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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As Rebecca Overmyer-Velazquez shows, such colonial projections of gendered beliefs about spirituality and sexuality show a "Christian disregard for Nahua complementarity and balance." (14) This gendered and racialized othering process links indigenous deities and women to a particularly dangerous sexuality associated with paganism, that is, with dangerous spirituality. (15) Perhaps the most explicit example in the Florentine Codex of this association is the representation of the "bad [female] physician" who is depicted as having "a friction-loving vulva" and harming people through her deceitful, bewitching practices: "She has a vulva, a crushed vulva, a friction-loving vulva. [She is] a doer of evil. She bewitches--a sorceress, a person of sorcery, a possessed one. She makes one drink potions, kills people with medications, causes them to worsen .... She deceives people, ridicules them, seduces them, perverts them, bewitches them, blows [evil] upon them ... " (16) This hypersexualized representation of the bad healer that specifically links evil-doing to the female sexual body rings of Christian medieval representations, such as in the infamous Malleus Maleficarum. In fact, Sahagun does not depict bad male physicians in ways that directly link their genitalia with their misuse of spiritual and healing power. (17)

Given that most Nahua documents were destroyed and the knowledge we have about ancient Nahua culture is laden with Christian colonial and Nahua male bias, it is challenging to discern pre-transculturated Nahua beliefs and practices. However, if we attempt to interpret primary documents according to an ancient Nahua lens that privileged complementarity and balance, the notions of "dual duality" and fluidity, and the value of moderation rather than abstinence, we might imagine that Nahua ideals did not judge women according to a rigid virgin/whore dichotomy, as understood within a Spanish Christian framework. (18) Indeed, because Nahuatl does not have a word for "virgin," Christians used the Nahuatl word for a post-pubescent girl, ichpochtli, to mean virgin. Moreover, the closest word to "whore" in Nahuatl was auiani (or ahuiani), "the joyful one," that refers to "pleasure girls," women who provided sexual pleasure in state-controlled or independent "Houses of Joy" and participated in ceremonial festivals, but who were not associated with "sin" as putas were within a Spanish moral system. (19) Although the Florentine Codex discusses the qualities of good versus bad indigenous women along the lines of sexual behavior, such representations are influenced by the classed, patriarchal, and binary colonial projections of both Spanish missionaries and Mexica imperialists, but not necessarily Nahua society as a whole. (20) As neither "virgins" nor "whores" in classic Nahua thought, Tonantzin, Cihuacoatl, Coatlicue, Tlazolteotl, and similar sacred energies represent a perspective from which to analyze and transform the prevalent postocolonial dichotomy between virtuous virgen and pagan puta.