CHAPTER 3 Ana Castillo as Santera: Reconstructing Popular Religious Praxis

In June of 1997, an item appeared in the San Diego Union Tri bune that recounted the miraculous appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City's Hidalgo Subway. Spotted by a 15-year-old girl who was mopping the floor, the Virgin has at tracted hundreds to the site, who come bearing candles and flow ers to Our Lady. Their responses to this people's miracle replay the contestation of meanings, both hegemonic and counterhegemonic, generated not only in Mexico since the origi nal apparition in 1531, but in subsequent apparitions throughout the American Southwest. Of the "Metro Miracle," working women said, 'This is telling us that there is divine light, that we are not alone" and "She is here....You can see her if you have faith." A student was more skeptical, "Let's see what the govern ment has invented for us now." Rather predictably, the Archbishop gave the final word: "It is not a miracle." The history of Our Lady of Guadalupe demonstrates that her cult was initially op posed by the Franciscans as obvious indigenous atavism, until her image was later recognized by the hierarchy as a useful in strument of conversion. However, her apparition continued to grace indigenous revolts throughout 18th-century Chiapas, the Yucatan, and Morelos, often in highly syncretic forms. It was on the foothills of the volcano Popocatepetl that Antonio Perez in the 1760s found an image of the Virgin that inspired a millennial movement to rid local peoples of a corrupt clergy and Spanish hacendados, all in the name of the Christian Virgin. "God," An tonio announced, "is the ear of corn, and the three ears of corn,