Alicia M. Barabas* Centro INAH Oaxaca. English translation by Denisse Piñera Palacios.

The figure of the Virgin Mary is one of the founding symbols of the catholic tradition which has surpassed frontiers, times and cultures, rebuilding itself together with the native religious Weltanschauungs of the evangelized peoples. This is why the large global Catholic community, though in sui generis ways, has offered different forms of cult to the Virgin for two thousand years. One of her main miraculous manifestations as the Appeared, that is, as an incursion of the sacred into the profane world, has generated many different forms of cult and has great popular diffusion almost everywhere around the world. The miraculous apparitions that constitute the different faces of Mary are central phenomena of the Judeo-Christian symbolism and, alluding to Paul Ricoeur,1 result from a series of cultural reinterpretations of the original sense of this dominant symbol in said religious tradition, which allow the singular expression of the sacred.

Admittedly, the miraculous apparitions of the Virgin, as symbologies filled with efficacy,2 do not happen in a historical void, but they are part of a global tradition of Marian miracles, which has unfolded in Mexico, creating a specific Guadalupe model, identifiable in numerous apparitions of virgins and saints3 However, it is essential to insist in the fact that miraculous apparitions are multivocal phenomena, not completely understood when interpreted only as another expression of the Catholic apparitional model.

The conception of space as sacred and the exceptional incursion of the sacred into the human world were known phenomena to the Mesoamerican cosmology and they are still present among the current indigenous peoples. Proof of this are the lords or patrons of places, who control specific spaces where they manifest themselves, and also the creator heroes remembered in myths, who leave their traces visible to make sacred the foundation of the human territory.4

The apparitions of the Virgin Mary that are considered miraculous, already accepted in Europe by the Catholic Church, become strong among the American indigenous peoples. In Mexico, during the XVI century, the myth of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s apparition was configured at the Tepeyac hill, ancient ceremonial center of the deity of earth Tonantzin (Our Mother), associated since that moment to the Virgin. The apparition, legitimized by the church in the XVIII century, was built as a multivocal symbol. In the XIX century it was an identity emblem for the mix of races and for the recently created Mexican nationality,5 and it was also identified as a symbol of justice for the poor and of punishment for the powerful.6 The vast majority of modern miraculous apparitions in this country have been built over the matrix figure of the Guadalupean Virgin.

The previous experiences of the sacred –according to the concept of sacred provided by Otto-7- related to the owners of nature –who dwell in caves, mountains, and springs of water, who are full of mystery and are also many times terrifying– who gradually acquired an aura of malignancy when they were associated to the Christian figure of the demon. The negative and sinful quality given to them, as shown for instance by the figure of the catrín, seems to be subsequent to the contact with Christianity.8 Although there generally is an initial ambiguity as to the definition of the demonic or divine character of an apparition, the secret of its condition is soon unveiled: when the irruption of the sacred is mainly built according to the Marian-Guadalupean model, it acquires the condition of a miracle, it is interpreted as divine, and its summoning power rapidly grows.

Now I would like to emphasize that current miraculous apparitions are part of new Weltanschauungs, based on native myths and on Christian apparitional myths as well. But at the same time they constitute wider and more ancient traditions (both Mesoamerican and Christian); they are new religious texts which are recycled and resignified in the present. Following Ricoeur once again9 we need to remember that powerful events are capable of separating themselves from the myths of origin and thus they transform into “free texts”, deterritorialized and detemporalized, which may be recreated in new social contexts. When an apparition becomes alive in a specific social environment, the text transfigures by means of the constant addition, alteration and interpretation of meanings. Notwithstanding the fact that the original text may be rediscovered and reread within a known interpretation tradition, the new text is built from a singular Weltanschauung, in a specific context, and from this particular encounter emerges a new experience of the phenomenon, filled with particular meanings and possibilities of action. O. Velho10 arrives to a synthetic explanation when he says that the relationship between text and context creates a new unity of meaning in a permanent movement of intertextuality.

Taking these ideas as background, I would like to interpret miraculous apparitions as processes of meaning production, which the collective of actors (believers, snoopers, detractors, etcetera) gradually builds from multiple (and many times contradictory) tales, experiences, messages, visions and dreams. The persistence of the apparitional miracle depends on the articulation of the fragmented spectrum of expectations, convictions, interpretations and interests of the believers into a discourse which is unifying as well as multivocal.

The town

The information reproduced and interpreted in this essay was obtained in San Felipe Tejalapam, region located 15 Km from the city of Oaxaca.11 The apparition of the Virgin took place on November 15, 1995, and in the days that followed I frequently visited this town, sometimes with Miguel Bartolomé, and in this way I was able to be acquainted with the events firsthand and while they were happening. This is why my interest focused on capturing the different voices that build the miracle. In this field, experiences and the individual and collective religious imaginary may be treated, according to Geertz,12 as the raw material for the structuration, description and analysis of the religious phenomenon.

At the beginning of the XX^th century, Zapoteco was spoken in Tejalapam, but approximately since 1950 the language gradually became extinct and the population, peasant and wage-earner at the same time, did not feel identified anymore with this ethnic group. Nevertheless, numerous indigenous organizational and cultural ways are reproduced in this 5500-inhabitant community, among which we find a substratum of beliefs in powerful entities of nature.13 In the same way, the political-religious offices and controllerships are central institutions of collective life. The festivities of the saints attract a crowd of migrants who come from the United States of America and Mexico City. One of the most important festivities of Catholic origin has always been that of the Virgin of Juquila, and the village celebrates it locally and in pilgrimage to the Virgin’s sanctuary.14 Although nowadays most of the inhabitants are Catholic, there already is thirteen percent of “Evangelicals” (Jehovah Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists), seen as “strange people” within the context of the town’s Catholicism. From the Mesoamerican Weltanschauung of Oaxaca, there is still a fixed cult and offerings to the springs of water or wells, which is the most common propitiatory ritual to the ancient deities of water and of the hill.

The apparitions

On October 31, 1995 while passing in front of a well outside Tejalapam, a young employee of the Conasupo saw a blond girl running down the hill; she was small, dressed in white and wearing small leather sandals, which were new and shining. The girl was making noise, but when she saw the young man, she hid behind a tree called casahuate and then disappeared into the well. On the night of November 14, when passing once more in front of the well, he heard the voices of small girls that called at him “we are here, come”. He was frightened and thus bordered the place until he arrived to his house. He told his family about this and later on he came back to the well with his father and grandmother, armed and carrying a lamp. When they got there, they saw that a white veil was covering the opening of the well. They came closer and then saw the crown of the Virgin on the veil, and suddenly “the Virgin was there, wearing her robe and crown”. They knew it was a miracle because they saw the crown and robe that were covering the one-meter-diameter well transform into the figure of the Virgin who, with robe and crown, measured 30 cm. On the night of the apparition, many people of the neighboring towns saw “fireballs” descending from the sky, which exploded over the place in the form of a crown of shining stars, like sparks. The next day, they notified the local authorities and the priest, and they started to build a sanctuary over the well. Due to her childlike appearance, to her size and to her similarity to the Virgin of Juquila, the believers interpreted her as a “daughter” of said Virgin. Very soon the news was spread that the apparition was the “small” Virgin of Juquila that had come to stay in Tejalapam.15 The various versions of the apparition of Juquila given by the visitors and believers initially shaped the accounts of the new apparition.

The first apparition did not bring a message, announcement or prophecy. In that context of total “secrecy”, of alert without message, the miracle could have rapidly vanished but, on the contrary, it grew, feeding from the various types of “signs”; usually contradictory fragments of meaning, which the believers deciphered and interpreted every day and which gradually configured a text, while it allowed them to unveil the enigma of the apparition and the attributes of its figure. Its presence indicated to them a double message: of punishment for all those who did not respect the principles of the Catholic religion, and of help for the faithful. Although the sacred message was still secret, the people of Tejalapam produced an explanation about the reason for the apparition that alluded to crucial global situations: the current social, political and moral disorder of the country and the lack of Catholic faith were the reasons why the Virgin had come to earth.

The second apparition of the Virgin, in December, is the nodal point of the miracle, since she sent a message full of symbolism when she appeared as a poor child to a traveler.

A man from the town of El Tule found a very dirty girl by the river, with her nose full of mucus, who told him: grandpa, where are you going? –I’m going to church, answered the old man. The girl told him that she was also going to church. However, the man walked very slowly and did not manage to arrive to mass, and so he came back to the well. When he arrived, he saw the little girl again. She was carrying a small jug of water and white flowers on her hand. She told the old man: “rub this river water on your knee and you will be healed, though he had not told her he was sick”. He asked her where she lived and the girl, pointing towards the jug, said: I live over there, where the roof made of tin plate is; when they invite me, I go to the big house and when they don’t, I live here, where the house made of tin plates is. Then the girl left, but the man turned around to look at her and the girl told him: please give a message to the people in the Committee: Tell them I will send them lots of water and a very large piece of bread, very special, for all their people. The girl took four or five more steps and when the man looked at her, she was not the little girl anymore, but the image of the Virgin covered in light, and right there she transformed into a star and fell where the house made of tin plate was.

The visual and verbal message of the child-Virgin allows us to guess various meanings interweaved in the narration, which contribute to unveil the mystery and to create a message. It defines her appearance as a dirty child, humble and poor like her devotees, who transits between two sacred spaces: the well and the town church. The water and the white flowers are the elements she uses for the miraculous healing of the traveler, and these are also used by the travelers for cleansings, blessings and healings. Not only does she establish the model of healing, but she also contributes to unveil part of her designs while healing, because when providing health to the believer, she shows a kind and symbolically therapeutic element. In this message we also see the delimitation of the chosen place for her definitive dwelling: the well, under the arbor with a tin-plate roof, as well as the group of the chosen ones: the Committee, to whom the salvation promise is addressed: water and bread, which she prophesizes in abundance, and prosperity for those who have built her sanctuary and take care of Her. Finally, she unveils the ultimate secret, her divine quality, when she sequentially transforms into light, into a star and into a Virgin and then comes back to her chosen sacred place: the well.

The sanctuary is an arbor over the well covered by a roof made of tin plate, where the image of the Virgin was placed inside a glass cabinet, surrounded by flowers, cards of the Virgin of Juquila, candles, offerings, promises and requests that go all the way up to the hill.16 The Virgin’s Committee was gradually integrated by volunteers moved by their devotion or by their miraculous experience, until they formed a group of 40 people, both men and women, who share all the tasks related to the Appeared one. They clothe the Virgin, gather the alms, take care of the sanctuary, clean it, fix the flowers and candles, cook and shelter the pilgrims at the well or in the town curia office, where the image of the Virgin was later on placed. In spite of the criticism of the church and of a local paper, in the sense that the members were making money on the apparition, they were ratified as a Committee by the municipal authorities. The new sanctuary is visited by hundreds of pilgrims from Tejalapam’s neighboring towns, as well as from towns of the state of Oaxaca; they also receive visitors from Puebla, Tehuacán, Guerrero, Tlaxcala and Mexico City. Some migrant families decided to return to live in town in order to “be close to the miracle”.

The well

Before the Virgin’s apparition, the well was a sacred place, which was never out of water. People used to perform requests for abundance to the water deity in it every March 1^st. Many of the people who had passed in front of it had had singular experiences. Some had heard noises, as if hundreds of pilgrims were praying, others had seen a beautiful woman dressed in white sitting on the rocks, and many others had had terrifying visions of the catrín and the snake.

The springs of water or natural wells are entrance landmarks, conceived by the inhabitants as “places of great water”, symbols of abundance, preferred by the King or Lord of water (King nisa in Zapoteco), and “heavy places”, because in them are kept the King’s treasures. Nowadays, King nisa, concentrates the attributes of the Zapoteca deity of water, symbolized by the snake, and those of the catrín or demon-mestizo.

In the Mesoamerican cosmology17 the snake dwelled inside the hills and in the springs of water it had created itself. It was the figure of beneficial omens, giver of water and good crops, but also of malignant omens, because it attracted people with its breath to then submerge them, to terrify them or even kill them. Nowadays in different indigenous groups in Oaxaca we see the reproduction of tales and rituals that evidence the persistence of these beliefs.18 In the local imagery, King nisa has also appeared as the catrín, carrying his money, frightening and making sick those who will not deal with him. This ambivalent being gathers the attributes of the Owner of the hill or Owner of the animals, and those of the Christian demon consubstantiated with the also ambivalent figure of the mestizo or half-breed: powerful, rich and evil. The catrín usually makes rich those who become his servants, although he generally deceives, promising richness and sending sickness instead. This figure may be interpreted as the condensed symbol of the uneven interethnic relationships.

It seems relevant to point out that nowadays the territorial entities of Mesoamerican origin are less and less perceived as ambivalent, with the capacity of exercising good and evil; in exchange, we often see these conceptions adjudicate to them only evil capabilities. In the same way, the places where they manifest are considered as dangerous and also demoniac.

On the other hand, the snake-Virgin figures are presented alternatively, as shown by the following accounts:

• She presented herself to a woman and a man by the well in the days following the apparition, first as a snake and then as a Virgin.

• A man did not believe, and instead of the Virgin, he saw a snake in the well.

Then, they might be exchangeable symbols, but of an opposite value. Whereas the Virgin is collectively represented as what is divine and shiny, the snake almost always alludes to a conception of what is sacred but also evil and dark. Given the fact that the apparition presents itself as a snake and as a Virgin, it would not be too hazardous to point out that the apparitions intersect and that the Virgin is a new manifestation of the sacred, superposed to that of the king of water (snake-catrín) and equally ambivalent, since among her designs we find reward and punishment. In the second apparition, the Virgin announces abundance, but some other times she manifests as a deity that punishes. The most interesting aspect, since it allows us to see the multivocal character of the miracle, is that the Catholic re-foundation of the sacred place does not suppress the previous meanings and rituals, but it conjugates with them, somehow participating of their characteristics and senses.

The apparition of the Virgin in the well, apart from the obvious relationship of water with fertility and abundance, could be thought as a myth to turn sacred again a previously sacred but chaotic and demonized space –like many other concepts of the ancient religion- which, while requalified with the sign of Catholicism, become a suitable space for men. The new irruption of the sacred allows the re-foundation and requalification of the dangerous space, to which new names are given: Well of the Virgin and neighborhood of Juquila.

Building the miracle

M. Taussig,19 in a suggesting essay, interprets Marian apparitions in Colombia as discourse phenomena. Following this idea, I understand the apparition of Tejalapam as a process of meaning production in which the discourse of the evil one collectively builds, from the accounts of “signs-messages” that the locals and pilgrims “see” and “dream of”, and from the many accounts of the visions and dreams of others, which add up to the figure of the Virgin as time passes. The possibility of its existence resides in the construction of a discourse that integrates the particular and fragmented miracles of the believers.

Perhaps what we must not forget to emphasize in this apparition (which does not prophesize catastrophes or other radical changes in the order of the world, or intervene in the everyday issues of the town), is the constant group of signs the Virgin sends in dreams and visions, in the form of gestures or transformations that evidence her mood: she cries, smiles, feels sad, angry or happy, she turns or lowers her head, her hair grows, her robes change color, she rejects her crown, etcetera. Those dreams and visions are the raw material of the accounts that gradually interweave the discourse of the miracle, give it continuity and allow the believers to decipher the mystery:

Several pilgrims and locals saw her feet and her face in the water, after the image had been moved.
The change from the well to the church, ordered by the Archbishop of Oaxaca, was made against the will of the people and against the will of the Virgin, and this is why when the image was being transported, the women saw her cover her face with her veil and cry.
A man says that on the day of the apparition he saw a red shiny star on the hand and chest of the Virgin and that on the following day it was gone.
When the municipal representative touched her with little respect, She, embarrassed, lowered her head and did not lift it again until after three days.
A cameraman from Televisa Monterrey or San Ángel arrived and filmed the sanctuary and told them it was a miracle that the image of the Virgin was always blurry when the rest of the shooting was clear.
The Virgin’s hair kept growing as time passed.
In the beginning, the robe was close to the reed cross behind her back, and as time passed, it started to separate from it.
People from San Lorenzo Cacaotepec, Magdalena Apasco, Santa Cruz Lachisolana, etcetera, on the night of November 13, saw thunders over Tejalapam as if it had been raining heavily, but it was not raining.
A man had noticed that each day the Virgin’s robe had a different color.
A woman dreamed of the Virgin telling her She was not really in the church, but at the little well, and that She wanted her chapel there.
Many had seen lights over the little well, in the same way signs were seen over Bethlehem when Jesus was born.
The halo of smoke produced by the fireworks is the crown that the Virgin had shown her devotees as a sign of contentment.

I have already said that in the beginning the Virgin showed a certain predisposition to punish. Not very often do we have comments on healing miracles, but it was said that she was a revenging Virgin whose miracles are depicted as punishments. There were many accounts about injured people, with broken bones, accidents and loss of goods, as well as people punished for not “believing from their hearts in the Virgin”20 One of the most commented miracles was the punishment suffered by the archbishop of Oaxaca on the day he went to withdraw the image from the sanctuary;

he was coming back to Oaxaca at night and the lights of the city kept getting farther. He tried different roads, but he did not manage to get there; he almost got lost. They arrived very late in Oaxaca. That night, he dreamed of the Virgin who reproached him for his incredulity. On the next day, he felt dim, almost dizzy, but he went anyway to Tejalapam to celebrate mass and to ask the Virgin for forgiveness.

It is said that “the Virgin arrived to punish the skeptical”, therefore the faithful searched the proof of the miracles more in punishments than in healings or the granting of their requests. After the second apparition, the Virgin’s message developed into a salvation one, building itself with selected fragments, choosing the beneficial miracles over the different punishments. In this way, we hear each time more often that she has granted requests of health and wealth to many people in the locality and also to foreigners. The members of the Committee are optimistic, since, they say: “almost the whole town believes in the Virgin, even the Authorities and some of the Evangelicals, who have converted back to Catholicism”. The town enjoys a certain prosperity; in 1996 there was a lot of water in the wells and rivers of Tejalapam, reason why they expected good crops and strong cattle; this abundance is interpreted by the people as the fulfillment of the miracle the Virgin had promised when she prophesized bread and water.

The struggle between the Virgin and the church

On December 3, 1995 the Archbishop of Oaxaca gave his verdict about the “authenticity” of the apparition of a “daughter” image of the Virgin of Juquila in Tejalapam. According to the results of an inquisitional Commission sent by the Church to this town, the image was a modern and commercial replica of the image in Juquila, which had been found or placed there, but not appeared and, therefore, it was not authentic. After he had discredited the miracle, the archbishop blessed the image and then forced the people to accept its removal to the curia office of the church, making sure they understood that the image was not sacred and that they should not venerate it as a miraculous apparition. We estimate there were more than a thousand pilgrims when the image was moved, in a procession of 3 Km that joined the Virgin from the well to the town church, in the middle of tears, songs, moaning, protests and commented miracles.

Even if the situation of the town was not especially critical or conflictive, the context of the apparition was built as a battlefield between the interacting voices. On the one hand, there were the church and the press that discredited the miracle and doubted the honesty of the Committee when collecting alms, forbidding them to build a chapel at the well21 and any celebration that attracted pilgrims to the church sanctuary of the Virgin in Juquila, making them gain money.22 Then there were the pilgrims, and especially the Committee of the Virgin, who disagreed with the verdict, with the accusations and with the mocking and contemptuous treatment given to the Virgin by the priests and the “Evangelicals”. In this struggle for religious power, the municipal authorities played a more or less impartial role, which translated into not providing the Committee with concrete support and into not preventing them from developing the cult.

The search for mediation

In one of our visits, on December 7, we saw two fireworks that left a smoke halo in the sky when they exploded; this sign was interpreted as a vision of the Virgin’s crown, by means of which she manifested her joy. Some days later, the accounts added the joy of the Virgin regarding our presence there and the expectation that we might serve as mediators between the believers and the government institutions. To evidence that the sacred sign was interpreted by the believers as a guide for action is that soon after this, three representatives of the Committee arrived to the offices of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) in Oaxaca, to request support for the new transfer of the Virgin to the well and for the building of her chapel. They wanted us to register their accounts of the apparition, in order to have “evidence” of the miracle’s authenticity, and they wanted the architects to draw blueprints and make budgets for the construction of the chapel. We agreed to register their accounts, although in the understanding that this registry would not be accepted as evidence for the authenticity. On the next day, we were received by the Authorities and by more than 40 people gathered in the courtyard of San Felipe’s church. They then narrated the events, visions and dreams regarding the apparition; we recorded them and later on gave them transcripts.

From the orchestration of symbols another voice was emphasized now, showing a political part of the miracle. The impossibility to negotiate with the Church regarding the authenticity of the Virgin and the construction of the chapel constituted a strong factor in the search for alternative mediation channels. In Mexico, where the State has a strong presence in the life of the indigenous peoples, the most viable strategy for the Committee’s objective was to obtain a favorable mediation from a government agency. The choice indicated by the miraculous smoke crown fell upon the INAH through us, but the support for the construction of the chapel was received from the Secretaría de Obras Públicas (Ministry of Public Works).23

Provisional Epilogue

In 1997, a year and a half later, the Virgin’s Committee was ratified by the Authorities as one of the new religious offices of the community. The frame of celebrations has grown with the controllership of the appeared Virgin,24 although the cult to water has also been intensified, celebrated in March. Frequently, miraculous apparitions are institutionalized, developing as controllerships, thus incorporating the phenomena of irruption of the sacred within the traditional system of saints’ celebrations.25 This institutionalization of the liminality could be understood as a dynamic modality of the ritual process, which intersects the “existential communitas” and the “normative communitas”26 without losing the exceptionality that is recreated daily by the faith, visions and accounts of the believers regarding the miracle.

The mystery about the reason for her apparition in this town persists, but other explanations have already been structured. She has chosen to commit to the poor, and this is why she does not accept her crown and presents herself as a dirty and poor child, who has needs (exemplified by the discrediting from the part of the church, and the scorn from the part of the priests) in the same way the peasants do.

The body of the apparitional message has grown very little in this time, but new accounts are structured according to the same pattern of discourse; a visual and gestural symbolic language produced and interpreted by the believers:

Her hair is now black; before, it was fair. It grows unevenly.
Her small golden crown always leans to one side, sometimes it falls. People fix it every day and it always looks out of place. When she was moved to the curia office, her crown appeared on the floor to her side.
She now has a small spot over her right eyebrow, a white spot. They say it is because of her crown; they say she does not want it on her head.
Many people say they often see a blue star that travels each afternoon from the little well to the church.

She continues to present herself in dreams as well:

One of the Committee ladies, who has a shift to fix her flowers, candles and dress, says that every day before her shift or if she is late, the Virgin appears to her in a dream as a dirty girl and says: “do not leave me, see how dirty I am, come and look after me”.

The apparition is produced, consolidated and legitimized through the discourse of the believers, based on cultural categories of knowledge and on a wide common collection of experiences and religious imaginaries. In the same way, a founding event: it writes the score of a new myth and the choreography of a new ritual, according to the model of the Marian-Guadalupean apparitions but with its own symbolic specificity; and it turns sacred again -under a new sign- a dangerous or uncertain sacred space for men. The symbolic language of the myth and of the ritual admits the creation of new meanings, which can be inserted in varied contexts, in different times and spaces, articulating, like in the case of Tejalapam, text and context in a new unit of meaning.

Glossary

Catrín: dandy
Conasupo: (National Company for Popular Supplies) government controlled Mexican stores.

Bibliography

Barabas, Alicia, “El aparicionismo en América Latina: religión, territorio e identidad”, in A. B. Pérez Castro, (ed.), La Identidad: imaginación, recuerdos y olvidos, Mexico, IIA- UNAM, 1995.

____________, “La aparición de la Virgen en Oaxaca, México. Una interpretación sobre la multivocalidad del milagro”, in Thule, Revista di Studi Americanistichi, 2-3 Perugia, Italia, 1977.

Barabas, Alicia and Miguel A. Bartolomé, Configuaraciones étnicas en Oaxaca. Perspectivas etnográficas para las autonomías, 3 vols., Mexico, INAH/INI (Scientific), 1999.

Bartolomé, Miguel and Alicia Barabas, Tierra de la Palabra. Historia y Etnografía de los Chatinos de Oaxaca, Mexico, INAH (Científica, 108), 1982.

Geertz, Clifford, La interpretación de las culturas, Mexico, Gedisa, 1987.

Jiménez, Eleazar, “No hubo aparición; la imagen: burda réplica” and “Por qué la Iglesia dijo que no…”, in El Imparcial, December, 1995.

Lafaye, Jacques, Quetzalcóatl y la Guadalupe, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1977.

Otto, Rudolph, Lo Santo, Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1965.

Ricoeur, Paul “Antropología e Hermenéutica”, in O conflicto das interpretacóes-Ensaios de hermenéutica, Brazil, R. J. Imago, 1969.

Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de, Augurios y abusiones. Indigenous sources of the Nahuatl culture. Introduction, version, notes and comments by Alfredo López Austin, Mexico, UNAM, 1969.

Taussig, Michael, “The wil woman of the Forest becomes Our Lady of Remedies”, in Shamanism, A study in Colonialism and Terror and Healing and the Wild Man, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Turner,Victor, O Processo Ritual, estructura e antiestructura, Petrópolis, Brazil, Vozes, 1974.

____________, Drama, Field and Metaphors, Nueva York, Symbolic Action in Human Society, New York, Cornell University Press, 1987.

Turner, Víctor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimmage in Christian Culture, Anthropological Perspectives, New York, Columbia University Press, 1978.

Velho, Octavio, “O Cativeiro da Besta-Fera”, in Religiáo e Sociedade, 14/1, Brazil, ISER, R. J., 1987.

1. Paul Ricoeur, “Antropología e Hermenéutica” in O Conflito das interpretacoes-Esaios de hermeneutica, 1969. [↩]
2. Octavio Velho, “O Cativeiro de Besta-Fera”, in Religiao e Sociedade, 1987. [↩]
3. Alicia Barabas, “El aparicionismo en América Latina: religión, territorio e identidad”, in A.B. Pérez Castro (ed.), La identidad: imaginación, recuerdos y olvidos, 1995. [↩]
4. Idem. [↩]
5. Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl y la Guadalupe, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1977. [↩]
6. In Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe often includes a millenarianist message of apocalyptical tendencies. She is a harsh Virgin, who punishes the rich and incredulous and who comes to earth because she feels sorry for the sins of the poor, leading them to repentance and obedience, without which her prayers to God for salvation would not be heard, and then the end would come, or suffering would continue. As appointed by V. and E. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 1978, she is the mediator between God and men, the bridge between what is sacred and what is profane. [↩]
7. Rudolph Otto, Lo santo, Revista de Occidente, 1965. [↩]
8. The catrín (dandy) is a posthispanic mythical figure described as a powerful man, of great size, bearded, who uses black elegant clothes, with a hat and silver spurs. [↩]
9. Paul Ricoeur, “Antropología Hermenéutica” in op.cit., 1969. [↩]
10. Octavio Velho, “O cativeiro da Besta-Fera” in op.cit., 1987, p. 75. [↩]
11. A more extensive version of this work was published under the title “La aparición de la Virgen en Oaxaca, México. Una interpretación sobre la multivocalidad del milagro” (The apparition of the Virgin in Oaxaca, Mexico. An interpretation of the multivocal character of the miracle, in the review Thule, Italy, 1997. [↩]
12. Clifford Geertz, La interpretación de las culturas, 1987. [↩]
13. In Mexico, there are numerous tales of caves, springs of water and hills where the sacred has manifested with will and figure. In Tejalapam, the one that is most widely spread refers to the great cave of the neighboring hill called Jalapa, filled with magical richness, where the ancient inhabitants of the town used to go looking for corn, beans, fruits and vegetables when food was scarce. Nowadays, everybody is afraid to get near it. [↩]
14. The Chatino ethnic group of Oaxaca has a vast apparitional tradition that begins with the delimitation of the Chatino original territory, by means of the tracks left by the mythological King Chatín. During Colonial times, the Virgin appeared in the town of Yolotepec, also leaving her traces on the rocks; and in 1633 an image of the Virgin of Conception, which the parish priest had given as a gift to a young man of the town of Amialtepec, started to become famous due to her miracles. On various occasions, the clergy tried to move this image of the Virgin to the municipal headtown of Juquila, but the Virgin kept coming back to her humble sanctuary of Amialtepec. Finally, the church achieved a permanent transfer and the official legitimation of the cult to the Virgin, called the Juquila Virgin, in 1719. Since then, massive pilgrimages are registered every year and the church that provides shelter to the Virgin has grown, as well as the funds of the curia (M. Bartolomé and A. Barabas, Tierra de la palabra. Historia y etnografía de los chatinos de Oaxaca, 1982. [↩]
15. In Oaxaca, it is frequent to see the unfolding process of sacred beings into other filial and dependent ones, who choose their own space and town to manifest. [↩]
16. These offerings often consist of flowers, glass lampshades and candles. The promises are tokens of gratitude that the devotees hand over when they make a request or when it has been granted to them. The most common materializations of the payment of promises are money (dollars), hair braids, music, food, the use of singular outfits and the pilgrimage on one’s knees. The requests to deities materialize in the form of figurines made of clay, stone or wood, which represent the requested favor: sons or daughters, parts of the body, houses, trucks and other goods. [↩]
17. Bernardino de Sahagún, Augurios y abusiones, 1969. [↩]
18. Alicia Barabas and Miguel A. Bartolomé, Configuraciones étnicas en Oaxaca. Perspectivas etnográficas para las autonomías, 1999. [↩]
19. Michael Taussig, “The wild woman of the Forest becomes our Lady of Remedios”, in Shamanism, A study in Colonialism and Terror and Healing and the Wild Man, 1987. [↩]
20. Alicia Barabas, “La aparición de la virgen en Oaxaca, México. Una interpretación sobre la multivocalidad del milagro”, in Thule, Revista di studi americanistchi, 1997. [↩]
21. Both in the story of the apparition of the Virgin of Juquila and in most of the other known apparitions, the sacred beings are withdrawn or stolen from the place to which they belong, but they miraculously come back to it and, becoming heavy, they make it impossible to be moved again. Certain accounts in Tejalapam note that “the Virgin had moved herself back to the well, where she had chosen her place, although only true believers can see her. She asks us to take care of her and to build her house by the well”. This is why, since the beginning, they had the intention to build a chapel in the space made sacred by her apparition. [↩]
22. Eleazar Jiménez, “No hubo aparición; la imagen: burda réplica” and “Por qué la Iglesia dije que no…”, in El Imparcial, December, 1995. [↩]
23. The new chapel built upon the well, on the leveled hill, is a vast work, with a cost over 90,000 pesos (11,000 dollars). It was planned and partly financed and executed by the Secretaría de Obras Públicas of Oaxaca, together with the members of the Committee, who financed materials and manpower with a fund of 60,000 pesos, obtained from alms. [↩]
24. Officially, it is celebrated on November 15, day of the first apparition, but it is also celebrated as the “daughter” of the Virgin of Juquila, on December 8. [↩]
25. Alicia Barabas and Miguel A. Bartolomé, op.cit., 1999. [↩]
26. Victor Turner, O Processo Ritual, estrutura e antiestrutura, 1974. [↩]