Crushing indigenous religions, Our Lady of Guadalupe & the conquest of Mexico. Dallas Morning News ommissions.
Churches built on locations of previous indigenous worship of their Gods. Maybe the Catholic church should rename it, "Our Lady La Malinche."
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The Massacre of the Nobels at the Festival of Toxcatl.
Dallas Morning News articles with their usual ommissions.
The story about the Virgin of Guadalupe is the invention of a myth some time after the conquest of Mexico to crush an indigenous religion and managed an oppressed people.
Dallas Morning News, 12/10/2023 .”Dallas’ Cathedral Guadalupe to celebrate its national shrine status.”
The church was granted a status of a shrine. The Catholic church is on a counter-offensive against historians reporting that the real story was about crushing indigenous religion as part of dominating a conquered people.
Dallas Morning News, 12/12/2023 , ”Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe celebrations: What to know about the 2023 event.”
The following is reporting on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe ommiting the how this is about the suppression of the story of the conquest of Mexico.
Dallas Morning News, 2024/12/10, ”What to know about the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.”
Other propaganda.
Dallas Morning News, `12/10/2022, ”Virgin of Guadalupe mural in Oak Cliff is a symbol of Hispanic culture and faith.”
The real story about Our Lady of Guadalupe
To pacify the conquered peoples, a very useful “miracle” occured to place a Christian church over an ancient indigenous holy site, towards the purpose of destroying the indigenous religion and subjugating the minds of the conquered peoples.
Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Art Journal, Vol. 51, No. 4, 1992, “The Virgin of Guadalupe: Symbol of Conquest or Liberation?”
About where Juan Diego had these visions. It was about putting Catholic shrines where indigenous religious sites were.
By no coincidence, Tepeyac had served as an ancient pilgrimage site dedicated to several pre-Columbian earth deities, who were referred to in the early colonial period by the generic name of Tonantzin, meaning "our revered mother." In the ambitious program to evangelize all native peoples after the conquest, Catholic shrines were superimposed on pre-Hispanic temples. Given its traditional significance, Tepeyac would have been a logical place for a chapel or hermitage (ermita), probably dedicated to one of the many cults of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception imported by the Spaniards. While scanty documentation has obscured the origins of the Guadalupe devotion, it is likely that neither a shrine specifically dedicated to the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe nor an image of her existed prior to 1555-56. [Boldface added.]
https://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art111/readings/virgin%20of%20guadalupe.pdf
Rebecca Janzen, Univ. of South Carolina, 6/14/2021, “‘Lady of Guadalupe’ avoids tough truths about the Catholic Church and Indigenous genocide.”
From the subtitle, “… ultimately it sanitizes the real-life brutality of the Church toward Indigenous peoples in the 16th century.”
In terms of the historical record, the film simplifies the role of the Catholic Church in Spain’s brutal colonization of Mexico’s Indigenous peoples in the 16th century. When it portrays the colonial period, it shows priests using the apparition of the Virgin Mary to an Indigenous man as a way to encourage conversions to Catholicism. But it leaves out the ways in which the Spanish colonizers destroyed symbols of Indigenous religions, killed local political leaders and forcibly kidnapped children and converted them to Christianity.
https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2021/06/06_conversation_lady_guadalupe.php
When Latinos worship at Our Lady of Guadalupe, they are worshiping their own ancestors’ butchery, rape and enslavement.
The brutal conquest of Mesoamerica
Bartolome’ De La Casas, “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,” translation and editioln, Penguin Classics.
From the very first day they set foot in New Spain, which was the eighteenth of April 1518, until 1530, there was no respite whatever in the carnage and mayhem provoked by these cruel and bloodthirsty Spaniards.54 Throughout those twelve long 43 years they pillaged their way over an area of some four hundred and fifty leagues around Mexico City, putting those who lived there to the sword and committing all manner of barbarities against them. This area had originally boasted four or five great kingdoms, each of them as large as Spain and a good deal better favoured, and each of them inhabited, as the Almighty had ordained, by more people than the combined population of Toledo, Seville, Valladolid, Saragossa and Barcelona, even when these Spanish cities were at the very height of their fortunes. The whole area veritably teemed with humanity, even though if one were to walk its frontier one would travel over one thousand eight hundred leagues. Yet, over the twelve years of which we are speaking, and during the course of what they term the ‘conquest’ (which is really and truly nothing other than a series of violent incursions into the territory by these cruel tyrants: 55 incursions condemned not only in the eyes of God but also by law, and in practice far worse than the assaults mounted by the Turk in his attempt to destroy Christendom), the Europeans have, throughout these four hundred and fifty leagues, butchered, burned alive or otherwise done to death four million souls, young and old alike, men, women and children. And this figure does not include those killed and still being killed today as a direct result of the tyrannical slavery and the oppression and privation its victims are forced to endure on a daily basis.
They strung her up and I saw with my own eyes how the Spaniards burned countless local inhabitants alive or hacked them to pieces, or devised novel ways of torturing them to death, enslaving those they took alive. Indeed, they invented so many new methods of murder that it would be quite impossible to set them all down on paper and, however hard one tried to chronicle them, one could probably never list a thousandth part of what actually took place. All I can say is that I know it to be an incontrovertible fact and do here so swear before Almighty God, that the local peoples never gave the Spanish any cause whatever for the injury and injustice that was done to them in these campaigns.
They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual's head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers' breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders into a river, shouting: ‘Wriggle, you little perisher.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholula_massacre
The newly elected president of Mexico has asked for an apology.
The Guardian, “3/6/2019,” “Spain hits back at Mexico in row over colonial rights abuses.”
In a video filmed at the ruins of the indigenous city of Comalcalco, in southern Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador called on Spain and the Vatican to recognise the rights violations committed during the conquest, led by Hernán Cortés. The video was posted on the president’s social media accounts.
“There were massacres and oppression. The so-called conquest was waged with the sword and the cross. They built their churches on top of the [indigenous] temples,” he said. “The time has come to reconcile. But let us ask forgiveness first.”
His indigenous mistress, La Malinche, is still seen as a traitorous figure – with her name forming the epithet malinchista, someone who prefers the foreign to the domestic.
Considering the Evidence: The Conquest of Mexico Through Aztec Eyes.
https://pohlmanpavilion.weebly.com/cte-the-conquest-of-mexico-through-aztec-eyes.html
Inga Clendinnen, “Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty”: Cortes and the Conquest of Mexico.”
https://latinamericanstudies.org/~latinam2/cortes/cortes-cruelty.pdf
Rationalizations and lack of logic.
Just as there is holocaust denial, people who argue that the Confederacy wasn’t about slavery, there is a lot of loopy evasions and justifications for the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica and to make Our Lady of Guadalupe some sacred thing.
A lot of rationalizations for the conquest of Mexico rely some practices of the Aztecs. They were only one of several peoples in Mesoamerica. Further, these Spaniards who were conquering Mexico also were running the horror know as the Spanish Inquisition.
The Christians in Europe would be burning each other at the stake alive for either heresy or witchcraft for centuries later, but the Aztecs are held to have been morally saved by the Spaniards.
There is a log of deluded empty headed silliness involved in trying to redeem the whole Our Lady of Guadalupe thing. They like to argue that Our Lady of Guadalupe was some sort of preservation of indigenous culture when it was the extinction of the indigenous religion.
The extinction of the indigenous religion as part of the conquest and subjugation of Mesoamericans is, without any logic, converted into syncretism or some continuation of pre-conquest religion. If someone claimed the Virgin Mary was some syncretism with Hera, it would be considered a laughable, but not with Our Lady of Guadalupe and the indigenous gods. When colonization of the mind continues for centuries it embeds itself very deeply.
Chicagotlan, “Our Lady of Guadalup.”
There are efforts to sugar coat the crushing indigenous culture, by making extinction of Mesoamerican religion, not an extinction with just a total lack of logic.
For some, La Virgen de Guadalupe was a tool used by the Spanish and the Catholic Church to further their project of religious conversion, colonization and genocide. For others, Tonantzin Guadalupe was a symbol of Indigenous resistance and continuity of Indigenous beliefs in the face of brutal colonization.
https://www.chicagotlan.org/guadalupe
The subjugation of women.
Miren Neyra Alcantara, ““In Between The Virgin and The Whore”: Decentering the Cultural Paradigms of The Virgin of Guadalupe and La Malinche in Four Writers.”
There are several oppressive cultural paradigms in Mexican culture that try to subject women. These cultural formulations are forged through historical events, in this case the colonization of Mexico. The two of the most important feminine archetypes in Mexico are “The Virgin of Guadalupe” and “La Malinche”. Both effigies of femininity are fundamentally anchored in catholicism and colonization. The Spanish conquest of the Americas and its violent colonization is due to the expansion of Catholicism, thus in Mexico, colonialism and religion are intimately intertwined. The Virgin of Guadalupe icon is born out of the catholic church and it is profoundly rooted in colonialism. On the other hand, La Malinche represents the indigenous woman Malitzin that was sold as a slave during the conquest. The two paradigms work in a separate but coordinated way to create oppressive boundaries for Mexican and Chicana women. [Boldface added.]
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1081&context=ureca
Other genocidal sanitations by the Roman Catholic Church
Junipero Serra who was made a saint by the pope in 2015.
