Guadalupe and Hannukah

I grew up in Mexico and was raised Roman Catholic. When I was around 9 years old my parents took my brother Pepe and me to Mexico City and the two places I remember the most are the Chapultepec Park and the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The feast of Guadalupe is observed on 12/12 with masses, pilgrimages, feasts, drunkeness and violence. For years the expression "peregrino Guadalupano" has been used as a synonym of stupid by the middle class, partly because it disguises the crass term "pendejo" and partly because it is a classist -even racist- way of describing the majority of those who go from their little towns in the country to the great basilica, most of them indian and poor.

The basilica I visited with my parents has been replaced by a larger, more opulent, building which stands in stark contrast with the masses of poor people who crowd into the place for a chance to offer prayers both pleas and thanksgiving for some special attention paid to the pilgrims or their family.

The virgin of Guadalupe is at the top of the popular religious pantheon. She is the mother of God and the one who can take the prayers of the pilgrims to Him. She is the mother of Mexico and the Empress of the Americas. Of course no one is told that she was already worshiped in Spain and is one of a collection of dark Madonnas that have graced the Roman Catholic population of Southern Europe. Guadalupe was from Extremadura, as was Hernan Cortez, the conqueror of the Aztecs. No one is told that the name Guadalupe is not Mexican and not even Spanish, it is Arabic and it is not clear whether it means River of love or -if combined with Latin- River of wolves. Details, mere details, that must be kept from the faithful lest they stop and think and wonder, "what am I doing following the mother of the conquistadores?"

I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the worship of a mother goddess in Mexico and traced the practice back to ancient Nahuatl roots and the Al Andaluz lands from where the bulk of the conquistadores went to the New World. I defended the thesis that the elevation of women in the abstract is highly correlated with the devaluation of women in the concreteness of life. I did not have to go to a University to pose the issue, I just had to remember the weekly beatings of poor women in the pulqueria across the street from where I lived.

So today men will go and ask forgiveness for all their sins, will get drunk and will beat their wives in front of their children. Some things have changed and the number of men doing that might have decreased, but I can guarantee that many people will die today as a consequence of a celebration that needs to be analysed and restructured if women in Mexico and in the Americas are to have longer, less violent lives.

Across the ocean a festival of lights will be started in Israel without a concomitant festival of human rights for Palestinians. Mexico or Israel, just the same incredible gaps between pronouncements and performance.

Ignacio Castuera