La Virgen de Guadalupe: Photographing a Cultural Icon with Delilah Montoya and Katie Doyle
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[00:00:00] Delilah Montoya: You know, like, when something really major happens, like a car wreck, like say, on a road, then all of a sudden all the cars stop, or they slow down, where that car wreck was. And I think the Virgen was, is kind of like that. There was something really major that happened in terms of what Juan Diego was doing.
And in terms of all of the temples that were being pulled down and the books that were burning; lives were changing, and I think with the Guadalupe is a way where we can slow down. She allows us to slow down and still remember.
[00:00:39] Emily Withnall: Bienvenidos! This is ‘Encounter Culture’ from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. I’m your host, and editor of El Palacio Magazine, Emily Withnall.
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[00:00:56] Emily: Like every New Mexican. I grew up surrounded by the Virgin of Guadalupe. She graced the hoods of cars, matchbook boxes, stamped tin earrings, jean and leather jackets, plush blankets, murals, and more. She was also tattooed on skin: backs mainly, but also calves and forearms and biceps. I knew of her as the Chicano representation of the Virgin Mary, but until I read Gloria Anzaldúa’s book, Borderlands/La Frontera, in college, I didn’t have a firm grasp on where the Virgin of Guadalupe had come from.
Though her origins have been written about extensively from many different angles, and although a large number of different groups claim her as their own, Anzaldúa helped to give me a starting place for making sense of her cultural significance. She writes, “My family, like most Chicanos, did not practice Roman Catholicism, but a folk Catholicism with many pagan elements.”
La Virgen de Guadalupe’s Indian name is “Coatlaxopeuh.” She is the central deity connecting us to our Indian ancestry. Anzaldúa goes on to recount the indigenous fertility goddess, Coatlaxopeuh, and the ways the male-dominated Aztec culture then disempowered her by assigning her monstrous attributes. Then, when the Spanish arrived in Mexico, Coatlaxopeuh is once again transformed: her monstrous attributes reassigned to the devil, and her benevolent attributes absorbed into the Virgen de Guadalupe.
As Anzaldúa writes, “The Virgin of Guadalupe first appears to the Nahua man, Juan Diego, in 1531. Debate about this history and the layers of colonization inherent to the Virgin of Guadalupe’s origins, have been accompanied by centuries of religious devotion.”
For many, her origins encapsulate her role as a protector of all, and particularly those who are most vulnerable and most marginalized. Chicana artist Delilah Montoya captures this sentiment powerfully in her mixed media photo mural, “La Guadalupana.”
Central to the mural, which is now on view at the New Mexico Museum of Art’s Vladem Contemporary, is a black-and-white photograph of the Virgin of Guadalupe as tattooed on the back of Felix Martinez. In the photograph, Felix is wearing a jumpsuit that is unbuttoned on top so he can show his back, and he is handcuffed.
In my conversation with Delilah and Vladem Contemporary curator, Katie Doyle, we discussed Delilah’s artistic process in creating “La Guadalupana,” and the deep cultural significance of the Virgin of Guadalupe in New Mexico, and beyond.
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[00:04:21] Emily: Welcome to Encounter Culture. Thank you both for being here with me. To get us started, can you both tell us what your name is and what you do?
[00:04:31] Delilah: Okay, sure. Yeah. Yeah. My name is Delilah Montoya, and I am a Chicana artist that has been working with imagery that we find in New Mexico, for, gosh, ever since I was about 16, I would say.
So as a Chicano artist, I had to kind of blaze my own trail, because nobody believed there was such a thing back in the seventies, eighties. Yeah. It was like, Nope, nope. There’s no Chicanos. Nope. And Art? No Chicano Art.
Emily: Chicanos aren’t real!
(laughter)
[00:05:07] Delilah: (laughing) What is that? But yeah, so it’s something I’ve been kinda like working with, in terms of creating the aesthetic. I was really clear about that when I was 16, 17, 18: that this is what I wanted, and this is what I wanted to be a part of. I wanted to create artwork that my own community would best understand. Because a lot of the art that you saw, you know, like in museums and at school? It never reflected what it is that I understood best. And what I wanted to do is just make that visual language more palatable for us. And I wasn’t really interested whether anybody else “got” it. They didn’t have to get it.
Emily: They don’t need to.
Delilah: Yeah. You don’t need to. I, there was, there was a particular community that I wanted to speak to.
[00:06:01] Katie Doyle: Hi. Hello. Thank you for having us. My name is Katie Doyle. I’m the assistant curator at the New Mexico Museum of Art, where Delilah’s work is currently up.
And I think, just to kind of echo some of Delilah’s sentiments, I also knew that I wanted to be in the art universe, in the creative field, from a very young age, and it took me a while to kind of find that path. I had the certainty that I knew what I loved, but I didn’t know how I wanted to love it yet. And over a number of decades, I found that my place is a place of elevating the voices of other artists. And that’s kind of what led me into curatorial work, and how I’m here sitting with you in this room, in Santa Fe.
[00:06:53] Emily: Thank you both. Delilah, I want to kind of go back to something you just said about starting to make Chicano art at age 16 or so. Did you start making art at 16 and what led you to it?
[00:07:07] Delilah: Oh, that’s a great question. I can’t really tell you when I started.
Emily: Okay.
Delilah: I always made art.
Emily: Yeah? Okay.
Delilah: You know, that was something that is the way that I kind of understood the world around me. I mean, I remember at a really young age in grade school, they were telling me I had to use a brown crayon to draw a tree, and I’m like, trees are not brown.
(laughter)
Trees are this color, trees are not brown, and, and it was always that sort of thing where just—I found the better part of myself when I was alone drawing.
Emily: Mm-hmm.
Delilah: Making work, looking at colors, watching color. I used to love to just watch the slow change of colors in the skies and, you know, things like that.
And my mother was very good at just encouraging me. She saw this as being something really admirable and she wanted to see me do more of it. And she always encouraged me to just kind of find that part of myself.
[00:08:12] Katie: I’ve been working on a separate project at the museum recently, but there’s a, a quote from one of the artists; he talks about how people are called to make. And, the “soul connection” is what he says, specifically of feeling like this is just, it’s part of you, right? The drive and the need to create things and create them the way that you see them and visualize them in your mind’s eye.
Delilah: It’s just, there’s something there.
Katie: Yeah, there’s something there. It kind of like (rising intonation verbalization), it rose to the top of my little brain filing cabinet as you were speaking: the soul connection.
[00:08:49] Delilah: But you know, the thing is, the hard part—there’s two parts that are really hard.
One is to kind of figure out what that voice is: trying to understand what it is that you want to say, and what really impacts, your lived experiences the most. And the other part is really simple, but it’s really difficult: is, how do you make work for the rest of your life? And that’s something I want to do. I want to make artwork for the rest of my life. Simple.
But then as I started, you know, engaging into the art making and such, I found out that it’s really, really difficult.
[00:09:29] Emily: Simple, but not easy. (laughter)
[00:09:32] Delilah: Not easy. Everything gets in the way.
[00:09:35] Emily: So, when you say it’s difficult to do that, do you just mean that there’s not time, like there’s so much other stuff happening in your life?
[00:09:42] Delilah: Well, life happens, right?
Emily: Yeah. Okay.
Delilah: You know, so there’s distraction upon distraction and, you know—there’s having a daughter at 18, right?
That was a real: How do I keep making the work?
Emily: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:00] Delilah: I remember just watching her in her crib and just starting to draw her and I would just draw her and draw her and draw her. And I think that was like one of the ways that I was able to kind of keep it moving. But then the other part was, I was on welfare and having to go through the system ’cause I was a single mom, and they didn’t want me to take any art classes.
Emily: Oh, wow.
[00:10:25] Delilah: And they just came right out and told me, “We’re not gonna pay for that.” But I remember just saying: I have a right, and if I want to make art, I’m gonna make art. That’s what I’m gonna do. And of course, I took things like commercial art and commercial photography and all of those things, which was really helpful, because I could keep making art.
Emily: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:44] Delilah: Yeah. Mm-hmm. But yeah, they couldn’t stop me. They thought they could, but they couldn’t stop me.
(laughter)
But the other thing too, I learned—It was during the time of the Civil Rights movements, and it was at that point in time, there was a little place called the Chicano Awareness Center that was in Omaha, Nebraska, which I really, early on, when I was like 16—15, 16, I started going there.
And really locked into the Chicano community that was there in Omaha. So it was an area where there was a lot of immigrant communities.
Emily: Mm-hmm. Right.
Delilah: So like, there was the Polish community, there was the Italian community, there was a German community. And there was a huge Underground Railroad that emptied out in Omaha; of course, Malcolm X came from Omaha, right? That’s where he was born.
[00:11:38] So, you know, growing up, I saw this huge community of many, many different people, and I saw the mixing, and I saw also the racism, and I saw the race riots. Huge race riots, all of that. And so, I think that really impacted the way in which I saw the world around me, and realizing that an artist has a voice and it’s a voice that can speak to identity, and speak to our lived reality.
And I think one of the things that I was really aware of, was the fact that my mother’s family had been in the United States, in this territory, for much longer than anybody else that I encountered. We were here for hundreds and hundreds of years, but yet—they wanted to tell me I was an immigrant.
And I’m like, how does that happen? How does that work? The most recent immigrant in my family was my Polish grandmother. Right?
(laughter)
[00:12:46] Delilah: And she didn’t have problems crossing. She had no problems crossing. They welcomed her with open arms. She went through Ellis Island. She was granted citizenship right away, and yet—
You know, there’s questions whether or not my grandfather was a citizen and his family had been here for four and five hundred years. It’s like, how does that happen? And of course, going back in history,
[00:13:10] Katie: (whispered) Racism is how it happens. It’s racism.
Delilah: That’s, oh my God, haven’t we seen it? (laughter) Haven’t we experienced it?
[00:13:18] Katie: Yeah.
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[00:13:28] Delilah: So those are the things that, you know, I had always thought about growing up, and when I started making work, what I really wanted to do was take the iconography and take some of the stories and the imagery that I had seen, particularly within the Chicano movement, to create work that would be viable, that would talk about some of the issues that that we experience.
[00:14:03] Katie: When you say viable, what does that mean? Or what did you want that to feel like?
[00:14:06] Delilah: Well, you know, when I talk about viable, I’m talking about the issues that the Chicano community are talking about at that given point in time. Right. And so, when I was making that piece of the Guadalupana, one of the things that the Chicano community was really thinking about was like, who is she really? Is she just strictly a religious icon, or is she a manifestation of the culture itself?
So there was a lot of discussion about her being Tonantzin, there was a lot of discussion about the way in which she’s tattooed on the back of prisoners, all of these things.
[00:14:49] And when I had thought about that, but hadn’t really done a Guadalupana—and it wasn’t until Francisco had asked me to be part of an exhibition that he was putting together in France with his wife; it was twelve New Mexico artists. I think it’s called Ida y Vuelta Could be wrong about that, but it was something along those lines, to exhibit in France.
And he had asked me if I would be willing to do something regarding working with the Guadalupana, because there was a 17th century easel painting of the first Guadalupe that was, had been taken by the Franciscans over to France. And I remember that really sparked a lecture that I was listening to by Flora Clancy. She taught about Mesoamerica at UNM and I would take a lot of Mesoamerican classes because I wanted to understand the aesthetic, and use that aesthetic in my own work.
[00:15:47] She had talked about like—there’s things that went back and forth between Europe and the Americas, and it was a lot more than just the tomato that went back and forth. There was a lot of ideas and there was a lot of communications that was going back and forth, even in terms of like languages and things like that.
And then I thought, well, the Guadalupana went back. And was she the same icon when it went back into the other direction? Was it really understood? And if I’m going to bring her back to France, what can I say about her? You know, that’s going to be meaningful. That it would, we begin to understand colonialism and the colonized, right?
And then. I was kinda like thinking about, the Guadalupana is tattooed. That’s how we really see her over and over and over again within the culture itself. At that time I was actually teaching at Hampshire College and at Smith College and it was like really hard for me to, to get back. So, you know, it was kinda like, I was looking over some old material, ’cause I’ve moved, and also I have this one person show coming up over at the Albuquerque Museum and they want me to, you know, like go back into my archive.
[00:17:06] So I was like looking at this and I was thinking, oh my God, I found this whole folder just filled with all the tattoo parlors I was calling, from when I was teaching over there on the East Coast. So that when I came back, I could just kind of like see what I could find, and this and this and that.
And I remember calling up a friend of mine, he was, Cecilio García-Camarillo, and Cecilio at that time was working at the Mexican Consulate. He was a Chicano and he was very bilingual, so he was able to negotiate between—he was like a Malinche (laughter)—able to negotiate back and forth. But, what he would do is he would go into the prisons and the Mexican nationalists that were going to go back, or somebody had passed. He would negotiate everything. Well, he knew one of the counselors he says, well, do you think you could talk to them? See if I could—if there’s any Guadalupe tattoos in there (laughter) that I could photograph—and bless him. He did.
[00:18:09] And there was a counselor that allowed me in and he connected me with Felix Martinez. And at that time what I did was I found a whole bunch of people that had Guadalupes, and I just made all these appointments so that I could photograph all the Guadalupes that I could possibly find.
And then I also was able to get into the detention center to photograph the back of Felix Martinez. And I remember, I mean, I was at, like a party. I don’t know if you would call it a party, but anyway, there was kind of like a thing going on over here in Santa Fe. I guess it was a party. And I went with Cecilio and this guy approached me, his name was O’Shaughnessy, and he just looked at me, he goes, Delilah Montoya, I don’t want to ever hear that you couldn’t get the shot you wanted because you didn’t have the equipment you needed. And he handed me his card.
Katie: Wow.
Delilah: I know.
[00:19:06] Katie: Wow.
[00:19:07] Delilah: I know. And I’m like, “Wow, you have no idea who you’re talking to because I will take you up on that one.” Right? Yeah. And so I held onto his card, and then when I knew I could get into that detention center, I called him up, because I wanted an eight by ten camera and I didn’t have one.
And I called him, I says, “Well, I need an eight by ten camera and some lenses and I need some lights.”
(laughter)
And he’s all, “Come on down!” I got down there and he met me at his back, the back door, and he took me to a locker and I opened the locker up and there were these Sinar cameras and lenses, right, and lights and everything.
And he says, “Take what you need.” And I’m like pulling these lenses out and they were like diamonds. I mean, I was just like, really? It was amazing. So I just kind of loaded up this old, it was an old car. I mean, you know, I don’t even, I was surprised that he was letting me take them. I mean, this is thousands and thousands of dollars in,
[00:20:09] Katie: Were you driving, driving like a station wagon with wood on the side or something?
(laughter)
[00:20:13] Delilah: Pretty much, yeah. Pretty much. It was pretty, like—
[00:20:17] Katie: I love a station wagon. Functional.
(laughter)
[00:20:20] Delilah: Well, you know, I’ve never drove sta—It was a small car. It was probably like a little Hyundai that I was driving. So I loaded it all up. Took it to the detention center. We get there. I had Mikey Fiores coming with me so that he could touch up the back on the tattoo, because I didn’t meet with Felix, so I couldn’t, like, get a real sense of what it looked like and see what the tattoo was.
[00:20:41] Katie: When you say like, touch up the back, do you mean like he came with a tattoo gun or do you mean like—
[00:20:46] Delilah: like a little marker
[00:20:47] Katie: like a little, (“ts ts ts” verbalization) just little colored in?
[00:20:49] Delilah: Yeah, because it, because it’s an old tattoo.
Katie: Yeah. Of course.
[00:20:52] Delilah: You know, I’m not doing documentary, okay. (laughter)
Katie: We’re here for art. Alright. This is, this needs to look nice.
[00:21:03] Delilah: This is documentary—This is not documentary. I mean, they just assume like, you know, Chicanos are going to do documentary, right? And it’s like, no.
Katie: Mm-hmm.
[00:21:09] Delilah: Why should I? Because I don’t even believe in documentary. You know, I don’t even really believe that the documentary photographer is doing what they say they’re doing anyway.
Katie: Mm-hmm. Right.
Delilah: They’re all making decisions. They’re all deciding that what they’re gonna put in and what they’re going to leave out. Right? And, they assume that their voice isn’t seen or heard, which is, in my mind—I didn’t believe it.
Anyway, so, “Mike, come down here, you gotta touch up this tattoo for me!”
“Okay, Delilah!”
So we go there and we have no way of bringing the equipment up. So they bring a laundry cart. And so we threw everything in this—(laughter)—laundry cart.
[00:21:49] Katie: (laughing) Thousands of dollars of camera equipment!
[00:21:51] Delilah: If Michael O’Shaughnessy saw me, he probably would’ve like, had second thoughts, right? (laughter)
And so we get there and I’m setting up the lighting. I’m trying to make sure everything is working and uh, Mike is kind of touching up that back so that it’s going to read well.
Katie: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:12] Delilah: Because I really needed it to read well, because of the—I had decided that what I wanted to do with this piece was make it huge. Really, really large. I think it was.
[00:22:25] Katie: It is. It is monumental. You know.
[00:22:28] Delilah: Yeah, and you have to remember this was done before digital. So I had to really think film. I had to think film. And I had to think about how was I going to make it go large.
[00:22:41] So, what I decided to do was use an eight by ten camera. That way, I could print up small—grid it, and print up small details on it like that. So the thing is, is like, I’m setting it up, Felix comes out and I’m like, “Eh, Felix, uh, would you mind if I handcuffed you?” (laughter)
And he goes, “Eh, no problem.” And I think he really liked the idea of having this kind of like— I explained to him how large it was going to be.
[00:23:17] Katie: Yeah. The theater of it is really—
[00:23:19] Delilah: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think he, he kind of liked all of that. That, and the other thing too, is he never really saw the back. Because it was on his back, so he never was able to really get a good look at it and I think in his mind he was going to be able to get a good look at it.
And so then, I set up the camera, had him do a couple of poses. I think I tried some with roses. I tried and—and then I realized it was just, plain, like, handcuff there—before we really begin to see the Guadalupe and also see that juxtaposition of the idea of the incarceration, the idea of colonialism. And colonialism really is where that incarceration started.
Katie: (whispered) Yes.
[00:24:03] Delilah: Right? Yes. And so I felt like that was, um, kind of important. And so, I was photographing him. I brought like ten sheets with me. No, maybe it was more like twelve—twelve, fifteen sheets. And I’m like, just using the lights. I’m shooting, shooting, trying to make sure I’m doing a little bit of moving the f-stop back and forth to make sure that I get a good exposure, because it’s film.
[00:24:28] Katie: Yep.
[00:24:29] Delilah: It’s film you, it’s not digital! (laughs)
[00:24:32] Katie: You’re doing this in a prison and Yeah. Yeah.
[00:24:35] Delilah: Well in the detention center.
[00:24:36] Katie: Yeah. There’s probably, like, one outlet in the wall that you’re working from. Yeah.
[00:24:40] Delilah: Which is a very good point. I blew the circuitry.
(laughter)
[00:24:44] Katie: Jeez! (laughing) You didn’t—you didn’t mention that last time we talked! I had no idea. Wow. That’s funny.
Delilah: Yeah.
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[00:24:58] Emily: Art is for everyone at the New Mexico Museum of Art. Through world class exhibitions and educational activities, visitors can gain insight on new ideas, diverse cultures, and the human experience. Visit nmartmuseum.org for tickets, events, and more, at both the original location on the Santa Fe Plaza, and at Vladem Contemporary in the Railyard.
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(Music fades, end promo)
[00:26:10] Emily: Katie, I would love for you to offer the broader context and talk a little bit about the show, Off-Center, that is at Vladem, and how Delilah’s work kind of fits in with some of the other art that you’ve selected for that.
[00:26:25] Katie: Yeah, so we opened the Vladem Contemporary a little over a year ago now, and a big part of managing the opening of a new building is kind of just like, taking stock. You know, we’re starting a new chapter of this institution and so, in looking forward, it’s also necessary to look back, and we were thinking a lot about, how do we, honor and recognize—and also take the history of New Mexico art with us into this new century, and this new era for the institution.
And Off-Center kind of was born out of that notion of looking at the last three decades of the 20th century and finding a way to kind of like, shove it all into one show, which was really very ambitious. But one way that we sort of problem solved was, well—many, many meetings of problem solving and kind of just exploring, what story do we want to tell?
We realized there’s no one way to encapsulate three decades of digital revolution and Chicano movements and civil rights and all of the things that were happening. And so, the solution we came up with was multiple iterations of the same show, over the course of a year. So, the show changes five times, and we’re about to enter the final cycle that is all about identity. So, prior to this, the areas of exploration that we’ve kind of been shaping the exhibition around have been about place like, here and now; spectacle of like, all of the things that you see, when you’re here, both culturally and in the land; and then identity, being the final iteration.
Alexandra Terry, our curator of contemporary art, and I worked together on this last section, and we really believe that the work itself is telling an essential story about the people here in New Mexico and an essential story about the militarization of the border, the school-to-prison pipeline—all of all of these things that have such a dramatic effect on the people who live here now, today. And I think that is also something that makes this work strong, is that, not only is it this beautiful moment captured in time with the photograph, but it is also this work that transcends time, and speaks to issues that sit at the root and the core of the culture locally, but also the culture nationally and internationally, in my opinion.
I mean, that’s kind of how we arrived at this work, and we have it kind of situated around other pieces that kind of deal with gun violence, that deal with family; and these things that sort of are all very close to the heart and close to the home.
[00:29:34] Emily: Mm-hmm. So, I actually want to have you describe this piece because our listeners won’t be able to see it.
We will make sure that it’s up on the website so that people can look at it.
[00:29:46] Delilah: It’s big. It’s really big as a matter of fact, I had to make it smaller for the museum.
Katie: No, you didn’t!
Delilah: I did.
Katie: From negatives?
Delilah: From the negatives; reprinted. I reprinted the whole thing, but I had to reprint it smaller.
So the other pieces that—Williams College has the larger piece and New Mexico has the smaller piece, that fits on your wall.
[00:30:09] Katie: This was before my time.
[00:30:10] Delilah: The visual description is, it’s a, a man who was incarcerated, right? And he has handcuffs behind him and on his back is the Virgen of Guadalupe. And it’s actually the way the Virgen is tattooed. It’s real—you really sense it that it was tattooed in a prison. Because it’s very much prison art.
And actually, I remember Felix had told me that he had gotten this one in California. So it’s very much in the, kind of the Californian style that was happening during that period of time. And there’s some more tattooing on his arms. And what I really enjoyed, and the reason why I wanted to use an eight by ten camera, is the clarity. The clarity of the piece is really good.
You can actually read his thumbprints. It’s that clear.
Emily: Wow.
Delilah: You know, I remember when I was doing it, the digital image was first coming in, and somebody had told me, you can blow it up digitally. And I’m like, wait a minute. Digital image does not blow up. You can’t, it doesn’t do a blow-up. The chemical will, but the digital won’t. At that point, they just didn’t have the resolution that could do that.
So anyway, then, along the sides of it are all these images of all the other tattoos that I had done, but that was all done in color.
[00:31:31] Delilah: Right. And I produced this work at a time when the black-and-white paper was really at its height, and there was, this paper that was called Forte and they were using, it was a Hungarian paper where they were using a lot of silver in it.
And so, the image itself was just, I mean, so beautiful—because, I remember I had to pay, I think I purchased like $500 worth of photo paper. I remember the end, I was just sweating bullets. It was like, Oh my God. Each one of those pieces I knew, but I knew, I knew the silver content was just, just gorgeous.
And then the other thing too: the color. Photography was at its height at that point. And so those color prints that I did, actually, I printed them, all of them at Hampshire College are, it is just really on target in terms of the color on it. So you have this really vibrant color that is more or less like a margin around Felix.
[00:32:34] Delilah: And then on the bottom of it, I had decided to create an altár—because there’s a such a strong tradition with Chicano art, right? With the altár. And, what I decided to do was use all of the cultura kitch imagery that you could purchase of the Guadalupe, and also the Virgen, and also low rider culture.
I remember I wanted to use roses. So I had these roses that I bought, I think at Michael’s or something like that. And at the time, I hadn’t really thought that I was going to use the roses, (whispers) so I left all the price tags on ’em so I could take ’em all back.
(laughter)
[00:33:18] Katie: It’s the artist’s way.
(Music)
[00:33:36] Katie: I actually, I have some questions for you. Just kind of regarding like, the process of locating the right Guadalupe. Like, what were your, like criteria, and also, why Felix?
[00:33:47] Delilah: One, I could get in. And that was really I important and so that was very important. That was the savior that got me in.
Two, you know, when I was able to get in and I saw the—I mean, ’cause I photographed a lot of tattoos, and, and you’ll see that in the piece itself. Yes. There’s a lot of color work. So I photographed it in color, and I photographed it with eight by ten cameras, in black-and-white. And I wanted to give myself enough material where I could really, kinda work with it. And I realized that a lot of the work that I did was good. I mean, any of ’em was going to do it. But what really spoke about the issues that I wanted to bring back to France was Felix Martinez. Right? And still, even to this day, we still deal with the idea of the Latino community being incarcerated.
And it’s not just an incarceration of criminal activity. You know, immigrants are incarcerated—
[00:34:48] Delilah: —with their children, and they’re separated. And babies. I mean, what is going on along the border, the militarization of the border—and I remember when there was an outcry about the militarization of the border.
It was back in the late eighties, and the Chicano community was already speaking about that. They were saying, they’re militarizing the border. We have to begin to talk about this and become aware as to why are they militarizing the border—which had never been militarized. You know, I say it’s such a cultural icon.
It is not necessarily understood what the history is, but, always, oh—say it’s kind of like a car wreck. You know, like when something really major happens, like a car wreck, like say, on a road, then all of a sudden all the cars stop at that, where they slow down where that car wreck was.
And I think the Virgen was, is kind of like that. There was something really major that happened in terms of what Juan Diego was doing, and in terms of all of the temples that were being pulled down, and the books that were burning, and the catastrophic lives were changing. Right?
And I think the Guadalupe is a way where we can slow down. She allows us to slow down and still remember. Right? Or at least, honor what had happened during that colonial period of time.
[00:36:20] Emily: I do want to ask you, though, about your specific relationship to Guadalupe, and also if you happen to know what Felix’s personal relationship to Guadalupe was.
[00:36:30] Delilah: The Guadalupe? Well, with Felix, I was introduced to him while he was in the detention center. And you know, that’s, that’s kind of a tough story. It really is. It’s—the story is that, and this is what his counselor had told me, is that he was being prosecuted for a drive-by shooting, but the police believed that he did not do it.
Emily: Oh, wow.
[00:36:59] Delilah: He was a veterano from an area in Albuquerque where there was a lot of gang, so-called gang activity, and he had just been released from prison and they assumed that the younger gang members kind of talked to him about the drive-by, that he probably knew who did it. And so what they were trying to do was get him to point out the shooter, and he wasn’t going to. He wasn’t going to.
And then, finally, there was talk about him pointing the shooter out, and he never made it out. So, you know—so the idea of protection, that’s another idea, you know, why prisoners get the Guadalupe on their backs is for protection.
[00:37:42] Emily: And for you, is she protection for you too, or does she take—
[00:37:46] Delilah: Yeah, yeah, she is. She is, yeah. She’s protection. She’s protected her people for hundreds of years, you know, Cuauhtlatoatzin has walked with her. Right? The indigenous communities all over Mexico and the United States pray to her. So, she’s the goddess of the Americas, you know? And she’s been the goddess for thousands of years.
Thousands of years. We’ve crossed the border for thousands of years.
[00:38:18] Emily: Yeah.
[00:38:19] Delilah: Back and forth.
[00:38:20] Emily: Does she still appear in your work? Or what have you done since you made this piece in 1998?
[00:38:26] Delilah: Oh my goodness. I mean, you know—so many things. (laughter)
I say, what I do is, I make work about during that era, the discussions that are going on, you know?
And so there for a while I was thinking about malcriadas, like, bad girls, right? And that’s brought me into the idea of female boxers, women boxers. And then after that I started really kind of thinking in terms of what was going on within the detention centers. And I got with a group of artists and we started, creating what is called Detention-Nation.
And they are installations that we would put up at different places dealing with the incarceration of the migrant communities that have been crossing the borders for thousands of years. Then, I started thinking about the castas. And my latest work right now that I’ve been showing is, has a lot to do with the castas. And, castas—people kind of look at me and say, what is a ‘casta’?
[00:39:28] A casta is, back in the seventeen-hundreds, there was these paintings that were made during the colonial era to demonstrate the different configurations of Native, African, and Spaniard, or European American. And out of these, the different children of all these different races, names were given to them.
So if, let’s say, a Black woman had a child from a Spaniard than it would, the child would, be considered a Mulatto.
[00:40:05] Right? If an, a Native woman had a child from a Spaniard, the child would be considered Mestizo. Right? And so, these are names that we still know. And so, when I was looking at all of this, I was thinking to myself, we still do this.
[00:40:20] And with it, there was a whole social hierarchy that they were demonstrating. And there was actually, these paintings are, if you really look at them, they’re kind of hard to look at.
[00:40:30] If you think about them in terms of race. But you know, the other thing is, Mexico has seen them in terms of nationalism as well.
So, what I wanted to do was like, how do you— going back to the idea of documentation or documentary—how do you document racism? It’s right in front of us. We see it every day. We experience it. Certain people have more privilege than other people. Coming from a bicultural family, I see it really clearly.
And so, what I wanted to do was—I think, the closest that we ever had to the documentation of racism was within these casta paintings.
[00:41:08] Delilah: And what I wanted to do was look at the aesthetic, see what they were doing there, and then redo it as a contemporary version, using contemporary people, using DNA, right? Instead of labeling.
So, their labeling process had to do with enlightenment, and categorization. Right? And then, when the DNA came out, it was like—so, that’s almost a carryover because it’s science, right? This is science, and who’s making all the determinations as to who is what, and percentage of what?
And I thought, well, this is like the perfect time to do an updated version of the casta paintings.
[00:41:50] Katie: The casta works are also quite lovely, too. There’s the photograph, and then there’s also sort of like an extension of the photograph through objects and diagrams, and I think shelving. I saw shelves.
[00:42:03] Delilah: What I did was, I have these little test tubes on and a map. There’s a map where National Geographic demonstrated to everybody how their DNA came out of East Africa and it moved on, through a hundred-thousand years. And what you’ll see is—you’ll see with the Latino community, usually on the mother’s side, it moves all the way into the Americas.
Then also, they had another one where, going six generations back—and it would be the bio-geographic breakup in there. And so, what I did with those is made a graph out of different colored sand, because sand is like humans. Sand is sand. Right? But there’s different colors to sand. So what I, that’s why I use that metaphor.
[00:42:47] Delilah: And then, what they did with the casta paintings—the families or people they portrayed really didn’t have names. They were types. Right? So what I wanted to do was to give the families a voice. And so, I implanted a QR code in the photograph, so that you just put your phone across, and what you get is a monologue of the family, or one family member, describing what they see.
[00:43:17] Emily: Interesting.
[00:43:18] Delilah: Right? And telling us about their family line, and if there was anything in the DNA that they found unusual or whatever—so that when you’re looking at the photograph, you can have that experience of having one of the family members standing right next to you.
[00:43:35] Emily: Wow.
[00:43:35] Delilah: Talking to you.
(guitar music)
[00:43:48] Emily: So, I want to go back to something you said about the Guadalupe on Felix’s back being in “the California style.” So can you talk about the different versions of Guadalupe that you encountered for this project, and what those differences are?
[00:44:06] Delilah: Oh, wow. You know, all the differences are actually there, in the mural itself, because I photograph so many ones that were done by different tattoo artists. There’s ones that have been done by amateur or all the way up to being paid high money for it. That’s in the prisons, all of that. And with the Guadalupe, there’s certain things that are just constant, that have to be there or else—it’s not the Guadalupe, right? And then there’s certain things that’ll just kind of like, like sort of, show up. So, some of the attributes is you have to have the raya
[00:44:44] Emily: mm-hmm.
[00:44:44] Delilah: That goes out like that. Another attribute is the head is tilted. There’s a tilt to the head that has to be there.
Her hands are here—underneath is the angel holding up the, it’s kind of like a dark moon. But then what we see is variations that circle around that, and so you can kind of look for those variations. Like, I’m thinking about Yolanda Lopez’s—and she caught it by the religious community, for—how dare you do that to the Virgen.
So what she did was put her mother at a sewing machine with the rayas around, and she’s sewing the cape. And, her mother was a seamstress working for Pendleton or something like that, like in a factory. And then, another one was her grandmother, very old, and she’s holding the snake, right? She’s holding the snake and the rayas are around her and, and the colors are right. And so, all the attributes are there. Her head is tilted.
[00:45:46] Delilah: And then there’s an image of Yolanda that is running right. And she has running shoes on, and she’s running. And, one of the things that I realized when I was looking at the work of Yolanda Lopez, is what she did is, she made me think about what it meant to be a Latina. You know, here the Virgen of Guadalupe becomes what we’re supposed to aspire to, but I’ll never have a virgin birth. Okay? That’s not gonna happen. (laughter) So, I mean, even that, you can’t even, you can’t obtain that. Right?
And so, on one hand, the idea of the Guadalupe is beautiful, right? But on the other hand, as a Latina, she’s somebody that I can’t aspire to. And I think what Yolanda did was, she gave us that to look at. And that was very important. I think one of the other, which is in the show—but remember I told you that I wanted the Guadalupe tattooed on a woman’s back. And I, at that time, I couldn’t find anybody, that women just didn’t put tattoos like that.
Latinas just didn’t put tattoos like that on their back. So I drew it, and I photographed my cousin, and she had this beautiful hair, and I dressed her backwards, because what I wanted to do is kind of like, talk about how in many ways the Guadalupe is something we can’t aspire to, we can’t do so in many ways it’s backwards for us.
You know, finding those cultural identities that are unapproachable, right?
[00:47:27] Katie: And unapproachable because, not just because it’s unattainable—but do you feel like there’s that unapproachable component of like, this symbol almost being foisted on a culture and then adapted or—?
[00:47:41] Delilah: No, I guess what I’m saying, is that she’s an Icon that goes beyond anything that we can possibly experience.
She’s an Icon of sympathy. She’s an Icon of love. She’s an Icon that has given courage. All those things has happened with her. Right? But as a Latina, I think it’s important for us to have mentorship. And being able to be guided into a world that we can achieve and do. So, I’m looking for something that is more attainable.
I mean, I’m not saying that the Guadalupe isn’t a beautiful part of our culture. I think she is, and I think it’s good that she’s reproduced over and over and over again, but, I want to be realistic too, you know? That, you know, we should be able to find our voices and be understood as we are part of the history, and that we have done things.
So she’s not the only one that we can use. There’s other women out there, Latinas out there, that have done powerful things that we can aspire to.
[music fades into theme music and closing credits]
[00:48:58] Emily: Encounter Culture is a production of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
Our producer is Andrea Klunder at The Creative Impostor Studios.
This season is produced and edited by Andrea Klunder and Alex Riegler with additional editing by Monica Braine.
Our recording engineers are Collin Ungerleider and Kabby at Kabby Sound Studios in Santa Fe.
Technical direction and post-production audio by Edwin R. Ruiz.
Our executive producer is Daniel Zillmann.
Thank you to New Mexico artist “El Brujo” D’Santi Nava for our theme music.
For a full transcript and show notes, visit podcast.nmculture.org or click the link in the episode description in your listening app.
I’m your host, Emily Withnall.
The New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs is your guide to the state’s entire family of museums, historic sites, and cultural institutions. From Native treasures to space exploration, world-class folk art to ancient dinosaurs, our favorite way to fully explore is with the New Mexico CulturePass. To see everywhere CulturePass is accepted and reserve yours today, visit nmculture.org/visit/culturepass.
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