Elsie_Brooks
Posted July 26, 2009
Like so many other multicultural texts, Kristy Nabhan-Warren's The Virgin of El Barrio: Marian Apparitions, Catholic Evangelizing, and Mexican American Activism, projects images of the white female as asexual, weak, and shallow.
In the introduction to The Virgin of El Barrio, Nabhan-Warren states that she thinks it is important for the reader to know her background. She sets forth to establish not only her personal ethnic distinction, but, also the rich ethnic diversity of the region from which she hails: northwestern Indiana. Nabhan-Warren is not just a white woman from a landlocked region of the United States' interior. She has a transnational heritage: Lebanese, Swedish, Polish, and Croatian. Moreover, Nabhan-Warren's childhood friendship with a Mexican American Catholic spawned her interest in the culture. (14) Is it important for the reader to understand Nabhan-Warren's heritage? Given the religious nature of the text, her Lutheran upbringing is probably relevant. On the other hand, Nabhan-Warren may mention her Lebanese paternal grandfather to establish personal credibility as more than a gringo.
While the Virgin of the Americas who appeared to Estella Ruiz is Hispanic, her features are more white than those of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She has a fair olive complexion and blue eyes. Several of the Mexican American women who visited the shrine and shared their stories with Nabhan-Warren commented on how they related more to the Virgin of Guadalupe. (191) Is it coincidental that the Virgin of the America is light skinned like Estella Ruiz herself? After all, Estella had a history of jealousy over her husband Reyes's relationship with the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe. Estella's virgin is a mother, a friend, a confidant. Reyes wanted to dance with the Blessed Mother, the virgin to whom he prayed. ( 29) As a light-skinned woman in a Mexican American community Estella seems to have viewed herself as less sensual than her darker skinned contemporaries. By casting her whiteness onto her Virgin apparitions, Estella was able to give value to her complexion and recast the fair-skinned woman into an image of virtue.
More About This Textbook
Overview
Based on ten years of participant observation and in-depth interviews, the Virgin of El Barrio traces the spiritual transformation of Ruiz, the development of the community that has sprung up around her, and the international expansion of their message. Their organizations blend popular and official Catholicism as well as evangelical Protestant styles of praise and worship, shedding light on Catholic responses to the tensions between popular and official piety and the needs of Mexican Americans.
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
“A thorough ethnography that sweeps the reader into the world of Marian visionary Estela Ruiz, her family and followers, and the evangelizing ministries they have created in South Phoenix. . . . Fascinating.”
-Timothy Matovina,Director, Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, University of Notre Dame
“This wonderfully written study, one of the most comprehensive and insightful books about modern Marian apparitions in North America, takes the story from the Virgin's first appearance to a feminist professional woman distressed by family burdens, through the widening sphere of the apparitions' impact on family and community, to the cult's ultimate role as a national and international vehicle for Catholic evangelizing, especially among Hispanics.”
-CHOICE, highly recommended
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“This book stands as an intimate portrait of the visionary; 'a woman torn between the individualism she enjoyed in the ‘Anglo world’ and her familial commitments in her Mexican-American home.”
-Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
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“This is a respectful, sensitive, clearly written book in which the author seeks to resolve the alien ethnographer's dilemma by ‘writing like a relative.’ The reader's reward is a rich sense of the circumstances and struggles of at least some Mexican Americans in South Phoenix to make a good life in the contemporary United States that balances faith and family with education, material strivings, professional growth, discrimination, and personal suffering in ways that begin to bridge the conceptual divide between official and popular religion.”
-American Ethnologist
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“A compelling account of Marian devotion as 'lived religion'”
-Sociology of Religion
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Meet the Author
Kristy Nabhan-Warren is assistant professor of American religions at Augustana College, Rock Island, IL.
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