THE BLACK MADONNA
Here in San Antonio, we know her by many names: Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, La Virgen de Guadalupe, or simply, Lupita. But the olive-skinned Virgin Mary/mother-goddess is a cross-cultural phenomenon, as Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures details in her new book, The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation (University of New Mexico Press, 2007).
In the following excerpts from The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation, Oleszkiewicz-Peralba writes about her native Poland and its fervent worship of Our Lady of Częstochowa, and the similar devotion in Mexico and the American Southwest to the Virgin of Guadalupe.
During my childhood, the figure of the Black Madonna, the famous medieval icon of the Mother of God—Queen of Poland—situated in her sanctuary of Częstochowa, was a pervasive presence. She was and still is the object of multiple processions and peregrinations in all regions of Poland. Her images seemed to be everywhere and were manifested in different ways, as the Częstochowa rendition is only one of hundreds of sacred icons of the dark Madonna in Poland. When Poles emigrated to distant lands, they took the Madonna with them and often established new sanctuaries, such as the Black Madonna of Częstochowa Shrine and Grottos in Eureka, Missouri; in Doylestown, Pennsylvania; and in Czestochowa, Texas. Significantly, the town of Panna Maria (Virgin Mary), near San Antonio, Texas, dedicated to the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, was the first Polish settlement in the United States (1854). A grotto dedicated to Our Lady of Częstochowa was built in San Antonio in 1966 to commemorate the Polish millennium of Christianity (966–1966).
I was born in Poland less than a decade after World War II, which saw the destruction of 90 percent of my hometown, Warsaw. To this day I remember vestiges of the prewar city with its distinct flavor, as well as the ruins, and the stories accompanying them. I also recall the Slavic folktales read to me at bedtime and the legends studied in school. Those tales reemerged as I was researching the fervent worship of the Black Madonna for this book. My family’s experience was typical of postwar Poland. My father was born in Wilno, now Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. Wilno was an important Polish cultural center, supporting four languages and cultures before World War II. Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, and Jews shared this corner of northeastern Europe. They had their own Dark Madonna, Our Lady of Ostra Brama, whose picture crowns the city gate. Even today, people kneel on the street in front of her. My father was subjected to the postwar events that led to the diaspora of eastern Poland, whereby its inhabitants were forced to relocate to the western region if they wanted to remain in the Polish nation after Lithuania became incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940 and was occupied by the Nazis in 1941.
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— UTSA Associate Professor Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba