For those not acquainted with early twentieth-century Latin American politics, the setting of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory can be a shock.
Mexico is redolent of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the sixteenth-century apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Juan Diego, who appeared in clothing consistent with Indigenous symbolism and spoke Nahuatl, Diego’s native tongue. Catholicism flourished in the country, where, despite the Spanish missionaries spearheading its establishment, Our Lady of Guadalupe ensured that, to the native population, it never felt like a foreign imposition.
