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Examining the Surrounding Context of Gloria Anzaldúa's Guadalupe/Coatlic

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Examining the Surrounding Context of Gloria Anzaldúa's Guadalupe/Coatlic Champagne 1 Our Mother of Marícones and Marimachas: Examining the Surrounding Context of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Guadalupe/Coatlicue as the Mediatrix of the Queer Borderland Culture and Community Gloria Anzaldúa has a complex relationship with Our Lady of Guadalupe. This relationship brings into question where exactly Anzaldúa and her theories fit in the Queer Borderland culture and community. As a lesbian, as a Chicana, and as a scholar, Anzaldúa understand the nuanced role Guadalupe plays in the lives of those in the Borderlands. As a result of this potentially complex ideological entanglement, Anzaldúa practices a non-traditional brand of Catholicism which equates Our Lady of Guadalupe with the Aztec goddess Coatlicue in order to understand her role as an individual in the Borderlands, and as an embodiment of the Borderlands itself. Anzaldúa’s non-traditional and complex relationship with Guadalupe/Coatlicue is examined through her theories of the mestiza consciousness, and la facultad in order to examine the way the individual fits into the larger, Queer Chican@, communal context. When Anzaldúa writes about the role in which the individual, the body, the spirit, and the consciousness play in the Borderlands, she speaks of the Queer experience thereof. As such, the question of what role Guadalupe/Coatlicue plays in the lives of other Queer Chinan@s arises. The mestiza consciousness, along with la facultad, play a significant part in Anzaldúa’s theory of the Borderlands, and as such, plays a significant part of the larger, Queer Chinca@ experience as well. La facultad, along with the mestiza consciousness are, essentially, the combination of the body and spirit, represented by Coatlicue and Guadalupe respectively. This essay functions to provide a larger context for Anzaldúa’s theory, and to examine how community is possibly created through the Queer embracing of Our Lady. Champagne 2 This essay takes a three-pronged approach by examining three culturally-relevant contexts in which to view Anzaldúa’s work: First, this essay explores Anzaldúa’s understanding of Guadalupe/Coatlicue in order to comprehend the role in which the divine duo plays in Anzaldúa’s life. Second, the relationship between Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Mexican and Chican@ communities at large is established. Third, the role of Guadalupe/Coatlicue in the lives of queer individuals, specifically Guadalupe/Coatlicue as a Queer icon, as the Mediatrix of the Queer Chican@ community, is explored. Anzaldúa’s relationship with Guadalupe is intricate, often times contradictory, and built on ambiguity; that is to say Guadalupe is a channel for something that Anzaldúa considers greater than herself. This complex relationship with Guadalupe stems from the history of Guadalupe, and the history of her interpretation by the Church. “The Catholic and Protestant religions,” Anzaldúa states, “encourages fear and distrust of life and the body; they encourage a split between the body and the soul; they encourage us to kill off parts of ourselves” (59). However, the body and the phenomenological experiences of the body are important to Anzaldúa. In Anzaldúa’s body politic, the sensual and extra-sensual experiences are paramount in examining the human condition. However, the Church promotes a split between the mind, body, and soul. This split is intended to make room for Christ, but for Anzaldùa, this split is unnecessary because she, herself, is her own sort of Christ: “I’ve always been aware that there is a greater power than the conscious I. That power is my inner self, the entity that is the sum total of all my reincarnation, the godwoman in me I call Antigua, mi Diosa, the divine within, Coatlicue…”. (72) Anzaldúa connects her ‘inner-god’ to the Aztec deity, Coatlicue. For Anzaldúa, the inner part of herself, functions as a spiritual reservoir. For Anzaldúa, her goddess exists within. While Anzaldúa connects herself to Coatlicue, it is the connection that Coatlicue shares with Our Lady Champagne 3 of Guadalupe which complicates Anzaldúa’s relationship with Guadalupe, and in extension, the role that Guadalupe plays in the mestiza consciousness and its applicability. “La Virgen de Guadalupe’s Indian name is Coatlalopeuh,” Anzaldúa states, and that “Coatlalopeuh is descended from, or is an aspect of, earlier Mesoamerican fertility and Earth goddesses. The earliest is Coatlicue…” (49). In connecting Guadalupe with Coatlicue, Anzaldúa complicates her relationship with organized religion by turning the dichotomy, the pagan earth goddess and the Christian loving mother, into the same being. This connection, while embraced by Anzaldúa, is not originally her idea. The original conflation of Guadalupe with Coatlicue took place during the Spanish colonization of the New World. Jeanette Peterson states “Aggressive methods of indoctrination were intensified, including the substitution of new Christian saints for old gods and the incorporation of parallel beliefs and ritual” (40). According to Peterson, the Spanish conquistadors combined the image of the Virgin Mary with Coatlicue in an attempt to indoctrinate the First Peoples of Mexico. “The Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe was one such fusion of an imported European Mother God with native mother goddesses” (40). The Church baptized the First Peoples, washing off their faces the red streaks of their mother goddess, washed the bodily doctrine from their hair and gave them the names of saints. It is this history of Guadalupe which Anzaldúa embraces and internalizes. This conflation of Guadalupe and Coatlicue is where Anzaldúa draws out meaning. According to Anzaldúa, the conflation between Guadalupe and Coatlicue is due to a phonetic opportunity. “Because Coatlalopeuh was homophonous with the Spanish Guadalupe, the Spanish identified her with the dark Virgin, Guadalupe, patroness of West Central Spain” (51). For Anzaldúa, this conflation, originally caused by phonetic incorporation of Coatalupeh the Nahutal word for Coatlicue, in to the Spanish Guadalupe, goes beyond phonetic equalization. Champagne 4 “Being lesbian and raised Catholic,” Anzaldúa explains “indoctrinated as straight, I made the choice to be queer” (41). In this quote Anzaldúa speaks of denying the body, of denying Coatlicue, and the damage of only embracing Guadalupe. This necessity of denying the ‘inner self’ is experienced by many Queer Chican@s, with the potential to be incredibly harmful. However, Anzaldúa’s theory provides a space where Coatlicue and Guadalupe are conflated, where the body and the spirit are entertained, a space sage for the Queer Chican@. However, this existence is based in the well-known sins of idolatry and homosexuality. In living an existence that is condemned by a powerful and prominent institution such as the Church, Anzaldúa feels a sense of unhoming. I use ‘unhoming’ because, like the term drawn from post-colonial theory, there is a sense that her body—that the Queer Chican@ body—is not wanted nor welcomed due to her ‘choice’ in being queer. Anzaldúa’s quote explaining her feelings of unhoming comes from a section of her book entitled “Fear of Going Home: Homophobia.” This sense of unhoming is reflected in a quote from one of Anzaldúa’s students. “One of the students said, ‘I thought homophobia meant fear of going home after a residency’” (42). It because of the pressures of the homophobic Church, and the shaming of all things sensual, that caused Anzaldúa to feel this sense of unhoming. It is only through entering “The Coatlicue State,” (68) a psychic experience that fully embraces Coatlicue, and in extension Guadalupe, that Anzaldúa becomes one with herself, one with Coatlicue, and one with Guadalupe . It is only through the Coatlicue state in which Anzaldúa can embrace both her body and her body’s desires through her spirituality. In this state that Anzaldúa realizes that the historical context does not matter, and finds a meaning in no-meaning: Guadalupe or Coatlicue, whichever name her spirit guide is deemed, or both or neither. It is through the experience of uniting the divine, and the earthly, the soul and the sensual (including sexual), and Coatlicue Champagne 5 with Guadalupe, in which Anzaldúa understands the history and context of the desexed female divine, and her own institutional desexing, and the desired desexing of the Queer community by the Church. In viewing Guadalupe not as the de-sexed, complacent Marian figure that tradition asserts, but instead as the serpentine, powerful, chthonic goddess, Anzaldúa reclaims a bit of herself that the Church forced her to “kill off” by reclaiming a bit of Guadalupe that was also forced to be terminated (59). “After the Conquest,” Anzaldúa states, “the Spaniards and their Church continued to split Tonantsi/Guadalupe [Tonantsi being an early Aztec mother goddess that Anzaldúa theorizes was the actual apparition of Guadalupe]. The desexed Guadalupe, taking Coatlalopeuh, the serpent sexuality out of her” (49). It is this historical disassociation of the body and the spirit that Anzaldúa recognizes as important, and it is through the re-association of Guadalupe with Coatlicue that the spirit and the body can become one again. This transubstantiation of Guadalupe through the spiritual realm and into the physical—as a part of experience and the body itself—frees Anzaldúa from the homophobic oppression she feels. In exploring the role Guadalupe/Coatlicue plays in the lives of other Queer Chican@s Anzaldúa’s theory of la facultad and her relationship with Guadalupe/Coatlicue must first be understood. “La facultad,” Anzaldúa explains, “is the capacity to see in the surface phenomenon the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface.” La facultad, is a structural ‘sixth sense’ which allows “…the females, the homosexuals of all races…” to survive in a world hostile to them. To embrace la facultad, one must listen to their body, to the earth which has born it unto them, and to the earth to which they will return. To Anzaldúa, the body is the extension of the earth, and by ‘tuning-in’ to the sensual experiences thereof, one connects to the deeper parts, the underworld, of themselves.
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