The Art of Private Devotion Retablo Painting of Mexico Inter Cultura 1991

Images of Popular Devotion: The Ex-voto Paintings of Mexican Immigrants

The content of contemporary ex-voto paintings in Mexico reflects specific sociocultural shifts taking place during the last one-half of the twentieth century.

In retentiveness of Distinguished Professor David L. Chicken, University of New Mexico

The rituals of pop religion in United mexican states are unlike from those of the organized religion prescribed by the clergy. Even so, they are also unlike from the dissident religious practices that oppose the cultural tradition of the dominant social elite. In popular, or folk, religion people tin accept a "direct" relationship with God or detail saints without needing a clerical intermediary. Every bit Eline L. Argaz and Michele M. Beltran fence, popular religiosity in Mexican society "recognizes no perceptible barriers between natural and supernatural, to which all else is subordinated: life, activities involving the natural globe, and economic and political problems."1 In the Mexican context, the basis of pop religion largely includes votive offerings of gratitude after surviving a terrible event or status. For instance, despite its secular elements, the ex-voto (literally, "from a vow") tradition in United mexican states has continued to enable a "direct" human relationship with the divine and to deconstruct the dogma of the church building.

During the twentieth century, a discernable shift took place in the content of ex-voto paintings, which illustrated the convergence of pop religion with the ramifications of edge-crossing among Mexican immigrants. The practical religious function of these forms of artwork has evolved in Mexican club, partially because of the immigration phenomenon in the last half of the twentieth century. While ex-voto paintings are concrete objects that course a channel between the divine and the people, they are also important documents that record this social drama. These painting provide historical, ethnographical, and literary show of socio-economic circumstances of the Mexican–United States immigration from the perspective of the immigrants.two

Labor immigration from Mexico to the United States has a long historical tradition dating from the tardily nineteenth century into the present.three However, it has intensified greatly over the final 3 decades. While global economic system has grown to integrate many countries in the aegis of neoliberal politics, immigration policies have been formulated according to the needs of the developed countries.4 In the Us today, the undocumented immigrants are far from a peripheral presence in either social or economic terms. Not merely do those immigrants contribute to the United States' economy as cheap labor and the source of accumulated surplus, their purchasing ability sustains millions of dollars.5

For the immigrants from United mexican states, making the dangerous crossing of the Us border is non ever a matter of choice. Intense poverty, due to Mexican economic weather, compels many poor workers to seek work "el otro lado," on the other side of the border. Without rural credit, training and reeducation programs, or health, nutrition, and family planning aid in their local environs, many will continue to assemble in United mexican states's northern states to seek low-paying, dead-end jobs and/or look for piece of work in the United States, taking life threatening risks while crossing the border. As a consequence of United States border security policies, more immigrants are dying in the deserts of the Southwest while attempting to cross the border. Many fall prey to people smugglers, which is now the second profitable business after drug trafficking across the border.6 If they tin go far to the other side of the "great tortilla mantle," they experience racism, xenophobia, discrimination, and various hostilities on a 24-hour interval-to-twenty-four hours ground. Most Mexican immigrants who come up to the U.s. have piffling or no education, limited employment skills, and lack the knowledge of how things function in the United States.7

Living a clandestine life, those immigrants cannot practice their legal rights and seek legal or medical help. They cannot openly protestation low wages, poor working weather condition, violations of labor laws, or sexual assaults. Existence deprived of economical and social power, and living with the threat of displacement over their heads, when immigrants cannot seek healthcare or legal aid they invoke divine powers for assist when they are sick, accept legal problems, are in life-threatening situations, and so forth. For many of them, religion serves as the but lifeline for their survival. They profoundly believe that God and the saints play a major role in their daily lives; therefore, they do non consider ex-votos an archaic superstitious beliefs, but a reasonable act. Votive objects are a role of the migrant's daily life, aiding him or her in surviving terrible economic and social conditions, thus providing a spiritual connexion and cultural anchor to the homeland and customs they left behind. Today, shrines throughout Mexico contain endless votive offerings hung or pinned near the epitome of a deity or a divine object, and this tradition is still very much alive in popular civilization practices.

When a practicing Catholic needs divine aid, he or she can make a straight appeal to Christ or an indirect appeal through the Virgin Mary and other saints. In Cosmic Europe, Latin America, and some parts of the The states, where there is a significant Latin American immigrant population, this religious plea is often combined with a folk custom in which the petitioner vows to offer certain gifts and comport out certain rituals.8 Those gifts can accept the form of any material votive object such as paintings, metal carvings or sculptures, coin, flowers, candles, jewelry, and ribbons.nine When a gift is offered, the vow should be completed by making the pilgrimage to the shrine to bring the gift to Christ or the appropriate saint. Ex-voto is a Latin term that means "from a vow," suggesting that those objects are votive gifts in return of divine favors.10 At the shrine or sacred place, the saint or divine existence whose assistance 1 seeks is evoked and a vow is spoken. When the prayer is granted, the votive object (the ex-voto painting) is offered to the spirit of the shrine as a token of the vow and is hung at that place for all to see. In the language of ex-voto painting, the representation of the supernatural, the human existence with worldly troubles, and the text come up together to depict the quest of the faithful to speak to the divine without interrupting the hierarchies between them.

In Europe, votive paintings and sculptures traditionally focused on saints and their relics, and in the years post-obit the Conquest in the Americas, the relics remained largely in newly established cathedrals and monasteries where only a few members of the elite were exposed to them.eleven In the nineteenth century, with the dissemination of popular organized religion, the need for objects of pop devotion was not met by saints' relics, just by sacred images of Christ and the Virgin.12 Frequently made by untrained local artists, who did non have access to European masters' drawings or prints, these images were considered miraculous throughout local folk religiosity.

During the nineteenth century, after its independence from Spain in 1821, more than thirty changes to the government took place in United mexican states. This instability led to attempts by reform governments to limit the Roman Catholic Church's power. Popular religiosity emerged when the shift of power of the political, likewise equally theological, elite occurred under thriving industrial commercialism.13 Consequently, ex-voto paintings were embraced by the peasant-turned-proletariat class as a ways for promise to survive and to pay back the divine favor. In well-nigh instances, the images offered formed the just realm visible for the faithful who sought the assist of a transcendent power in a painfully deprived globe. Experiences of concrete pain, such as health problems, accidents of every kind, mental low, surgical operations, also as less tormenting troubles such as escaping the military machine draft, acquiring a automobile or a house, finding a job, and passing through a exam, could be the bailiwick of an ex-voto painting.

The ex-voto paintings attempt to contextualize the devotional acts of thanksgiving through both graphic rendition and the narrative accounts. They utilise both pictorial and verbal language with a double narrative organized effectually the picture plane. Although constructed equally an artistic tradition, complex literary and narrative elements make the ex-voto tradition a unique and accurate Mexican literary practice as well. Moreover, the "act of reading" the ex-voto in the shrine by other devotees is a spiritual experience, and this kind of experience affirms and augments a sense of belonging within the community.

In those extraordinary paintings, different pictorial effects are sought and achieved by different classes. For example, up to the eighteenth century, the ex-votos fabricated for the wealthy were concerned with ostentatious appearances. When the practice became popular among the masses in the nineteenth century, it became important to emphasize the unproblematic nature of the practice in boggling weather, and the picture airplane was depicted with more modest elements. In general, the image of the invoked saint appears in the upper section, the activity or miracle is portrayed in the middle section, and the written text can be found in the lower section. In some twentieth-century pieces, depending on the artist's oeuvre, the text might shift to the middle, to the corner, or to the upper part of the ex-voto. Regardless of its position in the piece of work, the text describes the dangerous situation that was overcome and briefly gives thanks to the saint. About importantly, the text serves as a testimony to the reality of a specific fourth dimension and place, equally well as the private life of the person who commissioned the ex-voto.

As anthropologists Durand and Massey document, for the last iii decades, the majority of ex-votos in Central Mexico's shrines take been those of Mexican immigrants, and the most frequent subject is the dangers of edge crossings.14 In their experience of crossing the border, immigrants encounter considerable risks and various dangers that outcome from the measures taken by authorities and lawmakers to restrict those crossings. Ex-voto paintings are not merely extraordinary objects vowed, commissioned, and offered by people in need of divine assistance crossing the border, they also provide more than complete and tangible data on the immigration phenomenon past being a cloth reflection of emotions, fears, hopes, dreams, and gratitude of those people who migrate dorsum and forth.

Typical of such ex-votos is that of Manuel Chávez (come across image above). Three young men are trying to cantankerous the desert nether the nighttime sky, while far away nether the epitome of the Virgin of San Juan, a miniscule black figure prays and makes a vow in the groundwork. The text reads: "I give thank you to the Holy Virgin for having saved us from dying of hunger and thirst in the desert close to California. We were lost for three days in the year of 1947. Manuel Chávez November 1989."15 Every bit conveyed by the text, the incident took identify forty-two years before this ex-voto was painted. There could be several explanations for this kind of delay. Some illegal immigrants settle in the United States for many years in order to not take the chance of an illegal crossing, and also, in many cases, to wait for an opportunity that volition grant them legal rights and eventual citizenship. In such conditions, if one does not have a family member who could make the pilgrimage in the name of the immigrant and place the ex-voto in the shrine where the vow was made, the act could exist delayed many years.

Earlier the twentieth century, ex-voto paintings were about always anonymous, peradventure because they were simply trade objects and were non conceived of as works of art; their creators were simply doing their jobs. But, about importantly, these works were executed for the commemoration of a miracle, not for the glorification of the artist in the Eurocentric sense. Until the mid-twentieth century in Mexico, retables (run across note below) and ex-voto paintings were considered inferior to the European examples of "art"; therefore, many heart-class and upper-course Mexicans did not remember they were worthy of collecting or preserving.16 Thanks to the Mexican Modernists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who nerveless and exhibited ex-voto paintings in their home, an appreciation for them equally an art form was fostered in the mid-twentieth century. Since then, these paintings take become favorable objects for collectors of Mexican folk art and are bought and sold in art galleries, tourist shops, and on the Internet. As a result of this demand from a "different" marketplace, some artists have started producing ex-votos directly for the collectors and have begun signing their names.

During the late 1950s, ex-votos beginning entered the market to be bought and sold in the galleries in Mexico and the United States. In the 1960s, they attracted the attention of anthropologists and art historians. Soon after Gloria F. Giffords canonized these equally works of fine art, they took their place among exhibitions of colonial and folk art in Mexico. Mainly, as a result of this demand from the fine art market place – a different market place for which they traditionally produced these works – the painters of ex-votos began signing their names and bold authorship. Today, in Mexico, due to the like shooting fish in a barrel access to technologies of mechanical and electronic reproduction, votive offerings come in many different forms and through many different mediums: photographs and copies of passports, green cards, and diplomas embrace the walls of the sanctuaries. Fifty-fifty the ex-voto paintings themselves are sometimes fabricated in a different medium; if copper plating cannot be used, which is a costly and rare, though desired, material, the artists come up up with artistic solutions, such as embroidering the ex-voto on a piece of material or painting it on glass or plastic.

Ex-voto paintings can also be appreciated as special thanksgivings to the divine figure believed to accept helped heal or rescue the immigrant(s) from physical impairment or certain death, as well as the hardships of daily life. For the undocumented immigrants, crossing the border into the United States is a test of their concrete endurance, their graphic symbol, ingenuity, desperation, as well as their faith. These paintings serve as fabric reflections of the emotions, fears, hopes, dreams, and gratitude of unprivileged people; thus, they are also documents that record social and economic changes in a society, such equally the complex phenomenon of immigration. The practice itself augments the sense of belonging within the community and strengthens the cultural networks, which is crucial for the survival of the immigrants against dire socio-economic circumstances. Although the aesthetic manifestations and forms of votive offerings have changed over time in Mexico, the tradition has remained a popular devotional practice for the faithful that deconstructs the dogma of the clergy and persists in establishing a "direct" relationship with the divine in times of desperation. The painful process of immigration produces poignant visual manifestations that address and give attending to the diverse dimensions of dislocation and oppression. Thus, the production and reception of ex-voto paintings further testifies to the contemporary relevance and convergence of popular art and pop religion through their date of transnational social processes.

1. Eline L. Argaz and Michele 1000. Beltran, "Powerful Images: Mexican Ex-Votos" in Art and Faith in Mexico: The Nineteenth-Century Retablo Tradition, eds. Elizabeth Netto Calil Zarur and Charles Muir Lovell (New Mexico: Academy of Albuquerque Press, 2001), 71. [↩]
2. See Jorge Durand and Douglas South. Massey, Miracles on the Border: Retablos of Mexican Migrants to the The states (Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1995). [↩]
3. Meet John 1000. Hart,Border Crossings: Mexican and Mexican-American Workers(Delaware: SR Books, 1998). [↩]
4. See Jorge Durand, Douglas Due south. Massey, and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond Fume and Mirrors: Mexican Clearing in and Age of Economical Integration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002). [↩]
5. Meet Elizabeth Fussel, "Sources of Mexico's Migration Stream: Rural, Urban, and Border Migrants to the United States," Social Forces 82, no. 3 (2004): 937-967; and Walter A. Ewing, "From Denial to Acceptance: Effectively Regulating Clearing to the Usa," Immigration Policy in Focus 3, no. five (2004). [↩]
6. See Jacqueline Hagan, et al. "Death at the Border," International Migration Review 33, no. ii (1999): 430-454; Ken Ellingwood, Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S — United mexican states Border (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004); and Wayne A. Cornelius, "Death at the Edge: The Efficacy and Unintended Consequences of U.S. Clearing Control Policy, 1993-2000," Population and Evolution Review 27, no. 4 (2001): 661-685. [↩]
7. See Oscar J. Martinez, U.S- United mexican states Borderlands: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Delaware: Scholarly Resource Inc., 1996) and Border People: Life and society in the U.S — Mexico Borderlands (Arizona: University of Arizona Printing, 1994); and Pablo Vila, Ethnography on the Border (Minnesota: Academy of Minnesota Printing, 2003). [↩]
8. In Southern Arizona and Mexico this vow is known every bit manda, pregnant "offer," or "proposal," and could be idea of as an understanding or contract betwixt a person and a celestial being. See Eileen Octavec, Answered Prayers: Miracles and Milagros Forth the Border (Arizona: The University of Arizona Press, 1995), 28. [↩]
9. The term milagros is used in this regard, and tin refer to nigh any object used as a testimony to a miracle, including cut or cast metal body parts, locks of hair, x-ray plates, pictures (recently passports), and hospital identification bracelets. [↩]
10. Durand and Massey, Miracles on the Border, 39. [↩]
11. The first votive paintings in New Spain are thought to have been made past the elite and take been kept in sanctuaries like Tepayac or Remedios in United mexican states Metropolis. See Argaz and Beltran, 71. [↩]
12. Argaz and Beltran, 71. [↩]
13. See Solange Alberro, "Retablos and Popular Religion in the Nineteenth-Century Mexico" in Fine art and Religion in Mexico: The Nineteenth-Century Retablo Tradition, eds. Elizabeth Netto Calil Zarur and Charles Muir Lovell (New Mexico: University of Albuquerque Printing, 2001); and Gloria F. Giffords, "The Art of Individual Devotion: Retablo Painting of United mexican states" in Art of Private Devotion: Retablo Painting of Mexico, ed. Elizabeth Mills (Texas: Inter-cultural and the Meadows Museum, 1991), 14. [↩]
14. Examples of these shrines are those of el Señor de Villaseca, or the black Christ, on the outskirts of Guadalajara; el Señor de la Conquista (Lord of the Conquest), also known every bit el Señor de los Milagros (Our Lord of Miracles) in San Felipe, Guanajuato; and La Virgen de San Juan de los Lagos (the Virgin of Saint John of the Lakes) in San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco. See Durand and Massey, Miracles on the Border, 46-47. [↩]
15. Translation past author. [↩]
16. Gloria F. Giffords, Mexican Folk Retablos, revised ed. (New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), iv. Ex-votos, although they share the fashion and medium with retablos, serve different purposes. The term retablo comes from the Latin retro-tabuala, which means "behind the change table." According to Gloria F. Giffords, the origins of the retablo can be traced to the early on Christian reliquary boxes that were placed at the rear of the altar, and afterward, in the thirteenth century, to the chantry frontals and apse murals in Spain. See Giffords, "The Art of Private Devotion," 14. [↩]

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