ReCurrent: Roses & Pixels

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Announcer: This is a Getty podcast.

Jaime Roque: Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2001.

The Museum of International Folk Art unveils a new digital photograph called Our Lady.

[Upbeat music begins]

Spotlights flare. Familiar Virgen de Guadalupe symbols—gold rays, teal cloak, crescent moon, bed of roses—frame an unfamiliar center. A young mujer, hands on hips, chin lifted, and robe parted to reveal rose-patterned bikini bottoms. Below her, an angel—bare-chested, arms wide—unfurls monarch-orange wings.

[angry crowd yells] Outraged Catholics say the artist has crossed a sacred line. The local archbishop brands the print “blasphemous”; protesters clutching rosaries encircle the museum, and even a bishop across the Atlantic weighs in. Why? Because a queer Mexicana artist named Alma López dared to re-imagine a centuries-old sacred icon as the strong nurturing woman she grew up with.

Alma López: I was just like, wait a second. I’m Mexicana! I grew up with this image.

Roque: So what is it about this Virgen de Guadalupe—around for nearly five centuries—that some venerate as holy, while others wear like a cultural badge? Virgin de Guadalupe on bikinis, on skateboards, t-shirts, hats, bumper stickers, tattoos. These aren’t relics; they’re identifiers—markers of who we are.

To understand why that single print made so much noise, we need to step back—before Photoshop, before murals, before Mexico itself.

Hello my name is Jaime and Welcome to season two of ReCurrent.

[Upbeat music ends]

[church bells chime] From basilica candles in Mexico City to corner-store walls on Whittier Boulevard, and the glass case of my parents’ jewelry shop where her medallions outsold every crucifix and charm we carried: La Virgen de Guadalupe is everywhere. And my family wasn’t Catholic, but in a Mexican family, someone in the family always is and you still learn the rules: respect the Virgen de Guadalupe. My aunt kept a framed Virgen de Guadalupe in the living room and my cousin—the king of filthy language—would not drop a single cuss word in that room. Step outside and it was “F-bomb city”, but in front of her? Total respect.

As I got older I started spotting her everywhere in LA. Nothing religious in nature, just a “Cool, I know my peeps are nearby”. At the same time, I started to look at the Virgen de Guadalupe as like this cool art that represented heritage for me. Heritage that doesn’t just sit in a gallery or in an archive. It hangs off a rear view mirror, sits on a wall and gets carried around on a necklace. Places that are familiar to me, and places that I didn’t know at the time is where heritage can be found.

So how did a miracle born on a hillside end up silk screened on polyester, and still sparks both prayers and protest? Let’s return to where the story began.

[Upbeat music begins]

December 9, 1531. Dawn on Tepeyac Hill near the new capital of New Spain. A Nahuatl convert, Juan Diego, hears birds that sound like bells. A brown-skinned woman wrapped in stars speaks Náhuatl: “Build me a temple here.” Roses bloom in winter; her image spontaneously appears on his cactus-fiber cloak, his tilma. The pigments never fade, and the fibers never rot. The Catholic Church recognized this as an apparition of the Virgin Mary. But for the Indigenous peoples of central Mexico, her appearance echoed older sacred traditions. The site itself had been dedicated to Tonantzin, a maternal deity in the Mexica worldview.

So the figure known as Our Lady of Guadalupe came to be seen as a blend of traditions, connected to the Virgin Mary, yet shaped by the spiritual and cultural languages of both Europe and the Indigenous Americas. Guadalupe is hybrid from birth: Indigenous and European, a symbol of both conquest and survival. Five centuries later she’s still remixed: rebel banners, freeway murals, corner candles, soccer match-day kits. La Virgen de Guadalupe’s first apparition happened outdoors, before any church wall was built for her—and it felt like a pure miracle yet also a deliberate, politically charged sign—and ever since, she turns up where her people are, more often outside church walls than within.

Roque: Spain won México with swords but completely conquered the territory with story. In 1531 the empire needed a miracle both Spaniards and Nahuatls would trust. Guadalupe delivered: turquoise robe, Aztec sun rays, European prayer hands. And yet only Juan Diego, an Indigenous farmer, saw her.

By the 1600’s, devotion to Guadalupe had exploded. Artists answered the demand for replicas with a flood of images—prints, canvases, even shell-inlay enconchados that shimmered like stained glass. Many works carried handwritten notes attesting they were faithful copies of the sacred tilma. I guess you can say she was the first viral image of the Americas.

Yet not every remix is welcomed. Alma López found that out the hard way.

López: My name is Alma López. I am a Mexican-born Chicana, queer visual artist. Growing up on both sides of the border, I just saw her everywhere. In, like, house altares or in the cemetery, the panteon, in churches. And also in these altares that were corner altares, you know, at the puestos for the taxis…here in Los Angeles, I think she was much more present everywhere. What I would see her is in the murals, right? Almost any corner, little market, whether it’s a liquor store, a 99 Cent store, she is just present everywhere.

Roque: Alma’s faith isn’t anchored to pews and altars—it lives wherever La Virgen de Guadalupe shows up on the street.

Then in 1999, just out of grad school, a headline in the LA Weekly grabs her attention.

López: I remember coming upon a story that basically was about the Virgen de Guadalupe murals in South LA and how the Virgen de Guadalupe murals were actually being tagged. It was a shocking thing to read, like, oh my goodness, what you think will never happen in a million, zillion years is actually happening.

Roque: The shock sparks talks with friends and a reading binge. One book lands hardest—Goddess of the Americas, edited by Ana Castillo. Inside it, a short essay by Sandra Cisneros poses a question Alma can’t shake.

López: What would I see if I raised the dress, right, of the Virgen de Guadalupe? Like I lift the dresses of my Barbies, what would I see? And so it’s like deep questions, but it’s deep because I think she’s really trying to find a more real connection to that image. I was relating to the essay and Sanda Cisneros was relating to the Virgen, right?

And so would I see a body that I can identify with, is her skin a brown skin? Does she have breasts? And she even says, does she have a panocha, you know? Or will she be neutered like my Barbies?

So when she asks those questions at the very end, I mean, I was like a little kid, like a third grader in class going, ooh, ooh, ooh, you know, pick me, teacher, because I know the answer. And so my answer at that moment was, well, she would be covered in roses. And why roses? Well, roses were the proof and signature of her apparition, and so then that’s how the image came to be covered in roses—the Our Lady image that I did.

Roque: Imagine a postcard-sized collage, stitched together on an early 99 version of Photoshop. In the center, a brown-skinned woman stands tall, hands on her hips, roses guarding breast and pelvis. The robe she wears is actually the Aztec moon goddess, Coyolxāuhqui—a warrior goddess. Behind her, Guadalupe’s gold sunburst flares, and below, a black crescent moon rests on the wings of a bare-breasted butterfly-angel.

López: The idea for this was that I wanted to show, you know, a Chicana, a Latina, who was standing, like strong, right, with her hands on her hip. I had asked her to stand, like how a mom or an aunt would be standing there right in front of us saying, “Orale Ya!”, you know? Or “Te voy a tirar la chancla”, you know. But also, what most people look at is really the tilt of her head. Instead of tilting down, she has this slight tilt up.

Roque: Alma named the piece Our Lady, making it clear she meant Guadalupe, but re-imagining a sacred image doesn’t come without noise. [crowd chatter]

Back in New Mexico, Alma’s Our Lady debuts in a state-museum show called “Cyber Arte,” Hours later the region’s archbishop is denouncing it.

López: It’s Archbishop Michael J. Shehan in Santa Fe, Nuevo México, who saw our lady and thought it was like a tart or a street walker.

When I was getting in trouble—in Santa Fe, Nuevo México, in Ireland, and different places,  it was the Catholic church, like officials in the Catholic church who were coming after me saying that I had no right to this image that, that I needed a letter from my priest to see if I really was a Catholic.

And so I remember thinking, wait a second, I’m Méxicana; I grew up with this image. Virgen de Guadalupe and I, we’re practically home girls, right? Because, I mean, we are Méxicanas, we're brown-skinned, we are chaparritas, you know, whatever!

Roque: Alma’s line opens a 500-year struggle over who owns Guadalupe’s image. Five centuries after Spaniards draped the Aztec Tonantzin in European silk, Alma drapes La Virgen de Guadalupe in digital roses—another round in the never-ending fight over who owns cultural icons and who gets to reinterpret them.

López: We have the image, so it’s real. The Catholic Church stole her from the Indigenous peoples and then gives her back to the community as if they are the owners. She is an activist and a revolutionary. First of all, we see her in 1810 during the Mexican independence from Spain. Father Hidalgo carries her as the flag. And then, 100 years later, during the Mexican Revolution against the Porfirio Diaz regime, the Zapata and Pancho Villa carried her into the pueblos and then also here in the U.S. with the United Farm Workers, right? Cesar Chavez and co-founding member Dolores Huerta. But I think that the spirit of activist and revolutionary started with Juan Diego and his Indigenous community .

Roque: Not everyone calling her art “blasphemy” is an archbishop with a press release. Everyday believers also had a lot to say about Our Lady. Here is one of them:

Woman: “Dear artist: Mi familia y yo could not believe what you have done by painting Our Lady of Guadalupe. This is not culture class; this is culture trash. Your painting has attacked the Mother of the Americas. Would you have painted your own mother this way? This is our Mother. It was your way of calling attention to yourself and disgracing Our Lady of Guadalupe and our people—la raza. Mi familia will keep you in our prayers. For you have a gift from God, but you have misused it by painting our Mother in a disgraceful way. God bless you, The Garcia Familia”

Roque: Alma received many emails and letters after that, but the argument never really came to an end.

[Upbeat music begins]

Two decades, three popes, and many shares on social media later, Alma’s Our Lady still splits opinion, and sometimes right at the merch table where Guadalupe is being sold. So I head to downtown LA to see how the debate sounds in 2025. Manuel’s storefront, which he operates with his wife, is a shrine in mini-form: rows of t-shirts, poster prints, stacks of prayer books, and every item holds the image of the classic brown-skin Guadalupe in her star-flecked cloak. [crowd chatter and street music]

I asked him if I could get his thoughts on Alma’s Our Lady artwork. The longer he stared, the more upset he became.

Manuel: Eh eh, lamentablemente lamentablemente, tu en primer lugar, la Virgen nunca se vistió así.

Interpreter: [Manuel continues to speak in Spanish] That’s really disappointing; the Virgin never dressed like that. You don’t play with the sacred—it’s like insulting your own mother. What a shame they do things like that. By doing things like that, this woman is offending her, and her end will be sad. You should never disrespect sacred images.

Roque: [to Manuel] Pues en eso estoy haciendo historias aver como, pues....”

For Manuel, the Virgen isn’t a vehicle for self-expression;  to remix her robe is to cross a line that can’t be unpainted. Manuel guards the Virgen like family, unchanged, untouchable.

Yet just a few miles east, another husband-and-wife team is running a different kind of tienda. At Espacio 1839 in Boyle Heights, La Virgen still graces the merch—but here she’s screen-printed on soccer jerseys, remixed into vinyl stickers, stitched into denim jackets, even painted on a seven-foot plywood cut-out that roams the neighborhood. Same mother, same love—printed in a whole new palette.

Roque: [on the street] Hey Nico!

Walk into Espacio 1839 in Boyle Heights and every inch tells a story.

On one jersey La Virgen sits front and center on an LAFC shirt, the Los Angeles Football Club: a colonial miracle printed onto a 21st-century supporters’ kit.

Nico Avina: Like you’re saying, it’s part of the culture,  you know, but then also the significance of the foundation of Los Angeles, right? Nuestra Reina Señora de los Ángeles right?

Roque: So Nico is bridging two LA staples.

Avina: You have a lot of people that have been or are into soccer, but now, you know, because I’m adding this cultural element, it’s sort of like this fusion of, like, man, I'm not only like repping the sport that I like, but I’m also representing part of my culture with the imagery that you’re incorporating into it, you know? So it’s dope.

Roque: Back in Boyle Heights, Nico Avina doesn’t just screen La Virgen de Guadalupe onto soccer kits; he puts her on buildings–fighting displacement one wall at a time.

Avina: You expose their humanity using these images, you know, and so for me…like this mural that I have of La Virgen reading an eviction notice.

Roque: Picture a plywood cut-out of La Virgen de Guadalupe that towers seven-and-a-half feet high. Her scarlet robe and turquoise veil are unmistakable, but instead of a shower of roses, she’s clutching a bright-red eviction notice, eyes cast down as if she’s just been served. Eastside artist Nico Avina calls the roaming shrine “Lupita Was Displaced,” and since 2018 he’s been taking her to every Boyle Heights address erased by gentrification: the rubble where the old Brooklyn Theater stood, the ghost lot of Jonson’s Market, the leveled Pico-Aliso projects. Each stop is a quiet protest.

Avina: That whole conversation is about, you know, once the demographics of a community change, so does the artwork, right? Like the murals that were painted in the communities or in the barrio, was because people had respect and they wouldn’t write over La Virgen. At least they wouldn’t before. So before, you know, you had them painted on garage doors on the side of apartments, on liquor stores, you know, and it was, they were there because people wouldn't write over La Virgen. Right? But the demographics of the community start changing. So does the artwork. So does that artwork that represents that community, the barrio. And so I did that piece in reference to that, right? Like that it’s…once the demographics of a community change, so does the art that represents that community. So, the murals get displaced too.

Roque: An image that once evangelized now serves as a warning: if they can evict La Virgen de Guadalupe, they can evict you too.

Avina: So it’s not only a tool for the colonizer, but it's also a tool as an artist to be able to share, um, the similarities of what your stories that you used against us, and how we as a people are going through this. And now you’re just ignoring us. Right? The displacement, the constant attacks on migration, you know? The Virgen for me represents a mother who migrated for the safeguard of her child, right? There’s that sort of respect for that mother figure, you know, that mother figure in the barrio that folks have respect for. [voice fades out]

[Mariachi music plays]

Roque: If Nico plants a roaming Virgen on every scraped-clean lot, Oscar Rodríguez builds his altar in your feed: handle @lavirgencita. He launched the page the moment he realized Virgen de Guadalupe murals were being tagged over or demolished as Boyle Heights gentrified. Each photo freezes La Virgen before she disappears and pins a digital map of places where our community can still see her and still feel at home.

Oscar Rodriguez: She’s more like a mother, you know—a safe space for Latinos.

Roque: We met at Mariachi Plaza and took a slow walk to see the neighborhood’s Virgen de Guadalupe murals. Oscar led me to one he’d already posted on @lavirgencita—a blue-and-rose Guadalupe now almost completely buried under graffiti that’s piled up over time. Only her glowing face peeks through the spray paint, as if she’s saying she won’t disappear. Oscar tells me this is why he records her: even a saint can fade if no one keeps track.

Rodriguez: When I ever see her around, you know, whenever it’s in a mural, whenever it’s on somebody’s shirt or tattoo, or like I said, you know, a bottle or a bottle opener, it makes me feel at home. It makes me feel I’m in a safe space. I’m around my community. I’m around the people, that speak, sound like—sound and look like me. And, you know, and it gives me…I feel like I see a piece of home. So, you know, it makes me…it makes my heart, you know, smile and like I said, and it makes me feel safe. And I know that I’m in my community, you know. She travels like memory from wall to shirt, from stickers to even skin, you know, people get tatted. People carry with her not just as devotion, but as a badge of identity. Wearing her on your shirt or getting her as a tattoo—it’s a way of keeping her with you in a world that doesn’t always make you feel seen.

Sometimes people say, even send me messages of people praying or some people saying like, hey, you know what? My brother passed away, you know, and seeing this reminds me of him. Just like how you mentioned, you know, when your mother passed away… [voice fades out]

Roque: Oscar’s final words take me back to Olvera Street—season one fieldwork. I’d wrap interviews then walk over to sit alone beneath a sun-bleached Virgen de Guadalupe at the small Catholic church across the street. I didn’t pray—I’m not Catholic, I’m not even religious—but during that time in my life I was a son just trying to keep it together after losing his mom. And that bench was a rest stop. The street noise, the vendors, the music—it all faded just long enough for me to catch my breath.

The quiet showed me why she matters. It isn’t about rules or church; it’s the small space she opens in the noise, a moment where grief lets go so you can breathe, reset, and move on. The burden stays, but in that stillness I felt the same gentle strength my mom once gave me. For the first time in my life, I lit a candle for her. [lighter clicks]

Just like Alma said, La Virgen de Guadalupe is everywhere in this great open-air basilica we call Los Angeles. While working on this story, I even spotted her four rows ahead of my seat, pinned to a Dodger-blue cap in a place they call “Blue Heaven”: Dodger Stadium.

I approach the guy, Dominic Wilkins from Santa Maria, CA, and ask him what he thinks of Alma López’ Guadalupe.

Dominic Wilkins: It’s not up to me to judge that. In the end, it comes down to the Lord. Hey, you know what—there could be some positives toward it, right? It could be bringing people to the real thing. Obviously, like you said, those images—there’s a real image behind that. And if that…whatever guides people closer to God, then I’m for it, you know what I mean?

Roque: Dominic tips his cap and slips back into the sea of Dodger blue, as I make my way back to my seat I start to take it all in, the conversation and the journey I’ve been on.

[Jazz music plays]

I didn’t have to walk into a cathedral to meet her. She found me on corner-store candles, freeway murals, polyester jerseys—and tonight, four rows ahead of me on a Dodger baseball cap. From Juan Diego’s tilma to Alma López’s digital collage, every generation redraws her outline, rewrites her story. And with each redraw the question changes: not “Is she sacred?” but “Sacred to whom—and for what?”.

Is La Virgen de Guadalupe here as intercessor, or mascot? The moment an icon slips outside the sanctuary, its meaning is up for grabs.

For some she’s still the mother of God, the mother of the Americas. For others she’s abuela’s warmth, barrio pride, defiance to the system—and sometimes all at once. No church gate can keep her off skateboard decks, low-rider hoods, Instagram feeds, swap-meet hoodies, dollar-store veladoras, or the gloss of a fresh forearm tattoo. That split—spiritual practice versus cultural heritage—is what keeps her alive. She’s a relic, saint, and rally flag, and sometimes in the same breath.

López: I would look at this and I would be like, really? Like, these people think that they have more of a right than I?...than any of us Chicanos or Chicanas, to be able to relate in a real way just the way Sandra Cisneros was relating, or trying to connect and make a significant connection to the Virgen. Really? So if anything I was just like, really?

Roque: That’s the pattern I keep finding: power flows to the hand that redraws her. Juan Diego carried roses, muralists carried spray cans, Alma carried pixels. Each time, the image shifts—from colonial saint to living protest to cultural badge of honor. The saint doesn’t transform herself—we do. Every new technology cracks the meaning a bit wider. Each remix nudges her along a spectrum.

Five centuries on, La Virgen de Guadalupe is still in motion—traveling with migrants, sparking art shows, fueling protest chants. Tomorrow she might surface on a metaverse avatar or a 3-D-printed ofrenda.

Wherever she appears next, the argument will follow—holy mother or cultural homegirl? Maybe both, maybe neither. And that tension—the push and pull over ownership of meaning—may be her most enduring miracle of all.

Thank you for joining me on this episode of Recurrent. This is just the beginning of season two, so stay tuned. We’ve got new episodes dropping each week, uncovering more of the cultural heritage that surrounds us.

Recurrent was written and produced by me, Jaime, with creative support from Zoe Goldman. Our executive producer is Christopher Sprinkle, and for transcripts, images, and additional resources for this episode, visit getty dot edu slash podcasts slash recurrent.