Impassioned Icons

Impassioned Icons: Alma Lopez and Queer Chicana Visual Desire by Luz Calvo University of California, Santa Cruz The image of two recognizable cultural female figures appeared to me: the Sirena/Mermaid from the popular loteria bingo game and the Virgin of Guadalupe, the post-conquest Mother of Jesus . . .I am reimagining these cultural icons from my own worldview as a Chicana Lesbian. Alma Lopez, Visual Artist In the cultural space of the Chicano/a community, la Virgen de Guadalupe is everywhere: painted on car windows, tattooed on shoulders or backs, emblazoned on neighborhood walls, imprinted on tshirts sold at the local flea market. For Chicana feminists, her omnipresence incites feelings of ambivalence. Some, regardless of religiosity, accept her as a guardian presence, as nuestra madre. Others consider her to be that virgin who appears in the binary of virgin/whore,a social construction that traps women in a phallo-centric sexual economy. Sandra Cisneros, for example, writes "That was why I was angry every time I saw la Virgen de Guadalupe, my culture's role model for brown women like me. She was damn dangerous, an ideal so lofty and unrealistic it was laughable. Did boys have to aspire to be Jesus?" (1996, 48). In their effort to re-signify la Virgen de Guadalupe, Chicana feminists have used a variety of strategies. Many have sought to reclaim the indigenous aspects of her identity, seeing her as the embodiment of pre-conquest goddesses such as Tonantzin, Coatlique, Coatlalopeuh, or Tlazolteotl. In Ana Castillo's collection, Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgen de Guadualupe (1996), Castillo along with Gloria Anzaldua, Pat Mora, Cherrie Moraga and Sandra Cisneros deploy this strategy, identifying the Virgin of Guadalupe as a syncretic symbol in which Spanish Catholicism combines with Indigenous beliefs systems featuring female deities. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano elaborates this syncretism: [I]t is important to remember the semiotic richness of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexican/Catholic culture, productive of both religious and

nationalist meanings. In her syncretic fusion of the Catholic Virgin Mother and the preconquest fertility deity Tonantzin, Guadalupe signifies the racial construction of Mexican national identity as the mestizo or hybrid product of the sexual union of Indian woman and male Spaniard. (1995, 185)

Thus, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a fusion of Spanish (the Catholic Virgin Mary) and indigenous (Tonantzin) cultures in the same way that Mexican national identity is defined by the racial and sexual mixture that I have theorized as the primal scene of colonialism; that is, "the sexual union of Indian woman and male Spaniard." Drawing on the "semiotic richness" of the mestiza holy mother, Chicana visual artists, in particular, have made important contributions to feminist resignifications of la Virgen de Guadalupe. Ester Hernandez's 1975 print, La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los Xicanos, depicts the Virgin as a black belt in the martial arts. No longer the gentle mother figure imagined in the traditional icon, this Guadalupe is physical, active, and strong. While the title of the piece suggests that her ability is put at the service of her pueblo (the Chicano people), it is clear that she can also defend herself. Indeed, these two, the "me" of individual interest and "we" of the Chicano movement are no longer in opposition as is so often the case in the context of what ChabramDernersesian calls the "Chicano Movement script."1 In this "script," Chicanas are asked to choose between their loyalty to Chicano values and their affinity with feminism (often coded as "selfish."). Alicia Gaspar de Alba confirms that this is struggle was replicated among Chicano and Chicana artists: Chicana artists, like their male counterparts,were resisting class and race oppression and affirming their differences as colonized subjects with their own cultural, historical and linguistic identity. But some of the Chicanas were also resisting [gender] oppression, internal to the Movement, and for this resistance they were labeled by the patriarchs and their female allies traitors to the Chicano Movement. (1998, 125)

Refusing such a bifurcation, Hernandez's print portrays Guadalupe as a woman who is strong for herself and her raza. Similarly, Yolanda M. Lopez's Guadalupe Triptych (1978) represents the Virgin of Guadalupe in various guises: marathon runner, seamstress, grandmother that foreground women's strength. In Our Lady of Guadalupe (1978,), a seamstress works at a sewing machine, creating the star-covered cloak that traditionally covers the Virgin of Guadalupe. This image

underscores the unseen and under-considered labor of women who sew not only the Virgin's cloak but our clothes as well. Another Our Lady of Guadalupe (1978) depicts an older woman,the artistÕs own grandmother Chabram Dernersesian sitting on a footstool that is covered with the VirginÕs cloak. In her hand, the grandmother holds snake skin in one hand and a knife in the other. The grandmother in the image embodies the stoic strength and wisdom of the crone, the older woman reclaimed by feminists. The last of this 1978 trilogy is the Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe. In this image, the artist portrays herself/la Virgen as a marathon runner. Her legs are muscular and developed. She runs holding a snake in one hand and the Virgin's cloak draped over her shoulder in the other. She stomps on a small angel with red, white, and blue wings. Lopez describes this plump cherub as "a middle aged agent of patriarchy" (Gaspar de Alba 1998, 141). Chicana feminist artists, like the writers, have thus reclaimed the Virgin as a Chicana feminist icon, appropriating and re-signifying her patriarchal rendering as the selfless mother. Gaspar de Alba put it thus: "Both Hernandez and Lopez's portrayals of the Guadalupana alter the passive femininity of the traditional image to communicate feminist empowerment through change and physical action." (141). As Chicana feminists have struggled with and against the persistence of the la Virgen de Guadalupe some have dared to explore what is perhaps the most taboo of topics: her sexuality. In her essay, "Guadalupe the Sex Goddess," Cisneros reveals her desire to lift the virgin's dress, to see her underwear and her sex: When I see La Virgen de Guadalupe I want to lift her dress as I did my dolls' and look to see if she comes with chones, and does her panocha look like mine, and does she have dark nipples too? Yes, I am certain she does. (1996, 51)

Cisneros's desire to see La Virgencita's sex reveals itself as a site where race and sexual difference meet. Within a cultural context where white bodies are the norm, Cisneros desires to find a body like hers. In this instance, "lack" is not (only) lack of the phallus but the "lack" of the "white slit" that Cisneros has seen in pornographic film: "Once, watching a porn film, I saw a sight that terrified me. It was the film star's panocha a tidy, elliptical opening, pink and shiny like rabbit's ear. To make matters worse, it was shaved."(50-51)If the sight of the porn star's genitals evoked in Cisneros a feeling of terror, it was because of a difference that was at once racially and sexually coded. The very word panocha playfully codes sexual difference in terms of color and thus "race"2 for its literal meaning is a cone of brown sugar that is

used in Mexican cooking. Cisneros elaborates her reaction to this difference: I think what startled me most was the realization that my own sex has no resemblance to this woman's. My sex, dark as an orchid, rubbery and blue purple as a pulpo, an octopus, does not look nice and tidy, but otherworldly.(51)

Thus, Cisneros's desire to lift the Virgin's dress is a desire to locate her own body within the grid of racial and sexual difference. Difference is coded as "lack" in a social symbolic order that values men over women and whiteness over color. For Cisneros as for other Chicana feminists, political and social consciousness means one has learned to love yourself, not in spite of your "lack" but because of it.3 Citing Cisneros's essay on Guadalupe as inspiration, Los Angeles based visual artist Alma Lopez has created a series Lupe Loves Sirena that represents the Virgin in sexualized sapphic poses. Using digital cutand-paste, Lopez produces collages that challenge some spectators' sense of propriety. One family, on seeing her art on public television, wrote to the artist, claiming Lopez's work to be a "slap in Our LadyÕs face." Yet, to focus only on the "shock value" of Lopez's Lupe Loves Sirena series would be to overlook the complex articulation of sexuality, national iconography, and post-colonial identity that this artwork proposes. In Encuentro (1999), which images the celestial meeting of la Sirena and la Virgen de Guadalupe, we are introduced to three elements that will recur in many of the other images in this series: la virgen, la sirena, and la mariposa. The Virgin of Guadalupe image that Lopez uses in this piece is a traditional religious rendering and is most likely Mexican in origin. This exact likeness is found on religious cards available in stores that sell Catholic paraphernalia. Her name, however, has changed from the traditional "la virgen de Guadalupe" to the more informal and intimate, "Lupe." The image of la sirena (the mermaid) is taken from the popular Mexican bingo game "loteria." Finally, a Viceroy butterfly replaces what in the traditional icon is a small cherub, often painted with wings the color of the Mexican flag, green, white, and red. The butterfly has orange wings with black markings, it closely resembles the well-known Monarch butterfly but is in fact a Viceroy butterfly. These three elements work together in Encuentro to suggest to the spectator the importance of these motifs in the other images in the Lupe loves Sirena series, images which are more richly layered. Before we turn to these other images, it is worth our while to consider at more

length the significance of the sirena and the butterfly. Lopez chooses her butterfly carefully. In an essay posted on her website, Lopez discusses her selection of symbols: "The Viceroy butterfly mimics the Monarch for survival purposes, " explaining that the Monarch butterfly is poisonous to its predators while the slightly smaller Viceroy is not. Lopez suggests the aptness of the Viceroy butterfly as a visual metaphor for queer Chicanos/as: "The Viceroy pretends to be something it is not just to be able to exist. For me, the Viceroy mirrors parallel and intersecting histories of being different or "other" even within our own communities. Racist attitudes see us Latinos as criminals and an economic burden, and homophobic attitudes even within our own communities and families may see us as perverted or deviant. So from outside and inside our communities, we are perceived as something we are not. When in essence we are very vulnerable Viceroy butterflies, just trying to live and survive. ("Mermaids, Butterflies and Princesses.")

There is a play of recognition and misrecognition suggested by the metaphor of the Viceroy butterfly. Ultimately, the Viceroy must forego the possibility of recognition; in order to survive she must mimic something else. By others unlike herself, she will be mistaken for the Monarch. In Lopez's artwork, the Viceroy butterfly is a visual metaphor for queers, Chicanos/as and queer Chicanas/os (marimachas and maricones). In the loteria game, like its American equivalent bingo, players hold a card with a grid. In the Mexican version the grid is filled not with numbers but with images that map a particular national imaginary. For example, el nopal, la chalupa, and la bandera are all signifiers of Mexican national identity. The types of people depicted on the cards reflect a particular (Mexican) racial, social, and sexual order; to wit el negrito, el apache and el soldado on one hand and la dama y el valiente on the other. Within the grid of mexicanidad mapped by loteria, la sirena stands out as the hybrid subject: she is part woman, part fish. The sirena appears to be of mestiza heritage, because instead of the usual blonde hair this mermaid has long wavy black hair. She is derived not from Mexican or indigenous beliefs but rather from a European folklore tradition where she is marked as a seductress that men cannot resist. The image in Encuentro is structured by the combination of three elements:the mermaid, the Virgin, and the butterfly. Semiotics instructs

that meaning is derived from two axis, selection (the paradigmatic axis) and combination (the syntagmatic axis). Meaning is derived from the manner in which elements are selected and combined. The string of symbols on the loteria card is an excellent example of what semioticians call a "paradigmatic axis." Out of a set of possible loteria characters the artist selects one, la sirena. Just as the artist selects la sirena instead of, say, el apache, she chooses the Viceroy butterfly instead of the Monarch butterfly, and the Virgen de Guadalupe instead of an image of Tonantzin, And yet, because the otherÑ-unchosenÑelements exist in what Victor Burgin calls the "popular preconscious" these elements linger in the field of meaning evoked by Lopez's imageÑwhat Burgin calls the "pre-text."4 (1886, 60) Lopez suggests as much in her explanation of the use of the Viceroy butterfly instead of the more recognizable Monarch butterfly: The Monarch butterfly is most know for its natural yearly migration from Mexico to the northern U.S. However, the most remarkable aspect of this migration is that on its flight back to Mexico or the northern U.S. it is no longer the original butterfly, but it is the child returning on genetic memory.(2)

Thus, these two butterflies exist on a paradigmatic axis from which the artist chooses the Viceroy for her collage while the Monarch continues to attach itself by a relationship of contiguity to the butterfly that appears in the piece. While Lopez selects the Viceroy butterfly, she is still able to allude to the MonarchÕs unique migration pattern. Similarly, linguistic difference creates another set of elements on the paradigmatic axis. The butterfly in the image is la mariposa in Spanish. La mariposa is but one word that begins with the prefix "mari": others that come to mind are marimacha (dyke) or maricon (fag). Thus, the queerness of this image is suggested by the paradigmatic axis even before the virgin fondles la sirena's breast in Lupe and Sirena in Love. In Lupe and Sirena in Love, we find the three elements of El Encuentro, the mermaid, the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Viceroy butterfly, along with new elements: the city scape of Los Angeles, the wall at the Mexico-US border replete with the image of la virgen and the year 1848, a photograph of a man being chased by an agent of the migra (US immigration and naturalization "service"), a faint image of the volcanoes that tower over Mexico City (Ixtaccihuatl and Popocapetl). The entire scene is framed by three blond cherubs holding a gold ribbon and bouquets of roses.

Lopez's collage might suggest a Chicana lesbian primal scene: the fantasy of nuestra madre in a sexual embrace with a woman. This imagined scene stages the metaphoric conception of queer desire in explicitly Chicano/a terms. In this image, queer desire is inseparable from its racial and cultural context and from it geographic location in the Mexico-US borderlands. As a young urban artist, Lopez's artwork reflects a highly developed sense of place. This image, like many other in her ouvre, layer the Los Angeles cityscape, the fence at the MexicoUS border, and the volcanoes that tower over Mexico City. By arranging these various geographical markers within one frame, Lopez begins to map Chicana lesbian desire as a transnational formation that is not fixed by the "logic" of the border, but that is situated within a complex history of colonization and struggle. Note: See Alma Lopez's website featuring her artwork and critical reviews of her work. Endnotes 1Chabram- Dernersesian capitalizes the "O" at the end of ChicanO to signal the gendered nature of the referent-the as yet un-reconstituted male-centered Chicano movement. The more contemporary term Chicano/a or Chicana/o is meant to signify the reconstitution of the movement in gender-inclusive terms. Of course, the mere name change does not mean the reconstitution was successful or complete. 2Here as elsewhere in this dissertation, I use the term "race" as a way to signal a process of racialization that is social and historical not reducible to biological difference. In the US, Mexicans and Chicanos/as are racialized. Within Mexican and Chicano/a culture, the diversity of skin tones also carry complex social and racial meaning. 3I am well of aware of the challenge Lacan's conception of "lack" poses for many feminists. I find it useful in this context, however, to use it as a marker of sexual and racial difference in a social symbolic where such difference in marked by social inequality. I do not believe the equation of difference with social inequality is immutable, inevitable, or ahistorical. 4Popular preconscious is defined by Burgin as "those ever-shifting contents which we may reasonably suppose can be called to mind by the majority of individuals in a given society at a particular moment in history; that which is 'common knowledge'" (58). In the case of the elements in Lopez's work, the pre-text is not common knowledge for hegemonic US subjects, while it most likely is common knowledge for Chicanos/as. I do not mean to suggest that the image is, then, unreadable to non-Chicanos/as but simply that their pre-text will most likely yield less developed set of images along the paradigmatic chain. Subaltern artistic practice will make use of what I might call a post-

colonial preconscious that is distinct from the "common knowledge" of the society at large and that the subaltern's specialized knowledge produces a particular kind of viewing pleasure for those who "get it." Works Cited Anzaldua, G. (1996). "Coatlalopeuh: She Who Has Dominion Over Serpents." Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. New York, Riverhead Books: 52-55. Burgin, V. (1986). The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity. Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press International, Inc. Castillo, A., Ed. (1996). Goddess of the Americas. New York, Riverhead Books. Cisneros, S. (1996). "Guadalupe the Sex Goddess." Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. New York, Riverhead Books: 46-51. Gaspar de Alba, A. (1998). Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master's House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition. Austin, University of Texas Press. Lo Mora, P. (1996). "Coatlicue's Rules: Advice from an Aztec Goddess." Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. New York, Riverhead Books: 88-91. Moraga, C. (1996). El mito azteca. Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe.New York, Riverhead Books: 68-71. Yarbro-Bejarano, Y. (1995). "The Lesbian Body in Latina Cultural Production." Entiendes: Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press:181-197.

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