A House of Faith and Flowers: Moving Through Commemoration and Place With the Virgin of Guadalupe in Salt lake City

Abstract

This dissertation examines Mexicano/a and Latine devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Salt Lake City, Utah, and describes the construction of translocal sacred senses of place through the novena and feast day celebrations for the Virgin. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research conducted in the Parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the project demonstrates that public events and programs enabled by vernacular Catholicism or “fe popular,” have shaped the landscape of Salt Lake City and served as powerful tools for advocacy and building community. Using interviews, photos, informal conversations, reflexive analysis of personal experiences, and archived parish records, this work also seeks to deconstruct and decenter limiting narratives that have sublimated and erased the historical patterns of movement between Utah and Mexico and the existence of Mexicano/a, Latine, and Catholic Utahns.

Accounts shared by parish members before, during, and after the feast-day season reflect the relational, intimate nature of devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe and clarify her role in sharing and commemorating untellable and unspoken stories. The dissertation further identifies a persistent pattern of (re)constructing senses of place in motion through the processions, pilgrimages, dances, rosary prayers, and other novena and feast day performances that migrate in and around altars dedicated to La Guadalupe. Such devotional acts engage with and influence systems of religious and social power and control, including ongoing negotiations between lay and clerical authority and attempts to empower or suppress vernacular tradition. These performances build, raise, and present the Virgin’s casita sagrada,” or “sacred little house.” Ultimately, this dissertation offers a consideration of translocal vernacular religious performances that construct sacred senses of place in contested environments, and acts as a model for a vulnerable, present, and comprehensive ethnographic approach to the intersection of place, religion, and belief.