Yolanda López, Guadalupe Triptych, 1978 (left: “Victoria F. Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe,” oil pastel and collage on paper, 30 x 22 inches; center: “Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe,” oil pastel and paint on paper, 30 x 22 inches; right: “Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe,” oil pastel and paint on paper, 30 x 22 inches) © 1978 Yolanda López
Miguel Cabrera, Altarpiece of the Virgin of Guadalupe with Saint John the Baptist, Fray Juan de Zumárraga and Juan Diego, 18th century, oil on copper (Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City)
Some people became so upset over the paintings, they broke gallery windows. They called the artist’s home and made bomb threats. Yolanda López’s small paintings reimagining the Virgin of Guadalupe immediately roused strong feelings. The artworks depict López’s female family members with elements drawn from the popular image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Virgin of Guadalupe combines elements of European Catholic Virgin Mary imagery with the Mexica (Aztec) mother goddess Tonantzin (also known as Coatlicue). Though some found López’s Virgin of Guadalupe Triptych sacrilegious, others saw what López intended: a feminist claim to the heroism of Chicana women in all their variety.
The origin story of the Virgin of Guadalupe is syncretic. The Virgin Mary appeared to an Indigenous Nahua man named Juan Diego at the hill of Tepeyac (today in Mexico City), at the site where a shrine to the Mexica mother goddess already existed. The Virgin requested that a shrine be built in her honor on the location, but when Juan Diego related this to the local bishop, he was skeptical. It was only when the bishop saw the miraculous image of the Virgin of Guadalupe imprinted on Diego’s cloak that he believed him. That image is said to be the one hanging in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe to this day. In the centuries that followed, images of the Virgin of Guadalupe proliferated.
Art and activism
Yolanda López, Free Los Siete, 1969, offset lithograph on paper, 56.5 x 36.2 cm (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.) © 1969 Yolanda López
Yolanda López, a third-generation Chicana, was born in 1942 in the Barrio Logan district of San Diego, California. López later recalled being baptized at the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe there. Though her family was not religious, López’s mother saw the benefit of the Catholic daycare sliding scale and enrolled her. [1] The Virgin of Guadalupe therefore formed more of a cultural figure than a devotional one for López, though she was certainly aware of the figure’s religious relevance.
In the 1960s studying at College of Marin and San Francisco State University, López became active in the burgeoning Chicano civil rights movement. She participated in the Third World Liberation Front, the student coalition demanding ethnic studies curriculum in the longest student strike in U.S. history starting in 1968. In 1969 López supported Los Siete de la Raza, seven Latinx youths accused falsely of killing a police officer in the Mission district of San Francisco, by creating protest art among other activities.
Virgin of Guadalupe Triptych
In the 1970s López returned to San Diego. During MFA studies at the University of California, San Diego, López made art that plumbed her own life, exploring Chicana identity. Frustrated at the lack of Latinos and Chicanos pictured in media, López took on the famous and freighted image, the Virgin of Guadalupe, in visual language that freely “crosses the borders of various pictorial traditions, paralleling Chicano Spanish.” [2] The resulting images have been understood as part of a new “mestiza consciousness,” a multiethnic understanding of identity in the modern era. [3]
The Virgin of Guadalupe series, López’s best known body of work, comprises paintings, drawings, prints, and collages made between 1978–88. The best-known of the series is the triptych of three individually titled paintings that portray López’s grandmother, her mother, and herself with iconography borrowed from the Virgin of Guadalupe. Each painting shows the contemporary woman with the 16th-century Catholic Virgin of Guadalupe’s starred mantle, brilliant halo, and accompanying angel.
Yolanda López, “Guadalupe: Victoria F. Franco,” from the Guadalupe Triptych, 1978, oil pastel and paint on paper, 30 x 22 inches © 1978 Yolanda López
“Guadalupe: Victoria F. Franco” begins the generational trio on the left. López’s grandmother sits demurely on a stool draped with the Virgin of Guadalupe’s blue and gold cloak. Furrows in her brown skin and graying hair pulled back neatly declare her age. In a collared pink dress styled as a standard work outfit, Franco appears enthroned, silhouetted against a full mandorla framing her against the background’s celestial blue. A brown-skinned angel with wings the colors of Mexico’s flag holds a garland of roses, a symbol of the Virgin Mary.
Left: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Immaculate Conception, 1767–69, oil on canvas, 281 x 155 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid); right: Coatlicue, c. 1500, Mexica (Aztec), found on the SE edge of the Plaza Mayor/Zócalo in Mexico City, basalt, 257 cm high (National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The crescent moon brooch and flayed snakeskin in Franco’s hands could remind viewers of snakes found in Virgin of the Immaculate Conception imagery from which the Guadalupe form is derived. The snake also can reference the Mexica mother goddess Tonantzin, also known as Coatlicue, who wears a skirt of snakes. Divine imagery and the enthroned pose dignify the figure even while López insists on Franco’s ordinary individual humanity.
Yolanda López, “Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe,” from the Guadalupe Triptych, 1978, oil pastel and paint on paper, 30 x 22 inches © 1978 Yolanda López
López’s mother wears a pink dress and is bent over a sewing machine in the triptych’s center painting, “Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe.” An angel with the same green, white, and red wings as in “Guadalupe: Victoria F. Franco” rests on his elbows in the pose of the well-known putto in Raphael’s 16th-century Sistine Madonna. A flame-colored mandorla illuminates Franco’s workstation. López portrays her mother actively sewing the Virgin of Guadalupe’s starred blue mantle. The compositional choice inverts the power hierarchy between the divine figure and the humans she is said to protect—here, in a way, López is crediting Latina and Chicana women with the creation of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Yolanda López, “Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe,” from the Guadalupe Triptych, 1978, oil pastel and paint on paper, 30 x 22 inches © 1978 Yolanda López
The most reproduced painting in the triptych is “Portrait of the Artist as The Virgin of Guadalupe.” Once again, a figure in Guadalupan pink occupies the center of the composition backed by a bright mandorla halo. This time is it López herself, in running shoes, striding joyfully, holding the Virgin of Guadalupe’s mantle across her shoulders like a marathon runner’s victory flag. During graduate school López began running, a practice she found liberating. In the painting, she clutches a snake by the neck in her right hand as her feet pass over an angelic figure, this time, one with wings of red, white, and blue—the colors of the U.S. flag. With full self-possession, López bounds forward carrying a history, but unburdened by it.
Why Guadalupe?
Why would a 20th-century artist portray three generations of her own not-religious family in the imagery of a 16th-century Catholic iteration of the Virgin Mary? Few figures carry as much freighted meaning as the Virgin of Guadalupe. Cast as an aspirational model for women, introduced by Spanish colonizers, and later used as a rallying image for Mexican independence by Miguel Hidalgo in 1810, the Virgin of Guadalupe has borne many meanings. The first iteration of the Virgin Mary to be attached explicitly to the Americas, the Virgin of Guadalupe has become a symbol for Mexican and Chicanx identity and political independence.
Virgin of Guadalupe, 16th century, oil and possibly tempera on maguey cactus cloth and cotton (Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City; photo: Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P., CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Today, mounted in a golden frame, the original Virgin of Guadalupe image receives millions of pilgrims annually in a basilica in Mexico City dedicated to the figure it depicts. Backed by a mandorla, the Virgin Mary folds her hands in prayer demurely while standing on a crescent moon above a seraph (holy winged-being) with red, white, and blue wings. Her blue mantle and pink dress adhere to standard European iconography for the Madonna. The crescent moon at her feet and stars on the mantle refer to Immaculate Conception and Madonna of the Apocalypse imagery.
Other elements refer to the Americas. The black ribbon tied at her waist mimics the listón negro, a sign of maternity worn by Indigenous pregnant people. Her “ashen” skin color, the stars on the blue mantle, and crescent moon at the figure’s feet recall the Mexica Tonantzin who gave birth to the moon and stars. The flowers on the Virgin’s dress are similar in form to the Nahuatl glyph for heart, which was considered the source of the human soul. [4] Feathered angel wings are not far from the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl. The Virgin of Guadalupe’s noted gray-ish skin color has been seen as a reference to Indigenous skin tones and possibly the ritual ash applied to skin by Mexica priests during rituals. The “Guadalupe” name itself comes from a Black-skinned Madonna in Extremadura, Spain.
Modern women and Guadalupe
López’s vibrant modern women displace the still, statuesque demeanor of the 16th-century Guadalupe image with active movement and individual life. In López’s triptych, women do not have to become the Virgin of Guadalupe; everyday women can be honored as they are. [5] The legacy of Guadalupe does not weigh on López, her mother, and grandmother but can be used as each creates her own individual life. Her feminist rendition celebrates individual life paths and the autonomous choices that create them.
