Professional Documents
Culture Documents
MUJERISTA CREATIVITY:
LATIN@ SACRED ARTS AS LIFE-COURSE
Copyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution.
DEVELOPMENTAL RESOURCES
ESTER SHAPIRO AND DARCY ALCáNTARA
Creativity and the arts support Latin@s1 and other women of color in
transforming human hardships and resourcefully creating spaces of refuge, resis-
tance, and resilience. Through creative expression, these women challenge
1We use the term Latin@ throughout the chapter, following U.S. transnational and gender-neutral/
gender-queer writings, except when using preferred naming and spelling by cited authors, recognizing
that terms used for Hispanic, Chicano/a, or Latina/o groups imply uniformity or cohesion with racialized
political histories.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14937-009
Womanist and Mujerista Psychologies: Voices of Fire, Acts of Courage, T. Bryant-Davis
and L. Comas-Díaz (Editors)
Copyright © 2016 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.
195
patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and other oppressions and promote liberation
and positive shared life-course development. These healing artistic traditions
have a long history of intertwining with sacred traditions for Latin@s and other
women of color. In particular, Latin@ creativity is often grounded in spiritual
worldviews that link everyday life to social justice.
In this chapter, we explore the central cultural/developmental role of
creativity and the arts for Latin@s, focusing on how creativity expresses and
reflects a spirituality that challenges oppression and promotes liberation. The
chapter is grounded in mujerista theology, which is a feminist liberation theol-
Copyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution.
TRANSDISCIPLINARY CULTURAL/DEVELOPMENTAL
PERSPECTIVES: PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL SOURCES
OF TRANSFORMATIVE KNOWLEDGE
Both authors of this chapter are Latin@ clinical psychologists and rep-
resent different generations, professional experiences, and immigrant fam-
ily life-course journeys. We are now forever connected through mentorship
and collegiality, and we came together through our focus on Latin@s and
Scientific psychology has historically stood apart from religious and spir-
itual beliefs, seeing religion and faith as objects of study but considering these
as worldviews contradicting the critical perspectives required to test scientific
cycles of seasons and of generations, and love in its many dimensions as a life
force nurturing self and others. Often working with modest materials, women
bring their heart/soul to household and table, gathering in daily communion.
Creative acts nourish the courage and strength for la lucha/the struggle for
social justice in confronting intersecting social oppressions of sexism, racism,
and poverty, through both psychospiritual journeys and social justice actions.
Ethical revisionings of gender, culture, sexualities and spiritualities by Latin@/
Chicana feminists creatively communicated hard-won knowledge gained at
intersections/borderlands of women’s lived experiences, viewing spirituality
and representations of the sacred, grounded in lo cotidiano as central in caring
for self and others while enriching and transforming arduous circumstances
(Facio & Lara, 2014).
her mental health. Particularly relevant is what she termed literary liberation
theology, a resource for personal wellness and societal change. Martínez regu-
larly visits the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Boston Joiner Center
for the Study of War and Its Consequences, teaching creative nonfiction and
poetry writing workshops. Ester Shapiro joined her writing workshops and
participated in discussions of writing, activism and healing. The following
discussion of the activist psychospiritual foundations of Martínez’s creative
work draws from her published writing and public interviews, including a
presentation at UMass Boston about her struggles with bipolar disorder and
using cultural, political, and spiritual resources, as well as holistic health care,
in her journey toward wholeness (Martínez, 2014).
In her book of personal essays, Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana,
Martínez (2005) described the fateful histories in the U.S. Southwest that led
to her loss of Spanish-language and indigenous cultures as “mother tongues.”
The novel Mother Tongue (Martínez, 1997) is based on her experiences in
1986–1988 when she was writing for the National Catholic Reporter about
Central American refugees and the Sanctuary movement. Through this work,
she accompanied a Lutheran minister and two pregnant Salvadoran women on
their journey to Albuquerque, where the governor had declared New Mexico
a Sanctuary State. She was arrested and brought to trial by the U.S. gov-
ernment for conspiracy in connection with alleged smuggling of Salvadoran
refugees into the United States and was threatened with a 25-year prison sen-
tence. The government presented her poem “Nativity for Two Salvadoran
Women” (Gaspar de Alba, Herrera-Sobek, & Martínez, 1989) as evidence of
the conspiracy. This poem, which speaks to the tragedy of U.S.-supported civil
war in the region, draws parallels between the religious imagery of Jesus’ birth
and the courage with which these Salvadoran mothers-to-be undertook an
arduous journey to offer their children a better life. Both she and the minister
she accompanied were acquitted, but the experience was personally terror-
izing. She felt that the silence imposed by the government’s persecution (she
was warned that her phones were tapped), the need to protect the Sanctuary
movement, and the legal requirements of her defence made her feel deeply
silenced, as for years afterwards she struggled with the criminalization of her
ties” using the Nahual textual poetics, in which the juxtaposition of elements
expands the metaphorical space for their reception and interpretation. Her
wide-ranging review of Chicana artists, many of whom incorporate humble
elements and private rituals into their public artistic work, mirrored and
expanded on intergenerational practices they observed, preserved, and trans-
formed in their own homes and communities. Pérez explored how Chicana
artists use multimedia to represent the actual and imaginary places, lost to
dispossession and diaspora, yet preserved through seemingly mundane cul-
tural practices that capture the continuity of ancestral traditions rooted in
the earth’s cycles. One area of artistic work bridging formal arts and folk arts
is the altar to the ancestors, gracing many homes and public places. Pérez sug-
gested that the freedom to create hybrid spiritualities or otherness offered by
domestic altars has inspired a widely varied Chicana artistic use of altars using
installation, painting, photography, film, and mixed media. Others explore,
and expand on, cultural traditions common in household and community
arts. For example, artist and psychologist Amalia Mesa-Bains creates altar-
based installations focused on dress and domestic arts as social and transgres-
sive spaces of possibility. Through installations using dress, mirrors, furniture,
and paintings, such as the Black Madonna of Monserrat, she exposes imposed
images of patriarchy, uncovering images of women’s gynocentric power hid-
den by projections of Eurocentric and male dominance.
Pérez (2007) also explored the large body of work by Chicana artists
reinterpreting the Virgin of Guadalupe as a means of reclaiming multiple
dimensions of the Virgin, whose power to accompany the poor and disen-
franchised is expanded to include feminist empowerment, erotics, and queer
sexualities. She included emotionally striking evocations of the Virgin by
Yolanda Lopez, who depicts herself, in Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of
Guadalupe, as a vanquishing caped crusader and other archetypal heroines,
including Margaret Stewart sewing the Virgin’s cape and Botticelli’s Venus as
a love goddess. She also noted that a great deal of Chicana’s sacred/bleeding
heart imagery seemingly based primarily on Catholic sources is often hybrid-
ized with the alignment of the Face and Divinized Heart, or yolteotl in the
Nahua concept. Maya Gonzalez’s painting The Love That Stains invokes Frida
the waters: Yemayá, of sea and maternity; Ochún, of sweet river waters and
marriage/partnerships. Campos Pons’s installations and photographs directly
incorporate ritual elements, blurring the boundary between quotidian, sacred,
and profane spaces (West-Durán, 2013). Her installation Las Siete Potencias/
The Seven Powers invokes the Middle Passage using hand-decorated wooden
planks depicting the slave ships and the many lives lost to the unspeakable
cruelty of enslavement. Yemayá is depicted in a drawing invoking her oceanic
and maternal roles, embracing the dead and caring for survivors in a spiritual
unity of tragic past and enduring survival. Campos Pons uses sculpture and
photographs as both aesthetic and ritual objects, transforming the room-sized
exhibition into a sacred space resembling an altar, in which viewers can bear
witness to the horror, honor lives lost to enslavement and the Middle Passage,
yet feel comforted by life’s continuity through the sacred. In this and other
work, Campos Pons photographs and represents her own body and those of
other women to articulate and redefine aesthetic spaces, mindful of performa-
tive and ritual dimensions of spirituality.
West-Durán (2013) suggested Campos Pons’s work could be viewed within
the Yoruba concept of ori, representing the head of the body, mindfulness, con-
sciousness: the internal experience revealing (and questioning) the self and
identity, relationships (family, community), examining the past (history, public
and private), and envisioning the future (creation of art). West-Durán noted
the significance of Campos Pons’s use of ori as she draws on the association
between memory and water, especially within the context of Yemayá and water
spirits. The Orishas can be understood as archetypes with multifaceted mani-
festations, embodying energies, relationships, forces in nature, and principles
interwoven in daily life. Adding to their magnificent complexity as resources for
living, an individual orisha has different avatares o caminos (avatars or paths),
offering a rich spiritual and aesthetic vocabulary Campos Pons uses in her work
and millions of believers draw on, enriching and guiding their lives. Latina
psychologists Comas-Díaz (2008a) and Espín (2008) have both explored how
images of saints supported their psychological and spiritual development at
critical moments.
spirituality integral to their social justice activism. Shapiro (2005) first became
aware of the very different way that Latin American feminist movements,
particularly movements for women’s health and reproductive rights, incorpo-
rated religion and the sacred into their work when working as coordinating
editor on a Spanish-language transnational edition of the feminist text Our
Bodies, Ourselves (Shapiro, 2000). She discovered that the book in English
completely avoids religion and spirituality, out of fear that this would expose
its editors, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, to both religious and
scientific critiques. In contrast, Latin American women’s health movements
were grounded in spirituality that viewed mind–body–spirit and environment
holistically, so that the ethics of reproductive choice used the position of
Catholics for Choice, recognizing women’s responsibility for bearing and sus-
taining life and for making the needed ethical decisions on behalf of all their
future children (Shapiro, 2005). One early example of this political/spiritual
unity was the Chilean activist group Con-spirando, which did environmental
justice work from a spiritual perspective starting in the 1990s shortly after the
end of the dictatorship. Creating Nuestros Cuerpos, Nuestras Vidas, the editors
infused the text with this spiritually based vision of Latin American/Latin@
social justice activism.
In the Chican@ activist circles in Los Angeles, California, spirituality and
social justice are the foundation for community building and activism. The
understanding is that one cannot divide one’s spirituality from their activism
because through this connection to others, one develops a sense of collective
responsibility. A major focus of these spaces is artistic exploration of popular
arts. Mujeres de Maiz, an all-women artist’s collective in Los Angeles, created
a space for women of color artists and activists to organize together around
issues affecting communities of color. The mission of this collective is the
healing of the artists, communities, and Mother Earth through arts as prayer
conveyed through their zines, art, multimedia exhibits, and performances.
Their creative and artistic calling addresses resistance, healing, and change to
“make visible the invisible.” The intertwining of art, spirituality, and activ-
ism can also manifest through more subtle acknowledgment of spiritual prac-
tices and rituals. The Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade, a more recent Chicana/
CONCLUSION