Goddess of the Americas in the decolonial imaginary: beyond the virtuous virgen/pagan puta dichotomy.(Essay)

THE VIRGIN/WHORE DICHOTOMY, largely represented in the Americas by La Virgen de Guadalupe as spiritually pure mother and La Malinche as physically defiled concubine, is a foundational theme in Chicana feminist thought, along with this dichotomy's negative effects in the development of female subjectivity. Religiously sanctioned ideologies of the good Mary versus bad Eve female figures in Spanish Christian medieval and early-modern discourse were given racialized "New World" faces with Guadalupe, an indigenous or mestiza Marian figure, and Malinche, the indigenous mistress of, and translator for, conqueror Hernan Cortes. Their status as iconic good and bad mothers was affirmed as they became symbolic tools in perpetuating a nationalist Mexican identity. Guadalupe was crowned the Patron Saint of New Spain and the Queen of Mexico in the mid-eighteenth century, while Malinche became known as la Chingada after the Mexican Revolution, the violated, "fucked" mother of the first mestizo. (1) In the colonial imaginary, this insidious dichotomy pits the traditionally religious mestiza woman against the superstitious, demonized native woman. To advance a non-dichotomizing "decolonial imaginary" now, I refer to the conventional binary between proper and deviant female sexual behavior as one between a virtuous virgen and pagan puta in order to underscore how its disciplining of sexuality interweaves with its disciplining of spirituality. (2) Healing this dichotomy, I argue, entails deconstructing the ways it simultaneously regulates spiritual and sexual practices. Moreover, I use the Spanish words for virgin and whore to emphasize the specific cultural contexts at play in the colonial-modern imaginary of the Americas whose legacy persists.

Tonantzin, revered as "Our Mother" by the Nahua, was associated with Guadalupe since her apparition on the site of present-day Mexico City in 1531. "Nahua" does not refer to any one indigenous ethnic group, but I use it to refer "to the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of Postclassic [C.E. 900-1521] highland central Mexico," including the Mexica (Aztecs) who were the dominating power at the time of the colonial encounter and contemporary peoples who trace their genealogies to these groups. (3) Tonantzin forms part of the story of "transculturation," that is, of cultural loss, cultural persistence, and the creation of hybrid cultural forms mediated through power relations in sixteenth-century Mesoamerica. (4) However, although the construction of Malinche as Guadalupe's "monstrous double" has been widely discussed, there have been fewer attempts to analyze the significance of Tonantzin as Guadalupe's bruja-ized (witched) Other in colonial discourse. (5) Like other so-called pagan figures subjected to patriarchal religious imperialism, Tonantzin is among a group of indigenous goddesses who were demonized by Christianity. I use "goddess" here, as do the authors I discuss, even though this term does not adequately convey the significance of Tonantzin and related figures as honored elements of nature or sacred energies representing creation and/or destruction, sexuality, and motherhood within a Nahua religious cosmology.

Informed by a rigid Western dichotomy between good and evil and an ideology of distrust toward women, especially racialized women, and anxious about Mexica "idols," the colonizing Spanish transformed Tonantzin into Guadalupe's pagan Other. In the foundational mid-sixteenth-century chronicle of Nahua beliefs and practices, the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva Espana (General History of the Things of New Spain), widely known as the Florentine Codex, the Spanish friar and ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagun, for example, skeptically describes indigenous devotion to Guadalupe on Tepeyac Hill-the site of her initial appearance and also the site of an ancient temple to Tonantzin. The encyclopedic Florentine Codex's mandated purpose "was to provide priests and other Spaniards with a detailed description of Nahua culture ... in order better to recognize 'idolatry' in everyday colonial life and attempt to stamp it out forever." (6) Thus, it is not surprising that it railed against the Nahua's linking of the "idol" Tonantzin with Guadalupe, calling such a connection "a satanic" equivocation and an "idolatrous dissembling." (7) Although some Spanish priests encouraged this "identification of Christian saints with native deities" as part of the colonial strategy of conversion and assimilation, the figure of Tonantzin has largely remained marginalized in modern scholarship. (8)

In the colonial period, Christian beliefs about paganism, the devil, and female transgression as symbolized by Eve merge in depictions of Tonantzin and related goddesses. For example, Cihuacoatl ("Serpent Woman"), the Toltec earth mother, was also called Tonantzin. (9) In his descriptions, Sahagun identified Tonantzin-Cihuacoatl as "our mother Eve, who is deceived by the serpent," rather than engaging the more multivalent Nahua perspective of the serpent as an earth figure. (10) As Cecelia F. Klein argues, colonial representations of Cihuacoatl emphasized "the goddess's destructive powers ... [and not] her creative potential." For example, one image depicted Cihuacoatl with "her long hair hanging loose and her large, snarling mouth wide open, with her teeth exposed and her tongue protruding," which Klein observes, resembles the Florentine Codex's illustration of an Aztec "harlot, whose loose windblown hair contrasts so markedly with the bound-up hair characteristic of married Aztec women." (11) Tonantzin-Cihuacoatl was also associated with Coatlicue ("Serpent Skirt"), as Cihuacoatl's "Mexica variant," and her complex duality was similarly negated (fig. 1). (12) In addition, Tlazolteotl ("Filth Goddess"), a so-called carnal goddess associated with Tonantzin, is depicted as '"another Venus,' explicitly associated with the morally transgressive Eve": Fray Juan de Torquemada said of her, "[for] a goddess of loves and sensualities, what can she be but a dirty, filthy, and stained goddess?" (13) Thus colonizing Christians negatively associated the Christian serpent, devil, Eve, evil, and sin with these Nahua sacred energies. Although "masculine" Nahua deities were also demonized, I suggest that by being associated with a human woman, the fallen Eve, the maligning of the goddesses transposes to the maligning of actual Nahua women, particularly healers, midwives, and "harlots."

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