They play a significant role in twentieth-century Mexican and Mexican American culture, and their impact resonates in the lives of Cisneros’s characters.
Guadalupe and Mexican Catholicism. When Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521, he brought with him the religion of his native Spain, Catholicism. Spanish missionaries came to Mexico during and after the Conquest, eager to Christianize—and, in their view, civilize— the natives. However, before Cortés’s arrival the Aztecs and other cultures in Mexico had long practiced their own religions. Therefore, many of these natives, although forced to convert, initially resisted the teachings of Catholicism. Just the same, the missionaries were ultimately quite successful at gaining converts.
Part of the missionaries’ success was due to a reported miracle that allowed the Aztecs to conceive of Catholicism as linked to their own native religion. In December 1531 the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared outside Mexico City, at the hill of Tepeyac—a site that was a shrine to Tonantzín, the Aztec mother goddess. The Virgin Mary supposedly spoke here to a native convert to Catholicism named Juan Diego, asking him to tell the bishop of Mexico of her wish that a church be built here in her honor.
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