“Remember, it is I who am here to pray for you”: decolonização e resgate da autoridade religiosa/espiritual em La Loca Santa

Abstract

Glória Anzaldúa defends the recreation of the self-history of Chicano women, which would culminate in the recreation of the cultural history of the entire group. In this perspective, Ana Castillo argues in favor of revisiting and reinterpreting traditional models imposed on Chicano women to decolonize and rethink them as sources of strength and power without this meaning the destruction of all inherited traditional values of the Amerindian ancestry and Spanish influence. Thus, the objective of this article is to rescue and at the same time rewrite the collective memory in So Far from God (1993), by Ana Castillo, through the analysis of the search for decolonialization and the reconquest of the authority and spirituality of Chicano women symbolized in the construction of the character La Loca Santa; a representation that mixes the Amerindian ancestral mother goddess Tonantzin with the Catholic mother of Spanish colonial origin Guadalupe. Thus, we will reflect on the characteristics of Tonantzin, the historiography of Guadalupe, as implications of women's religiosity in the identity of Chicano women and the development of the character that evokes these two divine mythical figures. For this, I will use the theories of Jeanette Peterson (1992), Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo (1999), Michelle Sauer (2000), Glória Anzaldúa (2012, 2015), Ana Castillo (2014), Simona Lozovski (2016), Yuderkys Miñoso (2020), among others. We conclude that La Loca Santa is conceived as a syncretic figure that builds a world outside the limits of colonial, capitalist and patriarchal domination within the house itself through a positioning that rescues at the same time that it rewrites the spiritual authority of Chicano women.