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Article: Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe.
- Article from:
- The Women's Review of Books
- Article date:
- May 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Old City Publishing, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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My Italian immigrant grandmother, Margaret, was extremely religious, but not the variety I had experienced in Church. She practiced a folk Catholicism that entailed petitions to specific saints and special devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Her bedroom housed scores of statues of these saints as well as many Madonnas. I would sit there for hours, awed. Perhaps that was where I first learned to make altars of my own, always to the Mother, and in my case always outdoors. At the same time, the Church brought out in me a lifelong propensity to rebel. By early adolescence, deeply and finally frustrated with the emptiness of the spiritual experience that was offered by the ...