Alma López: Crossing the Borders of Identity, Sexuality, and Religion

Our Lady: Renegotiating Religious Figures

The Virgin of Guadalupe

Our Lady is by far Alma López’s most well-known and most controversial art piece. It is a contemporary feminist portrayal of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Virgin of Guadalupe is currently the most central figure of Mexican and Chicana/o visual and religious culture. She can therefore be found as an evident part of religious iconography alongside commercial products, advertisements, murals, tattoos, etc. Due to her centrality in Mexican and Chicana/o culture and religion, many Mexican and Chicana/o artists have reimagined the Virgin of Guadalupe as a way of reflecting their own relation to her, as well as the religiousness and traditions she represents.

Artists who have reimagined the Virgin of Guadalupe include, Yolanda M. López, Ester Hernández, Santa Barraza, Delilah Montoya, Yreina D. Cervantez, and many more. However, because the Virgin of Guadalupe is so closely connected to tradition and directly represents the Roman Catholic Church, most of these contemporary renditions of the Virgin have caused drastic public outcries. Many members of the Church have frequently viewed these reinterpretations as sacrilegious challenges to the Church’s authority. Whereas the artists themselves understand these reinterpretations as constructive efforts to create stronger connections between religious traditions and their own lived experiences.

Our Lady

Alma López’s Our Lady was no exception to this. The piece shows Raquel Salinas as the Virgin of Guadalupe accompanied by an angel embodied by Raquel Gutíerrez. It portrays the Virgin as a contemporary Latina woman. She is clothed in a cloak adorned with Aztec symbols of the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxāuhqui, and undergarments made from roses. The roses are a direct reference to the roses said to accompany the original apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1531. The piece thusly combines references to the Roman Catholic history of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the preceding Aztec traditions. Yet its primary focus is on the female Mexican bodily presence of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As Kathleen Fitzcallaghan Jones and Deena J. González highlighted, the piece, therefore, represents an essential reclaiming of the place and agency of the female Mexican body within the highly patriarchal traditions of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Controversy

When Our Lady was exhibited as part of the Cyber Arte exhibition in the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, NM, USA, the display was followed by an immediate public outcry. The local representatives of the Roman Catholic church dismissed the artistic intentions and context of the piece and merely interpreted it as a sacrilegious sexual objectification of the Virgin of Guadalupe. With the support of the local newspapers, these local Church representatives staged their objections with the piece into a nationwide media craze. It subsequently escalated into verbal violence and intimidation, as well as the use of pejorative language and even death threats mainly against Alma López, Raquel Salinas, and the Nuevomexicana curator of the exhibition Tey Marianna Nunn.

Despite the highly sensationalized opposition to the piece, Our Lady did, likewise, receive much public and legal support during the entire controversy. This included both specific support for the artistic vision of the piece and for the general rights for freedom of speech and artistic expression. It was effective enough that the piece continued to be displayed until the planned ending of the exhibition, despite continuous demand to remove the piece from the exhibition. Yet, the aftermath of this controversy continued years after the conclusion of the exhibition with consequences for all involved parties.

Alma López Reflects

Alma López herself describes the entire experience: “When I see Our Lady as well as the works portraying La Virgen by many Chicana artists, I see an alternative voice expressing the multiplicities of our lived realities. I see myself living a tradition of Chicanas who, because of cultural and gender oppression, have asserted our voice. I see Chicanas creating a deep and meaningful connection to this revolutionary cultural female image. I see Chicanas who understand faith. Even if I look really hard at my work and the works of many Chicana artists, I don’t see what is so offensive. I see beautiful bodies that are gifts from our creator. I see nurturing breasts. I see the strong nurturing mothers of all of us. I am forced to wonder how men like Mr. Villegas and the Archbishop are looking at my work that they feel it is blasphemy and the Devil. I wonder how they see bodies of women. I wonder why they think that our bodies are so ugly and perverted that they cannot be seen in an art piece in a museum? For me, this experience at times has been confusing and upsetting, primarily because men like Mr. Villegas and Archbishop Sheehan self-righteously believe that they have the authority to dictate how a particular image should be interpreted. They believe they can tell me as well as other Chicanas how to think. I am a woman who has grown up with La Virgen. Who are these men to tell me what to think and how to relate to her?”

Ixta: Renegotiating Figures from Folklore

Ixta

As with the Virgin of Guadalupe, Alma López, also reinterprets mythological figures. This concept is well-illustrated by her piece Ixta. The title refers to Ixtaccíhuatl who is one of the two main characters from the tragic pre-Columbian creation myth that is said to be configured by the volcanic landscape surrounding Mexico City. The myth centers on Ixtaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl who fell hopelessly in love. Yet, Ixtaccíhuatl’s father as the tribal leader sends Popocatépetl away to war and later tells his daughter that Popocatépetl had been killed in battle. As a consequence, Ixtaccíhuatl commits suicide, unable to exist without Popocatépetl. When Popocatépetl returns to find Ixtaccíhuatl’s lifeless body, he carries her up into the mountains in the hope that the snowflakes at the mountain peak might revive her. Instead, Popocatépetl dies from the cold.

In her piece Ixta, Alma López references this tragic tale with the landscape images of the mountains and the inclusion of the classical depictions of Ixtaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl taken from popular calendars. Yet, at the center of the piece, she embodies the heterosexual tragic mythical couple as a lesbian contemporary couple. As Alma López comments: “When I was thinking about this image [Ixta], I thought, well maybe Ixta is not dead; maybe she is sleeping. And maybe if she is sleeping, perhaps she is waiting for Popo to leave. But Popo never left and that is why she is frozen. Here in my story, as I have re-created it: Popo has left and now we have another Ixta. Depicted are the pictures of my two friends, Cristina and Mima. They are situated on the border between the United States and Mexico, looking from Mexico to California.” As both Alma López herself and Laura E. Pérez highlighted, the piece is set against the backdrop of the Mexican-American borderlands. Pérez interprets this specific spatial setting of the piece as a direct reference to the discrimination and displacement that lesbian couples face on either side of the Mexican-American border.

Digital Spaces

For context, it is significant to reference Guisela Latorre who comments on the importance of digital places. They can serve as stages for the creation of decolonial and feministic spaces of acceptance, which help constructing postmodern identity. Stages like these are especially relevant for Alma López who uses the digital tools as her main artistic medium. She creates spaces for the multitude of the different aspects of her identity as a queer Chicana woman. This is, moreover, closely related to the utilization of the distinctive cut-and-paste collage work which is prominent throughout López’s work. Latorre interprets the deliberately obvious edges of this cut-and-paste method as a reflection of the tensions and hybridity between these different aspects of the artist’s identity and experiences.

Recurring Motifs

It is necessary to emphasize the centrality of recurring motifs in Alma López’s art. For instance, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a recurring figure due to the earlier mentioned centrality of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexican and Chicana/o culture and religion.

Lupe & Sirena in Love

Apart from religious and mythological figures, Alma López reinterprets figures purely from popular culture such as la Sirena (Siren). La Sirena is one of the central characters from the popular Mexican Lotería board game. In Lupe & Sirena in Love, Alma López reimagines both la Sirena and the Virgin of Guadalupe as a divine lesbian couple. Lupe & Sirena recur regularly as a motif in her later art pieces.

The Viceroy Butterfly

Another recurring motif in Alma López’s art is the Viceroy butterfly. The Viceroy butterfly survives by mimicking the Monarch butterfly but is, unlike the Monarch butterfly, not poisonous. Reina Alejandra Prado Saldivar interprets the recurrence of the Viceroy butterfly in Alma López’s art as a reflection of her complex immigrant identity since the Viceroy butterfly crosses the Mexican-American border with each generation. Whereas Luz Calvo understands the butterfly as an embodiment of the artist’s queer identity.

Mexican-American Borderlands

Another key motif within López’s art is the Mexican-American borderlands representing a variety of different topics. This includes the artist’s own migration history, the overall displacement embedded in migrant identities, and the more metaphorical borderlands between tradition and lived reality. Furthermore, it refers to the long history of conflicts, migration, and colonialism across the Mexican-American borderlands, and, most prominently, symbolizes social commentary on current migration debates.

Coyolxāuhqui

A further central motif in Alma López’s art is the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxāuhqui. The myth of Coyolxāuhqui is that she fought and lost against her brother Huitzilopochtli. After her defeat, Huitzilopochtli exiles Coyolxāuhqui’s dismembered body into the sky which became the moon. Therefore, as Marci R. McMahon stresses, the story of Coyolxāuhqui represents colonial disembodiment, fragmentation, and female suppression.

As Alma López comments: “Coyolxāuhqui represents not only an incredibly violent dismembering of a warrior woman but also the need to remember and heal not only ourselves but also our histories and cultures from this violent and misogynistic past.” Thus, the inclusion of Coyolxāuhqui in López’s art represents a feministic decolonial reclaiming of the severed Aztec history and womanhood.

Tattoo: Renegotiating Chicana Femininity

Tattoo

One example of how Alma López uses Lupe & Sirena as a recurring motif is her piece Tattoo. The work shows a Chicana who is getting Lupe & Sirena tattooed on her back. The gesture of engraving the lesbian imagery on the body is, moreover, an expression of Chicana queerness. It is a direct reference to how many Chicanos tattoo the Virgin of Guadalupe on their backs as an expression of stereotypical Mexican masculinity. Consequently, the piece, likewise, embodies a new, reimagined Chicana femininity as well as a queer feminist defiance of stereotypical Mexican male macho culture. The piece is set against the backdrop of the Los Angeles skyline and features, as in many of López’s pieces, images of the Mexican-American borderlands.

Healing

Guisela Latorre highlights the importance of healing and affirmation within this piece. In this context, Latorre references the understanding of the connection between the spirit and the body which is prevalent in folk healing practices throughout the Americas. According to this belief, by healing the body, spiritual healing will be achieved as well. Hence, Latorre emphasizes how the process of being tattooed represents the Chicana’s strength to accomplish transformation and healing that is, spiritual, personal, and political.

California Fashions Slaves: Visibility of Chicanas in History

Chicanas in History

Not all of Alma López’s art centers figures of religion, mythology, or pop culture. One of her most well-known works is California Fashions Slaves. The piece centers Alma López’s mother as well as numerous Latina female textile workers. It particularly emphasizes the long history and central role of female migrants which are frequently excluded from historical and current debates surrounding migration. More specifically the piece gives a spotlight to the generations of female sweatshop workers with migration backgrounds in the United States and honors their hard work.

Social Commentary

Simultaneously, the piece features current debates on Mexican-American migrants. This is directly highlighted by the inclusion of political slogans and the image of a male migrant being chased by a military vehicle (the latter representing persecution and violence against migrants). The composition is once again set against the Mexican-American borderlands.

Lastly, while California Fashions Slaves does not center religious or mythological figures, it does feature both the Virgin of Guadalupe and Coyolxāuhqui as recurring patron protectors of these women.

Las Four: Conclusion

Alma López’s art is closely engaged with Mexican and Chicana/o traditions reimagined through artist’s queer and feminist experience. Most of her art, moreover, features commentary on numerous social issues such as racism, sexism, discrimination against immigrants and the LGBTQAI+ community. López is particularly interested in increasing the visibility and respect towards Chicana and Mexican women.

This is especially well-demonstrated by Las Four, which she describes as: “Another mural that I did in Estrada Courts was titled Las Four which consisted of actual photographs depicting young women who lived in the housing projects. We met them when they congregated in front of their homes sitting on the steps of their porch. We would ask them about what it was they wanted out of life, yet we noticed right away that there was disrespect toward the young women from some of the young men in their neighborhood, and I thought to myself: ‘These young women sitting in these front steps, whatever they do, they are going to make an incredible contribution to life.’ Therefore, it is important to respect them and think of them as people who will make incredible and important contributions, just like the four women featured in the background of the mural, who at one time were probably young women sitting in front of their steps, in front of their homes, hanging out with their friends.”

The women referenced in the background are Dolores Huerta one of the leading contemporary civil rights activists, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz one of the most famous Mexican feminist poets of the 17th century, Rigoberta Menchu a central contemporary revolutionary from Guatemala, and lastly one of the soldaderas who were the women fighting in the Mexican revolution.