Apocalyptic Apparition:
A Re-Interpretation of The Virgin of Guadalupe

Alyshia Gálvez
December 20, 2000
Performing Colonialism
Professor Diana Taylor
All rights reserved. 2000.
 

And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery. And another portent appeared in heaven; behold a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems…[and it] pursued the woman who had borne the male child. But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle that she might fly from the serpent and into the wilderness, to the place where she is to be nourished for a time, and times, and half a time.
--Revelation 12

Venida aquella noche en que se había de hacer y tomar lumbre nueva, todos tenían muy grande miedo y estaban esperando con mucho temor lo que acontecería, porque decían..que si no se pudiese sacar lumbre que habría fin al linaje humana, y que aquella noche y aquellas tinieblas serían perpetuas, y que el sol no tornaría a nacer o salir; y que de arriba vendrían o descenderían lostzitzimime, que eran unas figuras feísimas y terribles, y que comerían a los hombres y mujeres. [...] Y las mujeres preñadas en su rostro o cara ponían una carátula de penca de maguey, y también encerrábanlas en las trojes porque tenían y decían, que si la lumbre no se pudiese hacer, ellas también se volvieran fieros animales y comerían a los hombres y mujeres.
--Códice Borbónico

The sixth wonder was this: people heard in the night the voice of a weeping woman, who sobbed and sighed and drowned herself in tears. This woman cried: "O my sons, we are lost…" Or she cried: "O my sons, where can I hide you…?"…To the natives these marvels augured their death and ruin, signifying the end of the world was coming…
--Broken Spears

These three epigraphs share their association with the apocalypse. Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is where the end of the world and the final judgement is prophesied. The passage from the Códice Borbónico describes the New Fire ceremony, an illustration of the pre-Columbian Mexica catastrophic culture, which functioned around the assumption that every fifty-two years the return of the sun and the survival of humanity rested on the proper supplication of the gods through sacrifice. Broken Spears relates the omens revealed to the Mexica, foretelling the end of the world and the not unrelated arrival of the Spanish. These three passages are also telling in that these apocalyptic scenes feature prominent roles for women: one is clothed in the sun and battles serpents and dragons before and after childbirth, another weeps and seeks shelter for her children from impending doom, and another associates pregnant women with catastrophic liminality and demons. I wish to use these passages as a starting point from which to attempt a reinterpretation of the Virgin of Guadalupe, patroness of Mexico and empress of the Americas. The signification of the Virgin in the Americas did not begin with the story of her miraculous apparition to a native neophyte, Juan Diego, on Tepeyac hill, in December of 1531, but has roots in Reconquest-era Spain, and is even prefigured in Revelation. This reinterpretation will examine the kind of symbolic potentiality contained in the manifestations and interpretations of the Virgin of Guadalupe which goes far beyond the classic reading of her as an archetypal consoling mother.
Our Lady of Guadalupe has been called the "national symbol" of Mexico (Wolf 1958). As such, before describing the specificities of the devotional tradition that I will revise in this paper, it is important to examine what symbols are and what they can do. Geertz advocates a rather classic anthropological definition of symbols: "religious symbols, dramatized in rituals or related in myths, are felt somehow to sum up, for those for whom they are resonant, what is known about he way the world is, the quality of emotional life it supports, and the way one ought to behave while in it"; further, "particularly where these symbols are uncriticized, as they are in most of the world’s cultures, individuals who ignore the moral-aesthetic norms the symbols formulate…are regarded  not so much as evil as stupid…[or] mad" (1973: 127, 129). In this formulation, symbols become quite indistinguishable from a Gramscian vision of hegemony, a system of power relations masked with a veneer of normalcy and normativity. This kind of definition lends itself quite nicely to the kind of interpretation of Guadalupe that I am setting myself against here, as summed up in this quote: "What matters this revolving planet with its petty cares if an understanding mother whose benevolence is as unfading as the light of the moon and stars waits ready to comfort, nourish and strengthen them in their faith!" (Johnson 1980: 203). Although wrapped in a cloak of conquest, Guadalupe in this kind of long-standing reading became the only source of solace and comfort in the wake of the violence of the Spanish invasion.
I am advocating here a vision of symbols as cultural products made and remade by social agents for differing, often conflicting purposes. Symbols are not "uncriticized", unquestioningly reproduced, or embraced by social actors afraid of appearing "stupid" or "mad", but are products of particular cultural and historical contexts and they change through time. This is similar to the notion of bricolage, by which "Social actors take the material objects and social practices that are available to them in their immediate cultural milieu and combine selected objects and practices in creative ways" (Westerfelhaus 1999: 43). This is not to say that individuals can invent or read symbols against the grain in a willy-nilly fashion. On the contrary, symbols have social lives and histories, trajectories of transmission and use that provide the repertoire for their interpretation. Sometimes, the diverse elements of these repertoires travel in close proximity to the symbol, easily drawn upon by actors cognizant of their choices. This would seem to be especially true of orthodox and universal symbols within some religions or relatively young symbols, while other symbols, like the Virgin of Guadalupe, have such long, rich and apocryphal histories that their valences are not always evident on the surface, or they are lost in time. Turner argues, " Our Lady of Guadalupe lives in scenes of action whether of regular, annual, cyclical devotion…or as a multivocal symbol of popular powers in times of major social crisis" (1974: 153). I will explore here different associations and contexts, the symbolic repertoire of the Guadalupe, to show that, first, she has more complex meanings than she is commonly attributed in devotional and scholarly literature and, second, that these other, less-known meanings might go further than the standard interpretations to explain her continued popularity and meaning for many devotees.
The apocryphal history of the Virgin of Guadalupe reaches back to the time of Pope Gregory in Rome. Battling a plague that was claiming many lives, the Pope processed through the streets with a statue of Our Lady, causing the pestilence to cease. He then sent the miraculous image to Seville, in the care of Isidro who said that his brother, St. Leandro, was struggling with the "Arian kings of Spain". On the voyage, another miracle occurred, in which the image of Our Lady caused a storm to cease. Years later, in 710, upon the impending invasion of the Moors, the Christians buried the image of the blessed mother in a cave or at the banks of the river Guadalupejo or Guadalupe (Beemer 1988: 83-85). The image was not heard of again until the 13th Century, when, in "the archetypal apparition story of its time" (Christian 1981a: 39), a shepherd lost one of his flock near the same river. He found his calf dead, and proceeded to carve a cross in its throat. An apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared to him, telling him where the statue was buried and asking him to unearth it and honor her there with a shrine. The calf was resurrected, the shrine built, and the cult to Our Lady of Guadalupe founded. The retrieval of the statue, not uncoincidentally, occurred just on the heels of a drive against the Moors and repopulation by Christians of the region of Extremadura, a name given the frontier of Christian Castile. (Starr-LeBeau 1996) As such, from the start, this avocation of the Virgin Mary was associated with Christian hegemony and (re)conquest.
By the 15th Century, Guadalupe became the richest and most popular shrine in Castile. Starr-LeBeau argues that it was the "spiritual expression of the royal policy of the 1320s and 1330s that increasingly looked to the economic and political opportunities of the south and west" (1996: 19). King Alfonso, ruler when the apparition occurred, made a vow to Our Lady of Guadalupe in a battle against the Moors that he expected surely to lose. When he was victorious, he repaid the vow by dedicating the spoils of the battle to the shrine (Beemer 1988: 88). The order of St. Jerome undertook administration of the shrine. The Jeronymites were associated with the aristocracy, and royal devotion to the shrine was crucial to its status.
Christian expansion and Castilian consolidation were both byproduct and pre-requisite of the earliest nationalist and colonialist rumblings in Spain. With King Enrique, and his successor, his sister Isabella,  Guadalupanismo became associated with Castile generally, with satellite shrines emerging throughout the provinces (Ibid: 106). In June of 1492, six months after the definitive expulsion of the Moors in Granada and three months after issuing an edict to expel the Jews, Ferdinand and Isabella made a pilgrimage to the site to kneel and thank the virgin for her intercession (Ibid: 26). Later, Phillip II used it as a palace and a bank, further intertwining the kingship and divinity in what Christian calls a "double consecration": "of local religious objects by attention of the king and of the king by local religious powers" (1981b: 158).
Isabella based the legitimacy of her rule upon the favor she felt from the Virgin of Guadalupe: the separation of ("old") Christians and non-Christians, the resolution of a succession controversy on Enrique’s death, and Isabella’s victory in Granada,
not only indicated Isabella was the divinely-appointed ruler of Castile, and that Our Lady of Guadalupe was definitely orthodox, but also that the nativistic opposition of the victorious Old Christian party to the more open New Christians was supported by the Virgin and her Son (Beemer 1988: 108).
Isabella engaged quite consciously in an epic, millenarian vision. Beemer writes, "the Catholic kings, as Ferdinand and Isabella were called,…saw themselves as leaders of the final clash which was to usher in the end of history" (Ibid: 109). Within this vision, the end of the world, and the Second Coming of Christ, would only occur when the gospel had been preached to all people and each human being had chosen to follow or reject the path of Christ. This belief can be seen in the effort to make Jews and Muslims convert or leave Spain and the expansion of the Inquisition. When in 1492, the same year Isabella kneeled in Guadalupe, a new hemisphere of unbaptized souls was "discovered" and the mandate of the Catholic Kings was made more urgent and more momentous. Guadalupe became not just a referent for but a living symbol of Castilian expansion and its legitimacy.
 Already, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the Virgin Mary were associated with the woman of the Apocalypse, described in the first epigraph from Revelation above, in Christian iconography of the 14th and 15th Centuries. Beemer argues the moon upon which the Virgin of Guadalupe stands in her classic representation is the crescent of Islam, defeated in the Reconquest (1988: 110). Likewise, the rays of light emanating from her person are associated, like the corona of the monstrance in which the eucharistic host is carried in Corpus Christi processions, with the light of God, Jesus Christ.
Thus, when Cortés, and many other conquistadores who were in large numbers from Extremadura (Lockhart 1972), kneeled before the Virgin of Guadalupe at her shrine before undertaking the invasion of the American mainland, it is clear that their pretensions were grander than personal wealth and status, but encompassed even the idea of a Holy crusade. The Requerimiento which announced the arrival and intentions of the Spanish to convert or conquer any people they encountered was the legalistic condensation of the notion of the divine rights of the Catholic Kings and the choice of "infidels" and "savages" to surrender or face not only the violence of conquest, but the last judgment. That the Virgin of Guadalupe as image and the Requerimiento as text preceded Cortés and his men on banners is not a quaint marker of Castilian folk Catholicism, but an indication of the intertwining of that avocation of the Virgin Mary and Castilian legalism with the entire colonial project in all of its millenarian implications.
 Beemer argues that the Franciscans shared a millenarian vision that informed their evangelization project in New Spain, and that
they saw the discovery [of the New World] as a clear indication from God about why the world had not long since ended…The Franciscan mission in the Americas was urgent: to preach the gospel to the Indians and to use every means available to baptize them so that the long-awaited end of time would arrive (1988: 139).
The Fransciscans were the first to systematically organize the evangelization project in New Spain, charged by Charles V, who shared their apocalyptic vision (Ibid).
 If the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe occurred on Mesoamerican soil in 1531, as the legend has it, its meaning within the context of millenarian prosteylization would have been clear. Laso de la Vega described her in ways comprehensible within the Iberian iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe and within Mexica iconography related to the sun and the sacredness of place, "Her clothes were like the sun in the way they gleamed and shone. Her resplendence struck the stones and boulders by which she stood so that they seemed like precious emeralds and jeweled bracelets" (1998: 63, 65). Sánchez wrote that she tamed the torrid sun and fire of Mesoamerica, shielding it like a cloud. Here, within the hegemonic interpretation, the moon under her feet and rays of sun--which she is not emitting, but  blocking-- are the Mexica moon and sun deities she has conquered. However, there is no clear evidence that news of the apparition’s occurrence was published until 1648, and the first evidence of other references to the association of the hill at Tepeyac with the Virgin of Guadalupe seems to be from around 1556 (Poole 1995). However, that first published account, Miguel Sánchez’s Imagen de la Virgen María, is telling and indicative too of the reformulation of the apocalyptic associations of Guadalupe.
 However, in this casting of the apparition of the Virgin, no longer are the Spanish divinely chosen and associated with the battle against infidels, but the creoles are. Poole argues that for creoles in the 17th century like Miguel Sánchez, the apparition of the virgin to an indigenous man was a sign of special election of the "nation" of Mexico and of recognition of the land as sacred and valid within struggles against colonial hegemony (1995). This election elevated the Creoles and their projects vis-à-vis Spaniards and Indians, as Mateo de la Cruz wrote in his republication of Sánchez’s work,
In both places [the image] is called Guadalupe which…means ‘River of Wolves’…wolves being symbols of the demons…by her presence she put to flight the hellish demons of this place…there where they used to worship the demons in the idol Theotenantzin, with the title of the Mother of the Gods (Cited in Poole 1995: 110).

 However, almost since the same period (and possibly simultaneously) the Virgin of Guadalupe has been seized on by native and mestizo Mexicans as proof of divine favor of a people, indigenous to the land where she appeared. While Poole discredits the claim that nine million Indians converted in the aftermath of the virgin’s apparition (1995: 216), there is no question that indigenous devotion to la virgen morena soon equaled, then surpassed Creole devotion. Here, I would argue that the apocalyptic associations of the woman of Revelation and pre-Columbian legends of women associated with the end of the world become the stuff of a millenarian activism that would transform the Virgin of Guadalupe not into a comforting mother, but the vanguard of future-leaning activism.
 Rather than merely the "consolation of the poor, the shield of the weak, the help of the oppressed. In sum, the Mother of orphans" (Paz 1985), or even "the mother that recognizes the dignity of her children, even though they find themselves to be humiliated by life’s misfortunes," (González Dorado 1985: 43), the Virgin of Guadalupe becomes conquistadora, of a different reconquest. To explain myself here, it is necessary to locate my argument within another long-running debate in scholarship of colonial Latin America. In 1538, in the celebration of Corpus Christi in Tlaxcala described by Motolinía, The Conquest of Jerusalem was performed by indigenous actors, and "The Great Sultan of Babylon…was the Marqués del Valle, Hernando Cortés" (1950: 161). This theatrical production was described in 1984 by Trexler as an example of "humiliating paternalism", a "military theater of humiliation" (1984: 189, 209). Harris has taken this up, employing Scott’s notion of "hidden transcripts of resistance" to argue that rather, "it is surely the Spanish and not the Indians who, none too subtly at times, are being ridiculed" (196: 248, also 2000:137). He seeks in the morismas and other kinds of theater in colonial and contemporary Mexico a "hidden transcript" that has been "’insinuated’ into the ‘public transcript’ of subordination" and challenges the "official discourse of the performance" (2000: 23). I object to Scott’s notion of transcripts, not least because of the implicit reification of literate over other kinds of communication. Harris’ application of the theory goes even beyond Scott to allow that actors "consciously or unconsciously" insinuate hidden transcripts of resistance into public scripts (145), and even that "resistance" can exist while going completely unnoticed by the dominant (2000: 155-6). I do, however, agree with Harris that the popularity of Moros y Cristianos plays even in present-day Mexico cannot merely be read as a sign of continued subjugation and humiliation. He argues that by casting Cortés as Sultan, the Indians were playing "Christians" in the epic battle against the "Moorish" invaders, longing for the day when they could cast out the Spanish (1996).
 I wish to apply a similar argument in assessing the Virgin of Guadalupe, choosing to look further than the Jungian explanations of the appeal of an archetypal mother, or those that would see in her the face of defeat ("used by the church to mete out institutionalized oppression: to placate the Indians…to make us docile and enduring" Anzaldúa 1987: 31). Instead, I wish to read not a hidden transcript of resistance as I think it would be quite impossible to identify any continuous subaltern or elite project over the five centuries since Guadalupe’s legendary apparition in Mexico, but to identify instead the attributes, in her history and the interpretation thereof which make her such an enduring and compelling symbol who lives in the actions she inspires in her followers.
 The Virgin of Guadalupe contains within her historical trajectory and repertoire of connotations the potential to be interpreted by subaltern Mexicans as the woman of a differently cast Apocalypse than the one envisioned by Isabella and the Franciscans. Here, I am arguing that a forward-leaning millenarianism can be identified, with Guadalupe as its masthead. Millenarianism is often associated in anthropological literature with peasant fatalism, conservatism and fundamentalism. However, Munn argues that "the  future is contained ‘in potentia at the [prophetic] moment’" such that "the fulfillment of this potential ‘is the inescapable denouement of the episode’" (1992: 115). In the "prophetic moment" of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe on Mexican soil were contained allusions to apocalyptic visions of two cultures. Identifiable for the Spanish—at least in 17th-century retellings of the legend like Sánchez’s—was the Guadalupe associated with conquest and Reconquest, but identifiable perhaps for native Mexicans was a different woman of the Apocalypse. Identified as the Virgin Mary in her avocation of the Immaculate Conception, the image of Guadalupe impressed on Juan Diego’s tilma is encinta. She wears the black ribbon associated with pregnancy in pre-Columbian Mexico, marking her as deserving of respect and assistance, and as such, if the apparition could be seen as associated with the catastrophic millenarianism of the Mexica, there is no reason to doubt that she, like the pregnant women in the new fire ceremony, might have special rapport with demons. An exegesis of the links in Revelation 12, native stories, and the apparition legend between Guadalupe—and pregnant women in general—and the untamed and savage wild is beyond the scope of this paper.  This si without engaging in the many well-developed associations between Guadalupe and Tonatzin, a Mexica goddess, said to have been worshiped on Tepeyac before the conquest, and associated with sacrifice (whether of humans or birds is disputed), fertility, and the natural spring on the hill. Linking Tonantzin and Coatlicue, Castillo writes:
The little symbol of the forthcoming child that dangles below it is the nagvioli flower, which represented Huitzilipochtli, the great ferocious sun god of the Aztecs. Guadalupe is mother of Huitzilipochtli" (1996: xix)
However, it is clear that just as the woman of the Apocalypse who is bearing the Christ child appears and battles a dragon and snake in the final hours of the world, Coatlicue gives birth to Huitzilipochtli and sets in motion the cycles of suns which is foreboden to end, and pregnant Mexica women contain the potential to give and destroy life in the nervous penumbra of the New Fire ceremony, the Virgin of Guadalupe can be interpreted not only as solace and salvation for the souls of the newly converted, but as a sign of the approach of impending doom.
 How to interpret this apocalyptic vision with respect to the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe? In Revelation 12, the woman of the apocalypse, the mother of the savior, appears and battles evil just before the faithful are beseeched in book 14 to "Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgement has come; and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the fountains of water". Of course, because the Apocalypse is, almost by definition, always impending and never arrives, this threat of judgement is, in effect, a call to action. While the end of the world is near, there is still time to repent, worship God and seek God’s kingdom on earth. While it may seem counterintuitive, I am positing that it is this apocalyptic vision of Guadalupe that invests her with power and meaning, enough perhaps to sustain her popularity through the present day. Rather than millenarian conservatism, she enables millenarian activism. Inevitable in her prophesy is the fulfillment of a future in which the weak and oppressed are chosen, not for consolation, but advocacy and action.
 As such, rather than remain, like many analysts, dumbfounded before the seeming contradiction of Guadalupe simultaneously signifying subjugation (through evangelization and colonialism) and liberation (through the recognition of Juan Diego as human, and Christian) and the seemingly dichotomous associations of her image in Mexican history through the present day, I am arguing that within her trajectory as a symbol is contained all of the potential for her to become (re)conquistadora and liberadora. My insistence on the recognition of potential is a deliberate attempt to avoid attribution of a hidden transcript of resistance, or on the other hand, false consciousness to the faithful, but to recognize that as a symbol the Virgin contains a broad repertoire of interpretations that can be traced historically.
This analytical shift makes the role the Virgin of Guadalupe has played in Mexican history more comprehensible. She is at the root of the first assertions of Mexican sovereignty, when Miguel Hidalgo, responsible for the Grito de dolores, called for revolution against the Spanish in 1810 while carrying her image on banners. Likewise, Emiliano Zapata was a devout guadalupano, who carried her banner and ensured she was named generalísima  of the revolutionary forces in 1911. She became the most visible signifier of the United Farmworkers’ struggle for economic and social justice in California. She is carried in New York City by Mexican immigrants seeking amnesty and permanent residency. Pilgrims and devotees often say she has been present at all of the struggles of the oppressed.
In conclusion, rather than contradictorily signifying maternal solace and advocacy for the oppressed, I argue that the Virgin of Guadalupe’s association with apocalyptic millenarianism—in Iberian and Mesoamerican traditions—is what makes her an inspiration for action. Her appearance before the final judgement means that in the wait for the end of the world, the kingdom of heaven can be made by the faithful. Her link to demons and wilderness contribute to her power to negotiate with threatening forces and remain just a bit incomprehensible and out of reach to hegemonic power. The dual trajectory of apocalyptic associations in the old and new worlds that contributed to the valences of her apparition on Mexican soil in the 16th century did not determine but contributed to the repertoire of her possible interpretations and meanings. León writes, "by working with symbols, people become agents in their own world construction, and when the religious visions of the oppressed challenge that of those in power, myth and ritual can be utilized to dismantle social norms and work as forces of social change" (1997: 4). The ways that such work with symbols occurs cannot be divorced from the construction through time of the repertoires of those symbols. And here, I will end as Laso de la Vega’s recounting of the apparition does, "May it be her wish that we too may serve her and abandon the worldly things that lead us astray, so that we too may attain the eternal riches of heaven" (1998: 115).
 

Bibliography

Anzaldúa, Gloria 1987 Borderlands/ La Frontera. edition.San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Beemer, Margaret A. 1988 Godly Interchange: The Appropriation Of Nonchristian Symbols In The  Development Of Christianity In Spain And The Valley Of Mexico. PhD Dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles.
Burkhart, Mary L. 1993 "The Cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico". In World Sprirituality: An Encyclopedia History of the Religious Quest. Garry Gossen and Miguel Leon-Portilla, ed. New York: The Crossroad Publication Company.
Campbell, Ena 1982 The Virgin of  Guadalupe and the female self-image . In Mother worship: theme and variation. J. Preston, ed. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press .
Castillo, A. 1996 Goddess of the Americas: la Diosa de las Américas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, New York: Riverhead Books.
Christian, William 1981a Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Christian, William A. 1981b Local Religion in Sixteenth-century Spain.Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Códice Borbónico. El Libro del Ciuacoatl: Homenaje para el año del Fuego Nuevo. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991.
Curcio Nagy, Linda1994 Giants and Gypsies: Corpus Christi in Colonial Mexico City. In Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico. Ed Beezley, ed. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, Inc.
Demarest, Donald a. C. T. E. 1956 The Dark Virgin, The Book of Our Lady of Guadalupe: A Documentary Anthology. edition.New York: Academy Guild Press.
Diaz del Castillo, Bernal 1984 La verdadera historia de la conquista de la Nueva España.
Mexico City.
Foster, George. Culture and Conquest: America's Spanish Heritage.  60. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology. No. 27. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Geertz, Clifford 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books.
Gonzalez Dorado, Antonio 1985 Mariologia popular latinoamericana : de la  conquistadora a la Maria liberadora.Asuncion, Paraguay : Ediciones Loyola .
Gosner, Kevin 1992  Soldiers of the virgin : the moral economy of a colonial Maya rebellion. edition.Tucson: University of Arizona Press .
Gruzinski, Serge  1993 The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th-18th Centuries.Cambridge: Polity Press.
Guerrero, Andres G. Jr. 1984 The Significance Of Nuestra Senora De Guadalupe And La Raza Cosmica In The  Development Of A Chicano Theology Of Liberation. Harvard.
Harris, Max 2000 Aztecs, Moors and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Harris, Max 1996 The Dramatic Testimony of Antonio de Ciudad Real: Inidgenous Theater in Sixteenth-Century New Spain, in Colonial Latin American Review, Vol. 5, No. 2.
Johnson, Harvey 1980 "The Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexican Culture," in Religion in Latin American Life and Literature, Lyle C. Brown and William F. Cooper, Eds., Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press.
Klor de Alva, I. J.1982 Spiritual Conflict and Accommodation  in New Spain: Toward a Typology of Aztec Responses to Christianity. In The Inca and Aztec States, 1400-1800: Anthropology and History. R. R. a. J. W. G. A. Collier, ed. New York: Academic Press.
Lafaye, Jacques 1993 Quetzalcóatl y Guadalupe: La formación de la conciencia nacional en México. edition.Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Leon, Luis 1997 Religious movement in the United States-Mexico borderlands: Toward a theory of Chicana/o  religious poetics. PhD Dissertation. University of California, Santa Barbara.
León-Portilla, Miguel 1974 Testimonios nahuas sabre la conquista espiritual. Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl 1111-36.
León Portilla, Miguel 1962 The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, Boston: Beacon Press.
Lockhart, James 1972 The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Motolinía, Toribio de 1950 "Of the Festival of Corpus Christi and Saint John which were celebrated in Tlaxcallan in the year 1538, in Motolinía’s History of the Indians of New Spain, Elizabeth Andros Foster, New York: The Cortés Society.
Munn, Nancy 1992 "The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay" in Annual Review of Anthropology.
Noguez Ramirez, Francisco J. 1985 The Apparition And The Early Cult Of The Virgin Of Guadalupe In Tepeyac,  Mexico City. A Study Of Native And Spanish Sources Written In The Sixteenth  And Seventeenth Centuries. PhD Dissertation. Tulane University .
Noguez, Xavier 1993 Documentos Guadalupanos: Un estudio sobre las fuentes de información tempranos en torno a las mariofanías en el Tepeyac. edition.Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
O'Gorman, Edmundo 1986 Destierro de sombras: luz en el origen de la imagen y culto de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. edition.México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Paz, Octavio 1985 The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove Press.
Poole, Stafford 1995 Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of  a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797.Tuscon: University of Arizona Press.
Preston, James J. Ed.1982  Mother worship : theme and variations .  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Reed-Bouley, Jennifer 1998 Guiding moral action: A study of the United Farm Workers' use of Catholic social teaching and  religious symbols. Loyola University Of Chicago.
Laso de la Vega, Luis  1998 The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega's Huei tlamahuicoltica of 1649, Sousa, Lisa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart, Eds. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Starr-LeBeau, Gretchen D. 1996 Guadalupe: Political authority and religious identity in fifteenth-century Spain. PhD Dissertation. University of Michigan.
Tamez, Elsa 1987 Teólogos de la liberación hablan sobre la mujer.Yorktown Heights, NY: Meyer-Stone Books.
Todorov, Tzvetan 1982 The Conquest of America, New York: Harper Collins.
Trexler, Richard 1984 "We think, they act: Clerical Readings of the Missionary Theater in 16th Century New Spain,". In Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, Ed. S. Kaplan., Berlin: Mouton.
Turner, Victor 1974 Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Westerfelhaus, Robert G. 1999 An examination of the Cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe from two communication-based  perspectives: Diffusion of innovations and socio-semiotics. PhD Dissertation. Ohio University.
Wolf, Eric 1958 "The Virgin of Guadalupe: Mexican National Symbol". Journal of American Folklore 7134-39.