Some chroniclers recount that on July 31, 1817, on the slopes of Matasiete Hill, a bullet fired by royalist troops struck a medal of the Virgin of the Valley that a patriot from Margarita Island wore around his neck. The metal, which stopped the projectile and saved the combatant, served as evidence of a miracle that was interpreted by the people in resistance as a sign that the image, brought centuries before for the evangelization and domination of our indigenous peoples, had changed sides to protect and support those fighting for independence.
When that image arrived in the city of Nueva Cádiz, on the island of Cubagua, around 1530, the indigenous and enslaved people had been forced for years to harvest pearls, and the Virgin had come precisely to legitimize that system of exploitation that compelled them to descend to the bottom of the sea with no guarantee of return. In 1541, when a natural disaster destroyed Nueva Cádiz, the church where the sculpture of the Immaculate Conception was kept was buried under rubble. The image, however, was rescued without major damage and later taken to the Valley of the Holy Spirit, on Margarita Island.
Upon her arrival, some accounts indicate that the people of Margarita called her Our Lady of the Storm, due to her connection with the events in Cubagua. Later, given her location, she became known by her current name, Our Lady of the Valley. At that time, and with some justification, her image did not hold the prominent place it occupies today in the identity of Nueva Esparta. However, after her transfer to Margarita, the image gradually distanced itself from the institution that brought it and became integrated into the daily life of the island.
The events of the Battle of Matasiete consolidated this long process of appropriation and precipitated the moment when the colonizer's Marian image was embodied by a people who had decided to be free. The image that had arrived to legitimize an order of domination ended up protecting those who fought against that order. Only the Virgin who cares for and saves a life in the community takes root with its people. The incorporation of the European Virgin into the island's repertoire of beliefs occurred in a territory where the figure of the woman already occupied a role of caring for and safeguarding memory and life, which enabled this process.
The act of marooning that transformed the relationship with the Virgin has proven to be one of the most important identity markers in our islands. In La Asunción, the hermitage of Santa Lucía was built in 1575 as a space of religious control to gather and evangelize the indigenous population that the colonial order sought to control. With the abandonment of church worship, the community inhabited the structure, first as a market and then as a theater. When the passage of time damaged the infrastructure, a group of cultural practitioners, such as Luis Eduardo Acosta and the Sobretablas group, took on self-management to sustain cultural creation. The colony had erected those walls to control bodies and labor, but the people themselves took over the structure to decide which voices and which stories should emerge from within.
In his recent work created in that same space as part of the Ciudad Mural Festival, the artist Chamox, a native of Suamox in the Colombian Andes, recognized in the sea that sustains coastal populations the same force known in his Andean homeland as Pachamama, or Mother Earth; a figure whose representation allows for the connection of various female deities. This interpretation, forged in his own territory, finds resonance in the history of this archipelago. The Guaiquerí people, who fished in these waters before any Spaniard named them and reduced them to a source of wealth, built their existence around the sea as a maternal entity, while the Bantu and Yoruba traditions, torn from Africa to be enslaved, brought with them their own way of naming and resisting, whether by invoking Yemayá, associated with the sea and fertility, or by seeing in the ocean Kalunga, that threshold of the ancestors that ultimately endowed the European virgin with a protective and liberating force.
Thanks to this heritage, Nueva Esparta has a long history of welcoming and hospitality. The bodies and territories of this archipelago embrace all that sustains life. This explains the condition of the navegao (a term referring to a local term for a foreigner). The image of the Virgin came from Spain, and Chamox from the Andes. Both arrived from elsewhere and found a network of relationships that allowed them to recognize themselves in it. However, not every stranger is welcome. Like a pearl surrounding the intruder when they invade the oyster, Nueva Esparta has also learned to resist all that attempts to perpetuate the extractive practices of Nueva Cádiz.
The medal that stopped a bullet in 1817 remains etched in the memory of this land. On the wall of the old hermitage, Chamox poses today the same question that medal once answered: who sustains life when someone tries to end it?
