Page "Our Lady of Guadalupe" Paragraph 21

Guadalupe continues to be a mixture of the cultures which blended to form Mexico, both racially and religiously, " the first mestiza ", or " the first Mexican ".

" bringing together people of distinct cultural heritages, while at the same time affirming their distinctness.

" As Jacques Lafaye wrote in Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe, " as the Christians built their first churches with the rubble and the columns of the ancient pagan temples, so they often borrowed pagan customs for their own cult purposes.

" The author Judy King asserts that Guadalupe is a " common denominator " uniting Mexicans.

Writing that Mexico is composed of a vast patchwork of differences – linguistic, ethnic, and class-based – King says " The Virgin of Guadalupe is the rubber band that binds this disparate nation into a whole.