Date of Award

6-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Art

First Advisor

Khristin Landry

Second Advisor

Caroline Paganussi

Third Advisor

Sara Berkowitz

Abstract

This thesis suggests that the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, during the Colonial Period, provided the diverse population of colonial New Spain (and, in particular, Mexico City/Tenochtitlán) with an image that functioned to unify even some of the most seemingly disparate belief systems, those of Christian Spaniards and Indigenous Nahuatl traditions. More specifically, this thesis argues that this unification was achieved because the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the 16th and 17th centuries was likely understood as representing a divine pregnant woman to many colonial viewers—a state that bound viewers, both Spanish and Indigenous alike, to shared thoughts about what pregnancy meant. Pregnancy is itself a liminal state of change and transformation, and the Spanish would have connected the liminality of the Virgin’s pregnancy with the significance of the Incarnation. The Mexica worldview was rooted in core beliefs of duality and the power of states of transition and flux, which would have been mirrored in the liminality of pregnancy. This thesis argues that the liminality of the state of pregnancy can be understood to connect the tumultuous state of flux and change following the Spanish conquest of the Mexica, the Christian theological concept of the Incarnation, and Mexica concepts of ambiguity and transformation which were linked with sacred acts. The thesis will do so by exploring how both cultures understood pregnancy, from conception to childbirth, as well as analyzing contemporary images of pregnancy from the early modern period. The goal of this thesis is to provide a new lens for interpretation for an image that has been studied for centuries using the cultural and theological understanding of pregnancy from both the colonial Spanish and the Indigenous Mexica societies.

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