Summary
Depicted above from the John Carter Brown Archive, is an image of a Native American, Juan Diego, kneeling in front of the Virgin of Guadalupe where the saint is handing them a rose. In the top left corner, there is another figure of a human on top of a hill picking flowers. In the description of the image, it says that the roses depicted were out of season and when the Native person went back to his town, no one believed his story of the Virgin of Guadalupe until they saw the bouquet of out of season roses.
The role of the church was a large part of the colonial system in Latin America. The church was their main accounting system for keeping track of things like births, deaths, marriages, and verifying legitimacy of ethnicity between Indians and Spaniards. There was no other option but to oblige by the church in order to obtain these important documents which were imperative for day to day life. Indians would have rested their faith in many religious figures and polytheism was not an accepted practice of the Catholic Church. Thus, syncretism was a way the Native people’s culture and traditions were blended into the church. Syncretism allowed for people to continue their worship of many figures like the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Therefore, the depiction from the John Carter Brown archive above demonstrates the Native American traditions of their culture intertwined with in the bounds of the Catholic Church beliefs allowing for such cultural blending.
