Mariana apparitions in common objects and spaces at the end of the 20th century in Mexico

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Marian apparitions in objects and spaces as a religious phenomenon that occurred in the last two decades of the twentieth century in Mexico. Contemporary society in the country has expressed its religious modernity through a singular way that is gaining momentum every day, such as channeling certain myths; elaborating asystemic and deinstitutionalized rituals as a consequence of the re-appropriation of the religious foundational meta-narratives among which the birth and death of Jesus Christ, Marian devotion, among others, stand out. Some social groups have made up the narratives in local collective imaginaries, to which they add a large part of their religious cultural identity. Such is the case of the Marian myth of the Virgin of Guadalupe for its strong content in the construction of the religious cultural identity of Mexican society. However, the massive apparitions of the Virgin Mary in objects and places so unusual, common and every day that these were trivialized. In this sense, the debate will be organized in two conceptual schemes. On the one hand, the called emptying of religion, understanding it as the rethinking of that which is full and which in a certain way explains the trivialization of the stories and apparitions. On the other hand, the elaboration of universes of recognition rather than of knowledge, where the appropriation of the places of transit and the process of unanchoring reveals the urgency of recovering the certainty forgotten by the contemporary nomad.