Virgin Territory

“The Virgen de Guadalupe is one of the oldest images native to Mexico,” says Sanchez. “She‘s not an imported icon. Her skin is bronze. Her features look like the Mexicans’. She redeemed a people who survived the conquest, who had just had their whole world taken out from under them.” If the appearance of the Virgen was comforting to the Mexicans, she was also convenient for the conquistadors, a sign of Catholicism‘s pre-eminence. “Some people will say that it was all orchestrated by the Spanish to control the Mexican population, and that’s partly true,” he avers. “But that does not take away the faith people have placed in this icon, nor the attachment the Mexican people have to her.” Here was a holy apparition that looked like them, chose to visit them and gave them power in the face of authority. She offered hope.

“We use the expression ‘patron saint,’” says Sister Diane Donoghue, executive director for Esperanza Community Housing, an organization that builds homes for low-income families in the Hoover-Adams neighborhood. “For the Irish, it‘s St. Patrick, for the Italians, St. Francis. But for Mexicans, it’s the Virgen de Guadalupe. You may not be practicing your faith by attending mass on a regular basis, but you have this innate sense of loyalty for this special person who stands as protectress.” The vandalism, according to Donoghue, “is like someone defacing your mother. It‘s a personal affront.” She worries that the graffiti will spread, that there won’t be a Virgen left south of the 10 freeway with her head and hands intact. “Ours haven‘t been hit yet, but we’re quite conscious of the fact that they could be,” she says. “All around the area they have been. We have apartment units over by 28th Street and Maple, and there have been a couple near there that have been defaced.” Still, she downplays the religious significance of the tagging. “The archdiocese has been very clear that they don‘t see it as any kind of religious response. But it’s very hard to say where that kind of anger resides, and who has decided that this is the way of expressing it.”

“This is about the power of images,” declares Camilo Jose Vergara over the phone from his home in New York City. “And this is about how an attack on an image can be an attack on goodness. That‘s what it is. An attack on people who need to believe in goodness.” A photographer who has spent over a decade documenting transitional neighborhoods, from Newark to Detroit to Los Angeles, Vergara is passionate about his subjects, in particular the people who have built their “Little Mexicos” in the traditionally black neighborhoods of a South-Central. He has paid special attention to their images of the Virgen; a few years ago, when I accompanied him on a tour of Watts and environs, we stopped at no fewer than a dozen murals of Our Lady, whose creators Vergara had sought out and interviewed. “I met one guy who paints the Virgen on cars,” he tells me. “He doesn’t believe in her, but he knows how to get it right -- he doesn‘t take any liberties with her.” For his recent exhibit at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum, “El Nuevo Mundo of Latino Los Angeles,” the museum commissioned a portrait of the Virgen de Guadalupe to loom over the proceedings. “We wanted the Virgen large, standing over the city of L.A. as its patron saint. But this guy who painted her could not get the face right. I said to him, ‘What are you doing, man? It looks like she’s smelling shit! The Virgen de Guadalupe is the sweetest image, and you‘re not getting it. No one coming here would believe it was the Virgen.’ So I made him do it over.”

As with Senator Barbara Boxer, who has written to Attorney General Janet Reno asking that the vandalism of the Virgen be investigated as a hate crime, Vergara views the defacement as far more than simple graffiti. It is, he argues, a loaded act of violence. “This is happening in a community that sees itself very embattled -- there is the whole issue of being legal or not legal here, of getting access to education, to health care, to employment. And one way to make Los Angeles reassuring is to bring images of home to it. There are more symbols of Mexico in the Latino neighborhoods of Los Angeles than there are in Tijuana,” Vergara notes. “They need them more there, because they need to know who they are. To obliterate her face and hands . . . this is desecration, an inconceivable act.”

Vergara finds the defacing of the murals in South-Central far more disturbing than the recent scandal at the Brooklyn Museum of Art caused by Holy Virgin Mary, an interpretation of the mother of Christ done in elephant dung and body parts. The artist, Chris Ofili, who describes himself as a Catholic of African descent, has defended the image as reverent -- elephant dung, he insists, is a sacred substance in Africa -- but Mayor Rudolph Giuliani vowed to strip the museum of its public funding for the offense. (Last week, Judge Nina Gershon of the United States District Court in Brooklyn ruled Giuliani‘s move unconstitutional.)