100 books like Guadalupe Mysteries

The colonial period of Mexico was a mystery to me, so I turned to the ultimate source, this book by Paz. Surprisingly, I found that I did not agree with all of Paz’s conclusions about Sor Juana and the time she lived. He wrote from a male perspective, a middle-aged scholarly male perspective. Sor Juana was a young woman, a distinguished scholar in her own right. Had she written such a history, it would be quite different.

Sadly, there is no such book written from a woman’s perspective, so I invite you to join me in discovering what nuggets of wisdom you can in this book, truly the ultimate deep dive into Sor Juana’s life and times. Yes, I relied a great deal on Paz’s research. You will find it fascinating too.

This is, simply put, a lyrical conversation between two gifted poets. Westlake, like I did, knew that translations of Sor Juana’s poetry just did not do her justice. When writing about Sor Juana, we need to travel a different path; we need to listen to the whispers from centuries ago.

I listened and wrote a biographical novel; Westlake listened and shared the conversation with us. All I can say is “Yes!”

Royer adores Sor Juana, as do I. There are some wonderful surprises here, such as a long list of authors that Sor Juana likely read. The images that he presents, such as the church where la Vicereine Leonore was buried, are personal rather than scholarly. Yes, he does still speak from a purely male perspective, but it feels gentler than most.

Sor Juana was dubbed “The Tenth Muse” by an admiring priest in Spain upon publication of her poetry, and the sobriquet has remained with her throughout the centuries.

Sor Juana wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems in all manner of styles, from short, spiffy, and even humorous ones to elaborate villancicos performed in a cathedral. Here is a brief collection in both Spanish and English, a few of her shorter love poems. The poems may have been written for her lover, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, or as a commission for a gentleman’s wife or lover. In any event, they are magnificent, such as:

Oh, how I went up in flames

In your lovely Sun!

Hungry for the bait,

I forgot the danger.

Reading these poems, I could not doubt the depth of Sor Juana’s passion.

I live in southern California, where la Señora de Guadalupe appears all around us in bright murals on grocería walls, on t-shirts and jackets, as tattoos, even as dangling air fresheners. According to the earliest legend, included in this volume, she first appeared in 1531 to a peasant named Cuauh-tlahtoa—a.k.a. Juan Diego—on the hill of Tepeyac, at the edge of modern Mexico City.

The site was sacred to Tonantzin (the local name for a mother goddess), but Mary emerged there at dawn in her bright green and red gown amidst a flowerful garden that resembled the paradise of the Aztecs. It took a miracle for Juan Diego to persuade the Archbishop of Mexico City that the Virgin wanted a shrine built on the hill; he turned up at the episcopal palace one December day with his cloak full of out-of-season roses. When he spilled the flowers at the bishop’s feet,… show more.

Christianity is a syncretic religion, incorporating elements from earlier religious traditions, not only in the eastern Mediterranean basin but also in the lands where it spread. In each of the national shrines to the Virgin Mary in Europe, for instance, she is depicted with indigenous symbols or elements. Nowhere is the presence of the preChristian, indigenous sacred female stronger in such syncretic blendings than in Mexico with the Virgin of Guadalupe. The editor of this anthology refers to her as Guadalupe-Tonantzin, one of the variations of her name in the indigenous Nahautl language. These essays are scholarly, cultural, and engagingly personal. Don’t miss the brilliant essay by the late Gloria Anzaldua, as well as other memorable pieces by several well-known Mexican-American authors. This is lived religion.

Valeria Luiselli dissects the odd systems and networks of our world’s cities and reveals in their hidden corners and corridors strange and magical identities. Luiselli’s essays further interrogate a city’s relationship to the bodies, cultures, artifacts, and languages that inhabit its spaces. In the essay, “Flying Home,” Luiselli journeys to Mexico City, the place of her birth, and, staring out of her airplane window, considers the city’s layout from this great height. This act of “mapping” according to her extraordinary vantage (suspended in flight), allows for a greater, incantatory meditation on our various perceptions of “home,” and how said perceptions depend as much on the imagination and on ephemeral memories as they do on reality.   

This book showcases the extraordinary writing of the novelist and journalist Elena Poniatowska. She weaves together the voices of multiple journalists, her own reflections, and above all the testimonies of dozens of survivors of the two earthquakes that battered Mexico City and surrounding areas on September 19 and 20, 1985. It is both a moving report of people's suffering as well as a stirring portrait of how common people stepped in and created search and rescue teams and offered relief when government efforts failed. Poniatowska masterfully captures what many historians consider a key before and after moment in modern Mexican history.

I didn't realize a book could get the zoomies. América del Norte has instilled in me such great wonder and vicious prose envy that I may never recover. Rambunctious, bombastic, and sprawling, this work of autofiction left me saying things like, “No way!” and “What the hell?!” out loud like a complete buffoon. Sometimes because of the story and sometimes because of the audacity of the sentence structures.

Medina Mora weaves history, literature, politics, translation, and much more into a grand chronicle. Amid devastating historical narratives and global tragedy, I still laughed out loud at some parts and startled my little cat, who then also got the zoomies.

I’ve tried several times to understand the Mexican Revolution, with its cast of martyrs and rouges scrambling in a violent tornado of noble intentions and bloody treachery. Nava artfully demonstrates his chops as a writer by paring this seemingly incomprehensible sweep of Mexican history into an accessible and compelling narrative.

His characters are complicated and nuanced—Nava gives us no easy answers—and we watch them flail for salvation and fleeting promises even as society collapses around them.