Prayer hands, closed fists: Religious leaders react to treatment of immigrants
As lore has it, on this day in 1531 the Virgin Mary appeared to the Indigenous worker Juan Diego at Tepeyac Hill and left the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe on his cloak.
The iconography is now ubiquitous and evokes a plethora of emotions for a wide swath of people. Some see the depiction of Jesus’ mother as a stand-in for their own mothers; others view it as an olive branch from God to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas; there’s also the contingent that sees it as a vehicle for the Spanish to further exert religious repression onto Indigenous people by co-opting local religious narratives.
The Virgen has also been used as a symbol of revolution and social justice for over 200 years. Catholic priest and prominent revolutionist Miguel Hidalgo used a banner that employed the image of the religious figure to lead his crew of insurgents, which kicked off the Mexican War of Independence in 1810. More recently, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union utilized the image of the brown-skinned deity as an emblem for the oppressed agricultural laborers.