cent moon, held aloft by an angel with eagle wings. A gold mandorla – an almond-shaped aureola – with sun-like rays emanates from her entire body. Mendoza’s halos resemble the mandorla of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She thereby frames the undocumented immigrants as a salvific force for good. In “Aureola Super Auream: Crowns and Related Symbols of Special Distinction for Saints in Late Gothic and Renaissance Iconography,” Hall and Uhr write that “the aureole is an exceptional award given only to the souls of virgins, martyrs, and doctors at the time of death” (568). Mendoza’s installation sacralizes undocumented immigrants for their self-sacrificing works in America during the pandemic: “teaching our kids, cooking our to-go orders and singing for us at our last public gatherings” (Mendoza). But the Virgin de Guadalupe has specific historical and political significance beyond her association with spiritual and moral goodness. Notwithstanding the miraculous origins ascribed to the image, scholars have argued that it contains evidence of indigenous influence. The eagle wings on the angel, for example, draw on iconography of the Aztecs, the indigenous civilization who controlled northern Mexico prior to the Spanish conquest a decade prior to the tilma’s appearance. Jeanette Favrot Peterson argues that the apparition story of the Virgin of Guadalupe was an invention of the Spanish colonial church intended to convert native people to Catholicism. The Aztec imagery, as well as the Virgin’s olive skin and straight black hair, would prove a symbol with great significance to Mexicans of Spanish and indigenous descent. Whether her image was produced in the service of conquest or not, the Virgin de Guadalupe was soon appropriated to revolutionary causes. Her appearance in Mexico was interpreted to mean she “had chosen Mexico as her ‘favored city’ and Mexicans as the elect” (Peterson 42). This idea was initially up by seventeenth century criollos, Mexican-born Spaniards who resented being treated as second-class citizens by Spanish occupiers born in Europe. The Virgin de Guadalupe’s appearance in Mexico, they believed, proved that criollos, and not the Spanish Crown, were the “rightful heirs of the conquest” (43). Hence, in the lead-up to the Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821), Father Miguel Hidalgo, a criollo leader, sought popular support by parading the image of the Virgin de Guadalupe on his march to Mexico City to cast out the colonial authorities (45). Later, indigenous Mexicans would come to see the Virgin as looking favorably on their cause. During the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), rebel leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata used her image to build popular resistance against unequal wealth distribution and the confiscation of indigenous lands by the wealthy (45). Banners of the Virgin of Guadalupe have since been used by Mexicans in social and political movements. Inevitably, she came to hold resonance for Mexican laborers in the United States, too. Cesar Chavez, the leader of the United Farmworkers 16
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