ABSTRACT
Believed by Catholics to have been the mother of the Virgin Mary and grandmother of Jesus, St. Anne enjoyed remarkable devotion in sixteenth־, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Mexico. Numerous colonial hagiographies, sermons, and devotional texts, as well as countless visual images, lauded her as the “Mother of the Mother of God” and the “most holy Grandmother of Jesus.” 1 Many Mexican villages, chapels, churches, and missions were named after her. Today Anne remains a venerated saint in Mexico. Anthropologists recently documented thirty-one communities that celebrate her July 26 feast day, plus forty additional locales where Mary’s Nativity is observed on September 8. 2 Thus, after the Virgin Mary, St. Anne is the most celebrated female holy person in Mexico. What is so remarkable about St. Anne’s vigorous following in Mexico is that her cult attained popularity despite Spanish Church and Inquisition attempts to squelch such devotion. In fact, St. Anne’s cult flourished in colonial Mexico at the very time it declined in importance in Spain. Why did the cult of St. Anne prosper in Mexico as it dwindled in Spain? Positing answers to that question, which take into account the creation of new hybrid cultural forms in colonial Mexico, is the goal of this chapter.
