Flowers for Guadalupe/Flores para Guadalupe explores the importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a liberating symbol for Mexican women today. In the course of this richly textured treatment of an evolving symbol, twenty-three women speak out, in traditional testimonio format. This unusual "contata" of women's voices representing urban, small-town, and rural communities, is intercut with scenes of daily women's work and celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe in various contexts, including festivities organized by the Comite Guadalupano in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, N. Y.

Women have been silenced for centuries in Mexico. By focussing on various feminine forms of devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe as Mexican women's "role model," an entire world of consciousness unfolds. It is a resilient, hard-working, often painful, violent world, encompassing women of all ages and from various walks of life. They belong to a wider world of popular devotion, historically both exploited and dismissed as unimportant by ecclesiastical authorities who would keep women in a place where they no longer want to be.

The documentary follows an all-women's pilgrimage from Queretaro state through several arduous but joyful days as it weaves its way through difficult terrain, harsh weather and congested streets to the Virgin's shrine in Mexico City. The songs of Rosa Martha Zarate, Mexico's "singing nun," sustains this and everywoman's pilgrimage.

Guadalupe Arts Center Festival, 1997
Commendation, Society for Visual Anthropology, 1996
Cert. of Merit, Chicago International Film Festival, 1996
Award of Merit, Latin American Studies Association, 1996
Southwest Council for Latin American Studies, 1996