeuh . . . She Who HasDominion Over Ser pents,” whichAnzaldúa interprets as “the onewho is at one with the beasts” (27,29).41 By linking her with

“Mesoamerican fertility and Earth goddesses,” such as Coatlicue,Tlazolteotl, Cihuacoatl, and Tonantzin, Anzaldúa joins many Chicanavisual artists, including Gina Aparicio, in deconstructing Guadalupe’soverdetermined Hispanic identity, which officially associates her with theEuropean Marian tradition (27) (fig. 2). Anzaldúa’s re-memberment ofGuadalupe (Coatlalopeuh) with Tonantzin and other similar figures isan act of decolonizing a Christian-based ideology of feminized flesh andmas culinized spirit. Cognizant of the actual and attempted erasures ofindigenous conocimientos by Euro centric colonizers as well as the subver-sion of principles that valued the feminine within a fluid “dual Duality”paradigm by the imperialistic Mexica, Anzaldúa’s reclamation is multiplysignificant, because, as Alicia Gaspar de Alba notes, “Only by seeding thenew world with the old names will the memories come back.”42 In thiscase, “the old names” help us remember the impact of at least twoaspects of patriarchy on the colonization of women’s spirituality andsexuality. As Anzaldúa writes,

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Fig. 2 Gina Aparacio. Nuestra Madre Tierra, 1998. Acrylic on board, 18 in. x 24 in.Reprinted by permission of artist.

[T]he Spaniards and their Church. . . desexed Guadalupe, taking Coatlalopeuh,the serpent/sexuality, out of her. They completed the split begun by theNahuas by making la Virgen de Guadalupe/Virgen María into chaste virgins andTlazolteotl/Coatlicue/la Chingada into putas. . . . They went even further; theymade all Indian deities and religious practices the work of the devil. (27-28)

Not only is Anzaldúa critical of Christianity’s role in “desex[ing]” Guada -lupe (Coatlalopeuh), she also explains how “the male dominated Azteca-Mexica culture drove the powerful female deities underground by givingthem monstrous attributes and by substituting male deities in their place,thus splitting the female Self and the female deities” (27). She elaborates:“They divided her who had been complete, who possessed both upper(light) and underworld (dark) aspects. Coatlicue, the Serpent goddess, andher more sinister aspects, Tlazolteotl and Cihuacoatl, were ‘darkened’ anddisempowered much in the same manner as the Indian Kali. Tonantsi[n]–split from her dark guises, Coatlicue, Tlazolteotl, and Cihuacoatl–became thegood mother” (27).

Conscious of the ways that Mexica imperialism had also subordinatedthe complex feminine sacred power of goddesses such as Tonantzin andCoatlicue, Anzaldúa does not romanticize nor create a new dichotomybetween Catholic desconocimientos versus Mexica conocimientos. In resistance todiscourses that construct cultural and historical amnesia and distort in -digenousness and femaleness in the interests of the dominant ideology,Anzaldúa remembers the multiple names of Guadalupe and other indige-nous goddesses. Thus, she recuperates their ancient conocimientos of dualitywhile moving beyond their Western binary oppositional construction ofbeing either “creature[s] of darkness” or “creature[s] of light” and rede-fines “dark” and “light” by dispensing with their respectively positive andnegative connotations (81). In this way, Anzaldúa does not inscribeCoatlicue as the “dark” aspect of Tonantzin nor as a new “monstrousdouble” to the “good mother” Guadalupe or even Tonantzin, but ratherdefines them all as symbols of the indigenous and feminine sacred. ForAnzaldúa, they are multiple names and faces of the same or similar eroticdivine energy symbolized by the powerful serpent. In contrast to a Chris -tian worldview that associates the serpent with evil, the devil, and Eve’sFall, from a Nahua perspective the serpent, “who rubs the belly of the

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earth, moving as energy moves,” is associated with wisdom and justicespecifically through Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.43

Anzaldúa’s “curandera (healer) work” aims to heal the internalizationof a racist and heterosexist cultural legacy that condemns the indigenousand female elements in the Américas.44 Fleshing the spirit and spiriting theflesh of her indigenous female ancestors, human and divine, Anzaldúawrites, “Las invoco diosas mías, ustedes las indias / sumergidas en mi carneque son mis sombras” [I invoke you my goddesses, you the Indians /submerged in my flesh who are my shadows] (31). Arguing that the insti-tutionalized “obscuring” of Guadalupe’s “true identity” has worked “tomake us docile and enduring” (31) along with the subversion of otherChicana “Mothers,” the cultural figures la Malinche and la Llorona, An -zal dúa calls for us “to unlearn the puta/virgen dichotomy and to seeCoatlapopeuh-Coatlicue in the Mother, Guadalupe” (84). Working “to seeCoatlapopeuh-Coatlicue,” means becoming conscious about the indigenousserpentine conocimientos of dynamic duality that these deities manifestedbefore the Mexica redefined their meanings from a patriarchal point ofview that the Spanish colonizers further negated. By seeing the serpent asa symbol of the complementary duality of the spirit and flesh, the divinesexual aspect of the desexed mother Tonantzin-Guadalupe, one is poten-tially liberated from judging women and oneself based on a spirit versusflesh oppositional binary. Indeed, as Anzaldúa suggests, unlearning thevirtuous virgen/pagan puta dichotomy is nothing less than healing patriar-chal and colonized constructions of female sexuality and spirituality.

Goddess Genealogies: Liliana Valenzuela’s“Virgencita, Give Us a Chance”Although Liliana Valenzuela’s short story “Virgencita, Give Us a Chance”does not directly engage Tonantzin-Guadalupe, it does depict a contem-porary Marian apparition story that decolonizes the spirituality/sexualitysplit by evoking Mary’s pagan predecessors akin to Tonantzin. Re writingtraditional Marian apparition stories, Valenzuela narrates a mysticalencounter between an erotic Virgin “María” and Camila, a spirituallyskeptical and sexually assertive Latina. The en counter sparks a positivelytransformative shift in Camila’s sexual and spiritual consciousness.

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Initially published in Spanish under the pen name Adela Alonso in TheSexuality of Latinas, the first creative and critical anthology on the topic,“Virgencita, danos chance” is paired with the classic image of EsterHernández’s La Virgen de Guadalupe defendiendo los derechos de los Xicanos (TheVirgin of Guadalupe defending Chicano rights). The slightly revisedstory’s publication in English in Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Américasfurther establishes the link between Tonantzin-Guadalupe and theMarian tradition that has roots in the pre-Christian cult of earthgoddesses throughout the Mediter ranean and Europe.45

This story decolonizes the pagan female creation deities indigenous tolands and peoples colonized by Christianity. As documented by feministssuch as Marina Warner, Rosemary Ruether, and Donna Read, the spreadof Christian evangelization replaced pagan goddesses with a patriarchalGod and a mostly male pantheon of saints, attempting to repress thefemale deities’ positive link to sexuality and the body in the process.46

Challenging a tradition of Western androcentric constructions of the femi-nine divine, feminine beauty, and heterosexist sexuality, Valen zuela trans-gressively invokes Venus and related ancient Mediterranean goddessesalongside other female archetypes, the Christian Mary and Eve and theJewish Lilith, to re-member the link between the spirit and the flesh from adecolonial feminist perspective. Blurring the lines between virtuous virgenand pagan puta and putting the dichotomy into question altogether,Valenzuela’s “Virgencita” is sensually described as “gorgeous” and “majes-tic,” a “woman” and a “divine being” with agency and sexual desires.47

Locating the story in contemporary Venice, a city named afterVenus, the Roman goddess of agriculture who “took on many character-istics of the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite,” Valenzuela depicts theoceanic Madonna-Goddess as an embodiment of female sexuality.48

Appearing to a mystified Camila, she emerges from seawater like Venusas a “gorgeous woman, enveloped in steam, enveloped in a rose robe,soaking wet, showing her voluptuous body, her round and firm breasts.Her mouth a seashell. . . . The sea smell so intense it would seem thiscreature was the sea herself, her hair coral and her body a mermaid” (92).Her description as a mermaid further links this hybrid Virgencita to theancient goddess[es], “whose origin and power are associated with the

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sea.”49 If, as commonly suggested, “The mermaid ultimately signifies thefundamental mystery of female sexuality, particularly for men who,because they cannot comprehend it, are simultaneously drawn to it andterrified by it,” then this story also challenges a heterosexist female-maleeconomy of fear and desire. Not only does this mermaid-like goddess defypatriarchal myths about her supposed dangerous sexual allure typicallydepicted through her “irresistible” siren voice that “leads men to theirdoom,” but she also challenges the pagan puta/virtuous virgen dichotomyand reinforces bonding between women by appearing to a woman as theVirgin Mary.50

Moreover, the dark-haired “Venus” in this imagining is quite differentfrom Sandro Botticelli’s celebrated image of European Renaissanceplatonic beauty in The Birth of Venus (c. 1485). Her “mane of black hair,”“cinnamon face,” and the fact that she is conversant in Spanish andEnglish signal her racialized body and her cultural association with con -temporary U.S. Latina/o culture (92, 95). Such re-memberings be tweenthe mermaid–or within a Mexican popular cultural context, La Sirena–Venus, and María, a mestiza Mother of God, exemplify a spectrum of greatgoddesses whose decolonial feminist genealogies are dynamically presentand reconstructed in spite of patriarchal renderings.51

Valenzuela also challenges other patriarchal beliefs that maintain agendered spirit/flesh split and deny female sexual-spiritual power. Forexample, in contrast to the classical myth of Venus that recounts her un -mothered origin from Uranus’s genitals, Valenzuela omits any mention ofa male progenitor. However, Valenzuela’s narrative does not replace thestory of an all-powerful god with the story of an all-powerful goddess andmatriarchal past. Instead, Valenzuela complicates the conventional hier-archy between superior “s/Spirit” and inferior humans or flesh. For exam-ple, Camila initially rebukes the Virgin for referring to her as “daughter,”perhaps because she interprets it as the Virgin’s attempt to call her into anortho dox belief system that is sexually tyrannical toward women. Re -jecting an oppressively hierarchical divine mother/human daughter rela-tionship perpetuated by the Church, Camila adamantly demands, “Don’tcall me daughter,” and insists on instead creating an egalitarian relation-ship built on entrusting each other with their personal questions and

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stories. Indeed, when Camila recites in her mind the first line of theMexican rosary, “Ave María purísima, sin pecado concebida . . . [Hail purest Mary,conceived without sin . . . ]–presumably internalized during her Catholicupbringing–she quickly seizes the unique opportunity to inquire aboutMaría’s sex life with her in the flesh (93).

By situating the initial apparition and encounter between Camila andla Virgencita on a bridge, symbolic of an interstitial space, Valenzuela effec-tively creates a decolonial “third space” in which oppositional binaries arenot the dominant epistemology.52 On the contrary, they are put intoquestion and transgressed. Significantly, Valenzuela foregrounds Camila’sagency in creating a meeting of these spiritual and physical borderlandswhen she invites the woman-goddess to “climb on[to] the bridge” fromthe water so they can continue to talk (93).

Valenzuela’s portrayal of this Marian apparition depicts the Virgin ashuman-like: as “a woman just like [Camila] with desires, likes, with whatthey call a natural desire quite in bloom” (93). Gaining Camila’s confi-dence and affirming her sexual yearnings, María dispels the myth of herasexual virginity in recounting the great pleasure of her erotic encounterswith José (Joseph), whom she wistfully describes as “the best looking manin the whole region, and the hottest too” (93). Humorously blurring thehierarchy between humans and God(s) or representatives of God as repre-sented in the confessional, the Madonna “confess[es]” to Camila that she“loved” having sex with José. She elaborates: “I became more experiencedand each time I enjoyed it more. His soft and burning skin next to mine, Icouldn’t hold myself back” (93-94).

As the trust and intimacy between María and Camila evolves, it isclear that their transformative relationship represents a healing of thevirtuous virgen/pagan puta dichotomy, a healing that quells the sociallysanctioned fear and shame that leads to the repression of women’s sexual-ity and self-defined spirituality. Indeed, María reaffirms Camila’s spiritualfaith while affirming her sexuality. In the second half of the story, Maríaannounces that Camila is undergoing a sacred-sexual “transformation”(95). Valenzuela recounts an erotic dreamlike sequence in which Camila’semerging sexual consciousness embraces her desire for her friend andtraveling companion, Antonia. Appropriating the representational lan -

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guage of mysticism and ancient goddess worship, Valenzuela depicts the“miracle” of sensual and sacred female sexuality:

The two virgins [Camila and Antonia] embrace . . . they float over the blue-green waters . . . they reach for the fruit below. Their breasts are duplicated,quantified, multiplied, a twin image, a mirror image, a repetition, an un -folding, and a rupture. Venus plays with a golden lock of hair over theirvulvas. A delicate foot squashes the juice of a red poppy. Raspberries dripfrom their breasts . . . the smell of the canals, of their own canals, their ownrivers and seas. . . . La Madonna de Latte nurses Camila and Antonia at herbreast, envelops them with petals, gives them divine manna while they lieon her bosom of understanding. All of Venice is witness to this miracle. . . .La Virgencita swims, Venus in the water, her light robes appear and disap-pear. . . . The monks in their white habits pray, raise banners, the miracle ofthe vulva is back. (96)

By providing sensually rich, transgressive images, such as of the Virginnursing two grown women, the sea-scent of vaginas, multiplying breasts,sexually suggestive dripping raspberries and popping red poppies, Valen -zuela evokes pre-Christian feminine deities and female orgiastic cere-monies. Such erotic imagery counters the body-loathing ideology inChristian theology that treats sexual desire as a human weakness in needof constant surveillance. Moreover, Camila and Antonia are represented asdeified virgins who are supported by the Virgin herself in transgressing thetaboo of same-sex eroticism. The spectacular image of these nursing adultwomen replaces centuries-old “Madonna de Latte” images of baby Jesus atMary’s glorified breast, troubling the Christian nurturing mother ideal sooften reserved for males while sanctifying nurturance for and by females.53

To help heal the denigration of the vulva and the virgin/whore di -chotomy inherited from patriarchal interpretations of Judeo-Christianity,Valenzuela also invokes Lilith, who in “postbiblical Jewish folklore andrabbinic commentary” is believed to be the first woman created by God.54

Genesis narrates two creation myths: in chapter one God creates woman,interpreted by some people as Lilith, and man (Adam) simultaneouslyfrom clay, and both are equal; in chapter two, the dominant version, Godcreates woman (Eve) from Adam’s rib to be his subservient helper. Incontrast to Eve’s biblical story of disobedience that leads to exile from the

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Garden of Eden, according to some Jewish stories, Lilith chooses to leavethe Garden of Eden in resistance to Adam who attempts to control hersexuality and dominate her. Patriarchal interpretations of a defiant andsexually voracious Lilith speak of her becoming a succubus, a femaledemon who seduces men, has demon babies, causes erotic dreams andnocturnal emissions, and kills children. In addition, some feminist writershave interpreted Lilith’s desire for oral sex as possible evidence that shewas “punished for being lesbian.”55

Rather than rewriting Eve, whose sexual desire is viewed with suspi-cion and shame in dominant discourse, and exhorting Camila to “followEve” as Valenzuela does in the initial Spanish version of the story, in thissecond version, Valenzuela concentrates on a feminist revision of Lilith’snarrative of sexual empowerment that blurs the historical dichotomybetween Eve and Mary.56 Although characterized as a pagan whore insome Jewish folklore, Lilith, akin to Tonantzin and related indigenousdeities, offers a third space from which to deconstruct the pagan puta/Eveversus virtuous virgen/Mary dichotomy. Indeed, María’s response to Cami -la’s supplication, “Virgencita, give us a chance, the heck with virginity, no?We’re up to here with the same old song about honor, let’s call it quits,”positively associates Camila with Lilith’s sexual and worldly curiosity andcelebrates her choice of serpentine conocimiento, passion (94). Choosing to bepart of Lilith’s feminist genealogy, María celebrates the idea that Lilith“was the first to know / the first to know about / the first to choose / thefirst to feel passion” (94). Subverting the moral discourse on sin by focus-ing on healing Camila’s internalized “guilt,” María blesses Camila with herfinal words: “Like Lilith / you are free / free / from now on your guilt hasbeen washed with water / erased from your heart / Follow Lilith / youhothead / it’s your time of transformation” (94-95). As she departs, Maríagifts Camila with a humanizing vision of her nude female body, “her wetvagina, everything you don’t see in the holy cards,” that leads to Camilaseeing her own nude beauty as well, “her pubic hair, her tits” (95). Per -ceiving herself as a manifestation of this human, erotic Virgencita is an act ofdecolonizing self-love that liberates Camila’s sexual curiosity and desires.

So when “Camila kisses Antonia’s mouth, juicy as persimmon,” it is a“miracle” of love and eroticism between women in a culture that compels

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women to repress their sexual and sensual desires, particularly for eachother (97). In this decolonial imaginary, the spirit is fleshed and the flesh isspirited as women are represented as the subjects of their own sexual andspiritual emancipation. To enforce the women’s agency, Valenzuela twicedepicts the male priests as “silent” witnesses (96, 97). As the storyconcludes, images of renewal and rebirth abound. With the hopeful finalwords of the story, “Spring begins,” Valenzuela transforms the patriarchalmyth of Mary/María/Guadalupe into a new story that celebrates femalesacred eroticism (97).

Speaking from the Panocha: Sandra Cisneros’s “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess”Valenzuela’s story leads us to another “spring” of transformative playfuldialogue and imagery about Chicana sacred sexual bodies and desires thatalso affirm: “the miracle of the vulva is back” (96). In this case, SandraCisneros’s essay, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” directly evokesTonantzin-Guadalupe in relation to culturally and sexually diverse defi-nitions of the sacred.57 Moreover, Cisneros pushes the virtuousvirgen/pagan puta oppositional binary even further by daring to identify,name, and intensely gaze at Guadalupe’s panocha. In her work on theimportance of constructing Chicana lesbian spaces and discourses, EmmaPérez draws from indigenous terminology to elaborate an erotic and criti-cal language. Panocha, she explains, is a Nahuatl root and a contemporarycolloquial expression for vagina used within some Mexican communities.Cisneros is among many other writers like Pérez who also look beyondcolonial Western ideologies to construct discourses that are specific towomen’s cultural and sexual subjectivity.58 In her testimonial essay,Cisneros wistfully wonders what she would find if she were to look underTonantzin-Guadalupe’s saintly dress. Indeed, she sincerely, althoughplayfully, questions, “Does her panocha look like mine?”59 In thinking aboutGuadalupe’s fe male anatomy, Cisneros transforms her from an impossi-ble feminine ideal into a god dess she sees reflected in herself and in thesacredness of women’s bodies. Like Anzaldúa, Valenzuela, and other femi-nists critical of how Mary and women in general have “been imprison[ed]upon a pedes tal” of virtue as defined within the heteronormative roles of

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virgin or mother, Cisneros takes Mary down to earth.60 This processentails humanizing and indigenizing Mary, as well as assimilating her toTonantzin-Guada lupe beyond the limiting constraints of an androcentricand Euro centric definition of the female sacred. Following Anzaldúa’sexample, Cisneros decolonizes the Catholic sacred by recoveringTonantzin’s indigenous pantheon of female goddesses to re-memberTonantzin-Guadalupe as a “sex goddess.”

Significantly, although Cisneros describes Tonantzin-Guadalupe asrepresenting compassion and love, she chooses to give her the title of “sexgod dess” rather than the more socially accepted title of “love goddess.”Like Valenzuela and other Chicanas who re-imagine romantic renderingsof woman as love goddess from a Eurocentric male gaze, Cisneros presentsa sexually assertive, feminist, and decolonizing representation of Tonant -zin-Guadalupe. As a figure that legitimizes women’s sexual self-knowledgeand desires, Cisneros’s Tonantzin-Guadalupe links love and sexuality, spiritand flesh, not necessarily for heterosexual ends, but for oneself.

In re-membering Tonantzin-Guadalupe, Cisneros writes, “[she]makes me feel good about my sexual power, my sexual energy . . .reminds me I must, as Clarissa Pinkola Estés so aptly put it, ‘[speak] fromthe vulva . . . speak the most basic, honest truth,’ and write from mypanocha” (49).61 By speaking and writing from the panocha, here defined asthe whole vulva, clitoris included, by insisting that women express theirsexual and spiritual wounds and desires, Cisneros challenges the legaciesof silence that curtail wom en’s agency. By calling on women to writefrom their panochas, Cis neros is legitimizing the erotic female body as a siteand producer of knowledge. This sentiment is also expressed in herpoetry, particularly “Down There” where Cisneros ingeniously describesmenstrual blood: “I’d like to dab my fingers in my inkwell / and write apoem across the wall. / “A Poem of Womanhood” / Now wouldn’t thatbe something? / Words writ in blood. . . . ”62 Through this re-membering,the panocha is not solely a site of pro creation nor is it the antithesis ofreason, as Western patriarchy postulates; it is an extraordinary site ofcreativity. Writing from her social location as a Chicana who grew up in aCatholic working-class family, Cisneros compels her readers to reflect onwhat it means to trust the body’s conocimientos. Given women’s internal-

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ized legacy of fear and mistrust toward the female body, especially theracialized, classed, and queer body, this is no easy feat.

Of course panochas are sites of sexual pleasure and power, the clitorisbeing the only organ in the human body whose sole function is sexual joy.A politics of panocha, however, does not simply mean that women celebratetheir genitalia for being genitalia. A panocha politics also examines the signif-icance of making such a woman-loving, self-loving reclamation given theanti-sexual Christian legacy that holds women responsible for perpetuat-ing sin through the myth of Eve. Against such misogynist myths, as AudreLorde urges, women experiencing erotic power can use it as a resource ofknowledge and “energy for [personal and social] change.”63 Cisneros alsoshows how the erotic can be a source of artistic creativity and need notonly be related to sexuality, with or without procreation overvalued bypatriarchy. Countering the Christian legacy of representing female spiritu-ality through images of passive motherhood, Cisneros defines creativitymore broadly, by including writing and art in order to open space forwomen to spirit their flesh. She inspires the question: how might creativeexpression that comes from the panocha be a spiritual act?

Cisneros fleshes the spirit and spirits the flesh by providing examples ofNahua goddesses of sexuality that are hiding under Guadalupe’s skirt, asdevotees of pagan goddesses hid them underneath Marian figures since theadvent of Christian evangelization.64 Of course there is Tonant zin, butthere are also many others: “Inside Tonantzin,” Cisneros writes, “I discov-ered Tlazolteotl, the goddess of fertility and sex, also referred to as Totzin,Our Beginnings, or Tzinteotl, goddess of the rump” (49). Another aspect ofTlazolteotl, Cisneros recounts, is “Tlaelcuani” who as “the filth eater”cleansed people of their sexual “sins” through her priests/esses that listenedto their “confession[s]” (49). That is, within Nahua dualism focused on fluidequilibrium, Tlazolteotl was responsible for immoral sexual behavior andcould remove such impurities by “eating [people’s] carnal appetites andsins.”65 Moreover, Tlazolteotl is commonly represented as a squattingfemale figure giving birth in Mexica art and thus embodies “a duality ofmaternity and sexuality,” not the Western polarized binary (49) (fig. 3).These goddesses are what Cisneros calls “sexy mama[s]” (49). Within a colo-nial imaginary, the concept of a “sexy mama” is an oxymoron, and thus

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Cisneros’s reimagining of thesegod desses through the lens ofindigenous and mestiza conocimientosplaces them in a third borderlandsspace beyond the disparaging andlimiting dichotomy of the virtuousvirgen/pagan puta.

However, although Cisnerossubverts the moral judgmentsimplicit in the colonial characteri-zations of such sex goddesses, shedoes not engage all of theircomplex significations. She missesan opportunity, for example, tocomplicate the notion of a sexymama by glossing over her owndescription of the birthing deity“grimacing in pain” (49). Mostcontemporary Western eyes wouldnot consider this image “sexy,” butCisneros’s reimagining can inspirereflection on the powerful, erotic “depth of feeling” experienced whilebirthing and witnessed by Nahua midwives patronized by Tlazolteotl.66 Inaddition, Adela Fernández’s description of “confessional” storytelling toTlazolteotl-Tlaelcuani as having “the cathartic sense of desembarazo,” whichmeans “extrication” and literally, to become non-pregnant, is suggestiveof Tlazolteotl’s regenerative role of eating then birthing transgressions,healing the transgressors and the transgressions in the process.67 Drawingfrom the oral tradition, Patrisia Gonzales cites “la comadre Sylvia” whospeaks of Tlazolteotl as “Mexica healing energy that absorbs ills and recy-cles and purifies life.” Indeed, Tlazolteotl represents the rejuvenating,rebalancing, generative, and regenerative cycle of life.68 The Codex Borbonicusillustration of Tlazol teotl in which she appears to be giving “birth to aminiature version of herself” also confirms such cyclical transformativeand healing associations (fig. 3).69

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Fig 3. The Goddess Tlazolteotl in the Act ofChildbirth, Mexica, fifteenth or nineteenth

century. Aplite, 8 in. Reprinted bypermission at Dumbarton Oaks, Pre-

Columbian Collection, Washington, D.C.

Although Cisneros does not thoroughly address Tlazolteotl’s multiplemeanings, she does elaborate on the ways that Guadalupe is also thecomplex Coatlicue, the Mexica “creative/destructive goddess” who re -minds her of her own creative and destructive power. Cisneros writes,“When I think of the Coatlicue statue in the National Museum in MexicoCity . . . I think of a woman enraged, a woman as tempest, a woman bienberrinchuda [extremely upset], and I like that. La Lupe as cabrona. Not silent andpassive, but silently gathering force” (49-50). Learning of Tonantzin-Guadalupe’s association with Coatlicue expands Cisneros’s decolonialimaginary away from patriarchal portrayals of a silent and suffering Marianfigure. For example, she characterizes Tonantzin-Guadalupe-Coatlicue as a“cabrona,” literally a “she-goat,” which in Mexican Spanish feminist vernac-ular means a powerful, assertive woman, akin to the positively appropri-ated term “bitch” in the United States (50).

Not only does this re-membered Tonantzin-Guadalupe embody thelegacy of resistance against patriarchy and colonialism, but she also re mindsCisneros of her own indigenous heritage, a connection that encouragesCisneros to align herself with the struggles of native peoples. Whereasdominant U.S. and assimilationist Mexican culture teaches shame aboutindigeneity and self-loathing of the racialized female body, it is healing for aChicana to embrace that body. When Cisneros declares, “I am theCoatlicue-Lupe whose square column of a body I see in so many Indianwomen, in my mother, and in myself each time I check out my thick-waisted, flat-assed torso in the mirror,” she is proclaiming the native bodyas sacred (50). She also celebrates the difference of her racialized sexual bodywith vivid imagery: “My sex, dark as an orchid, rubbery and blue purple aspulpo, an octopus, does not look nice and tidy, but otherworldly” (51).Perceiving Tonantzin-Guadalupe as spirit and flesh with a panocha similar toher own empowers Cisneros in her “obsess[ion] with becoming a womancomfortable in her [brown] skin” (50). Such self-possession potentiallyempowers her to participate in feminist and decolonizing social changethrough her writings and cultural activist work.

Dominant patriarchal, Eurocentric, and homophobic cultures havenegatively represented and perpetuated wounding silences againstChicana and other racialized and sexualized bodymindspirits. A critical

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consciousness about the impact of the internalized “enemies within”points to the ways that women’s panochas have been defined to fulfill men’sdesires and needs.70 In what ways have our panochas not been our own, andhow might they continue to lie to us about what we desire? Indeed, a poli-tics of panocha insists that before we speak and “write from [the] panocha,” weexamine the significance of our wetness (49). That is, women must con -sider the ways that female bodies express erotic excitement and create awelcoming space for erotic play. Let us also ask: What makes our panocha’s“wet”? Who is invested in shaping our desires? How might we be express-ing ourselves in complicity with our “enemies”? Fleshing the spirit andspiriting the flesh through our panocha writing or other creative expressionentails careful self-reflection because while one’s wetness speaks, onecannot presume that our wetness is essentially truthful ink. Indeed, wecannot assume that all bodies “get wet” at all or for the same reasons.Moreover, the dryness of our panochas also speaks and merits attention.Finally, we cannot assume that everyone has similar access to panochaconocimientos, be they our own or others’ conocimientos. Cisneros’s decolonialmarveling over Tonantzin-Guadalupe’s human sexual body inspires suchreflections as seeds for further engagement.

Conclusion/Seeds…Sequoia VirgenI see you in every creviceof your burnt red fleshvagina openings splitinto two thick thighsof female eruption.

you grow old and tallyou fall

you turn to seed.71

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In this tribute to Tonantzin-Guadalupe’s 1992 apparition in Watsonville,California, to a Mexicana cannery worker and her consequent miraculousinscription onto a nearby tree, Cherríe Moraga concludes her poem byfocusing on the material-spiritual presence and persistence of the indige-nous-identified Tonantzin-Guadalupe as a “Mother Creator” (124). Inconstructing Tonantzin-Guadalupe as an ensouled and embodied “Se -quoia Virgen,” Moraga draws from pre-Christian Western as well asindigenous Mesoamerican spiritual worldviews that associate divinity withnature while also honoring women’s creative and erotic faculties (126).Certainly, further work on the ways that Chicanas decolonize Tonantzin-Guadalupe in the creation of empowering views of spirituality and sexual-ity necessitates an examination of the spirit-body as spirit-land. AsMoraga’s poem suggests, the writing body is also the sexual body is also theearthly body is also the textual body whose “seeds” are perpetuallyreleased through “female eruption” (127). This form of panocha-speaking ismagnificently female and ultimately creative. Indeed, Moraga’s poeminspires reflection on the sacred panocha as an active agent of empower-ment. By sensuously describing the Sequoia Virgen’s “burnt red flesh /vagina openings split / into two thick thighs / of female eruption,” Moragaputs erotic flesh back onto the desexed, de-eroticized Tonantzin-Guadalupe (126-27). In confluence with other decolonial feminist writers,Moraga celebrates Tonantzin-Guadalupe’s spiritual and sexual indigenous“seed” rather than fearing and suppressing it. Rejecting the feared geneal-ogy of the dark female “hagseed” perpetuated by colonial discourse,Moraga pays homage to the steadfastness of the ubiquitous “seed.” For, asshe reminds her readers, even when Tonantzin-Guadalupe “fall[s],” shewill turn into “seed,” bound to “grow old and tall” again (127). LikeAnzaldúa, Valenzuela, and Cisneros, Moraga also takes us beyond a virtu-ous virgen/pagan puta dichoto my by engaging Tonantzin-Guadalupe as ulti-mately a figure of sacred erotic energy and creation.

As we have seen, Chicana decolonial feminist practices are potentiallyhealing acts of transgression against dominant U.S. and Chicano/Latinopatriarchal cultures that support a virtuous virgen/pagan puta dichotomy.They transform cultural discourses that silence and/or distort Chicanadecolonial imaginings of sexuality and spirituality by highlighting indige-

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nous and mestiza conocimientos as represented by Tonantzin and otherindigenous sacred energies in the genealogies of Guadalupe and Mary.They create new language, dialogue, and visual stories with which topopulate a decolonial imaginary beyond either/or binary systems.Ultimately, decolonizing Tonantzin-Guadalupe does not necessarilymean rejecting Guadalupe as a colonial sign of the virtuous virgen in favorof Tonantzin and associated goddesses as signs of the colonized pagan puta.The Chicana writers discussed in this essay do not reverse the dichotomy.Instead, through Tonantzin-Guadalupe, they engage her/their conocimientosin order to sanctify the complexity and dynamism of their spiritual andsexual subjectivities.

N o t e sA heartfelt thank you to everyone who offered their suggestions and support throughthe journey of birthing this essay: primeramente, Tonantzin-Guadalupe y sus/mis comadres,including Gloria Anzaldúa, Sophia Arredondo, Bianet Castellanos, Jessica Far, InésHernández-Ávila, AnaLouise Keating, Guisela Latorre, Laura Pérez, and Yolanda Venegas.As always, I am also grateful to my family, especially my husband Raúl Trejo. A specialthank you to Ana Castillo and Emma Pérez whose writings inspired the title of this essay.

1. Catrióna Rueda Esquibel, With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians (Austin:University of Texas Press, 2006), 23-28; Luis D. León, La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, andDeath in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 8-14,62-63; Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1999), xv.

2. Emma Pérez uses the phrase “the decolonial imaginary” as a strategy through whichtoday’s writers and scholars can render audible the agency and occluded “women’svoices” of the past. E. Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary, 33.

3. Scholars also use “Nahua” to refer “to those ethnic groups constituting the Aztec orTriple Alliance empire of late postclassic times (consisting of the Mexica ofTenochtitlan, the Acol hua of Texcoco, and the Tepanec of Tlacopan).” SusanKellogg, Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America’s Indigenous Women from the PrehispanicPeriod to the Present (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2005), 188 n1. I use “Mexica,”the biggest, most powerful Nahua group at the time, only when I am specificallyspeaking about them.

4. On “transculturation,” originally penned by Fernando Ortiz, see Frances R. Aparicioand Susana Chavez-Silverman, introduction to Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representa -tions of Latinidad (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College, 1997), 1-17.

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5. On the “monstrous double,” see Norma Alarcón, “Traductora, Traditora: A Para -digmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism,” Cultural Critique 13 (Fall 1989): 58.

6. Rebecca Overmyer-Velázquez, “Christian Morality in New Spain: The Nahua Wom -an in the Franciscan Imaginary,” in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in WorldHistory, ed. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Durham, N.C.: Duke UniversityPress, 2005), 68.

7. Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, 5 vols. (México, D.F.:Editorial Pedro Robredo, 1938), 3: 299, translated and quoted in Enrique Florescano,Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence, trans. Albert G. Bork andKathryn R. Bork (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 134. Unless otherwisenoted, all English translations of Spanish texts are mine.

8. Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 54.

9. Ester Pasztory, Aztec Art (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1983), 158. The Mexica trace theirlineage to the Toltecs who dominated central Mexico four centuries prior to theMexica.

10. Sahagún, Historia general, 1: 19.11. Cecelia F. Klein, “Wild Woman in Colonial Mexico: An Encounter of European and

Aztec Concepts of the Other,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and LatinAmerica, 1450-1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995),248, 250.

12. Pasztory, Aztec Art, 158. 13. Overmyer-Velázquez, “Christian Morality in New Spain,” 72. She specifically cites

Louise Burkhart’s discussion of Sahagún (Historia general, 1: 24-29) and Torque mada(Monarquía Indiana, 7 vols. [México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,1975-1983], 3: 100), in The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-CenturyMex i co (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 93. These are Burkhart’s transla-tions.

14. Overmyer-Velázquez, “Christian Morality in New Spain,” 72.15. Irene Lara, “Bruja Positionalities: Toward a Chicana/Latina Spiritual Activism,” Chi -

cana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social 4 (Spring 2005): 10-45.16. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, 11 vols.,

trans. and ed. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Salt Lake City: School ofAmerican Research, 1950-1982), 11: 53. The Spanish text prepared after the originalNahuatl version does not translate this description, perhaps because it was deemedtoo scandalous to repeat (Sahagún, Historia general, 3: 46-47).

17. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 11: 30.18. “Dual duality” is a term used within the Nahua oral tradition to refer to, for exam-

ple, the Creator “Ometeotl” as “male-female, female-male.” Inés Hernández-Ávila,interviews with author, 4 Sept. 2001, and 17 June 2005.

19. See Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 150, regarding “virgin” and “ichpochtli.” On “pleasuregirls,” see Noemí Quezada, Sexualidad, Amor, y Erotismo: México Prehispánico y México Colonial(Méxi co, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996), 104-11; and Inga

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Clen dinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,1991), 163-65.

20. Sylvia Marcos, “Beyond Binary Categories: Mesoamerican Religious Sexuality,” inReligion and Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Stephen Ellington and M. ChristianGreen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116.

21. I draw from Gloria Anzaldúa for whom the Spanish word “conocimiento” connotes crit-ical knowledge, wisdom, consciousness, insights, intuitions, and ways of knowingsuggestive of “counterknowledge” akin to the “knowledge of the serpent in theGarden of Eden,” which is unacceptable to dominant cultures. Anzaldúa, “Toward aMestiza Rhetoric: Gloria Anzaldúa on Composition, Postcoloniality, and theSpiritual. An Interview with Andrea Lunsford,” in Interviews/Entrevistas: Gloria E. Anzal -dúa, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), 266.

22. Irene Lara, “Tonanlupanisma: Re-Membering Tonantzin-Guadalupe in ChicanaVisual Art,” forthcoming in Aztlán: The Journal of Chicano Studies 33, no. 2 (2008).

23. On honoring Tonantzin-Guadalupe, see Léon, La Llorona’s Children, 86-87. On danza, seeInés Hernández-Ávila, “La Mesa del Santo Niño de Atocha and the Conchero DanceTradition of Mexico-Tenochtitlán: Religious Healing in Urban Mexico and theUnited States,” in Religion and Healing in America, ed. Linda L. Barnes and Susan S. Sered(Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2005), 371.

24. Angelbertha Cobb, interview with author, 4 Sept. 2001.25. Kellogg, Weaving the Past, 29.26. See Marcos, “Beyond Binary Categories,” 111-35, on the specificities of Nahua fluid

duality and nonbinary concepts of the body as distinct from binary Greek thought.27. Ana Castillo, introduction to Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Américas: Writings on the

Virgin of Guadalupe (New York: Riverhead Press, 1996), xxi.28. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 4: 2.29. Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (Albuquerque: University of

New Mexico Press, 1994), 105-19, and Goddess Remembered, VHS, dir. Donna Read (1989;New York: Winstar TV & Video, 1999).

30. Quezada, Sexualidad, Amor, y Erotismo, 60.31. I thank Inés Hernández-Ávila for this insight.32. Cherríe Moraga, “En busca de la fuerza femenina,” in her The Last Generation: Poetry and

Prose (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 69-76.33. Cherríe Moraga, interview with author, 13 Feb. 2001.34. See Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, 145-61; Laura E. Pérez, “Spirit Glyphs: Reimagin -

ing Art and Artist in the Work of Chicana Tlamatinime,” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 1(1998): 36-76; and Lara Medina, “Los Espíritus Siguen Hablando: Chicana Spirituali -ties,” in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998),189-213.

35. Norma Alarcón, “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-Vision through Malintzin:Putting Flesh Back on the Object,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by RadicalWomen of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (1981; repr. New York:Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), 182-90.

Irene Lara 125

36. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt LutePress, 1987), 27. Further citations appear parenthetically in the text.

37. Gloria Anzaldúa, telephone interview with author, 12 Jan. 2002.38. Gloria Anzaldúa, interview with author, 25 July 2001.39. Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Tonantzin-Guadalupe: The Meeting of Aztec and

Christian Female Symbols in Mexico,” in her Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A WesternReligious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 195.

40. Following Laura E. Pérez, I write “s/Spirit” with a lowercase “s” and uppercase “S” toreference a simultaneous understanding of “spirit” in general and “Spirit” as sugges-tive of an immanent God or Great Mystery. By including “(s),” Pérez cross-culturallyacknowledges the potential plurality of “the s/Spirit(s).” See, L.E. Pérez, “SpiritGlyphs,” 37, 38, 45.

41. “Coatlalopeuh,” which is similar to “Coatlaxopeuh,” “[t]he one [feminine] whocrushed the serpent’s head,” is one of the names posed by proponents of indigenoushermeneutics who argue that the diety’s name was originally in Nahuatl but “wasthen transliterated by the Spaniards to ‘Guadalupe.’” See Miguel Leatham, “Indige nis -ta Hermeneutics and the Historical Meaning of Our Lady of Guadalupe of Mexico,”Folklore Forum 22, nos. 1-2 (1989): 30.

42. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, “Facing the Mariachis,” in Latina: Women’s Voices from theBorderlands, ed. Lilliana Castillo-Speed (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 42.

43. Inés Hernández-Ávila, “Tierra Tremenda: The Earth’s Agony and Ecstasy in theWork of Gloria Anzaldúa,” in EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on GloriaAnzaldúa, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 233-34.

44. L.E. Pérez, “Spirit Glyphs,” 41.45. Adela Alonso (pen name of Liliana Valenzuela), “Virgencita, danos chance,” in The

Sexuality of Latinas, ed. Norma Alarcón, Cherríe Moraga, and Ana Castillo (Berkeley:Third Woman Press, 1989), 43-46. Hernández’s 1975 etching was reprinted in TheSexuality of Latinas on the page before Alonso’s story. For the pre-Christian roots of theMarian tradition, see Maurice Hamington, Hail Mary? The Struggle for Ultimate Womanhoodin Catholicism (New York: Routledge, 1995), 11.

46. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York:Vintage Books, 1983); Ruether, “Tonantzin-Guadalupe”; Read, Goddess Remembered.

47. Liliana Valenzuela, “Virgencita, Give Us a Chance,” in Goddess of the Americas, 92-93.Further citations appear parenthetically in the text.

48. See Barbara Walker, Encyclopedia of Women’s Myths and Secrets (1983; repr., Edison, N.J.:Castle Books, 1996), 1043, for the naming of Venice. Quote from Clifford Bishop, Sexand Spirit (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1996), 80.

49. Heinz Insu Fenkl, “The Mermaid,” Journal of Mythic Arts (Summer 2003): sec. 3;www.endicott-studio.com/jMA03Summer/theMermaid.html.

50. Ibid.51. Also see Jessica Far’s “Panocha Theory: Chicanas Theorizing Sexuality through La

Virgen and La Malinche” for an interpretation of Alma Lopez’s image Lupe and Sirena inLove that suggests that La Sirena, a mermaid controversially shown being embraced by

126 Irene Lara

Guadalupe, represents Guadalupe’s vagina. In addition, see article by Guisela Latorre,in this volume.

52. E. Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary, xvi, 142 n7.53. Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 157.54. Enid Dame, Lilly Rivlin, and Henry Wenkart, editors’ introduction to Which Lilith?

Feminist Writers Re-Create the World’s First Woman (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1998), xv.55. Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, 107-8. Castillo cites J.A. Phillips, Eve: The History of an

Idea (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984).56. Alonso, “Virgencita, danos chance,” 46.57. Sandra Cisneros, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” in Goddess of the Americas, 46-51.58. Emma Pérez, “Irigaray’s Female Symbolic in the Making of Chicana Lesbian Sitios y

Lenguas (Sites and Discourses),” in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (1994; repr.,Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998), 98.

59. Cisneros, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” 51. Further citations appear parentheticallyin the text.

60. Mary Daly. “I Thank Thee, Lord, That Thou Has Not Created Me a Woman,” in TheGender Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Evelyn Ashton-Jones, Gary A. Olson, and Merry G. Perry(Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000), 165.

61. For the original “speaking from the vulva” reference, see Clarissa Pinkola Estés,Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992; repr.,New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), 368.

62. Cisneros, “Down There,” in The Sexuality of Latinas, 19-23.63. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and

Speeches (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1984), 53.64. Luisah Teish, Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals (San

Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 103.65. “Confession” to describe the sharing of one’s transgressive experiences with

Tlazolteotl-Tlaelcuani distorts the Nahua emphasis on the social value of acknowl-edging transgressions within the context of creating equilibrium, a process theycalled “the art of unbending hearts.” Adela Fernández, Dioses prehispánicos de México:Mitos y deidades del panteón nahuatl (México, D.F.: Panorama Editorial, 1983), 125.

66. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 54.67. Fernández, Dioses prehispánicos de México, 125.68. Patrisia Gonzales, The Mud People: Chronicles, Testimonios, and Remembrances (San José, Calif.:

Chusma House, 2003), 185-86.69. Pasztory, Aztec Art, 184 (colorplate 32), 284. The Codex Barbonicus is one of the codices

written by Nahua scribes/priests, ca. 15th-16th centuries.70. Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (Boston: South End

Press, 1983), 53.71. Cherríe Moraga, “Our Lady of the Cannery Workers,” in Goddess of the Americas, 124-27.

Further citations appear parenthetically in the text.

Irene Lara 127