The Mexican Museum in San Francisco commissioned Delilah Montoya to produce a contemporary codex for the 1992 exhibition “The Chicano Codices: Encountering Art of the Americas,” which sought to critique Quincentennial observances erasing indigenous presence. The artist created a seven-page book, Codex Delilah, Six-Deer: Journey from Mexicatl to Chicana, that depicted the consequences of the initial American-European encounter, and she used the heroine Six-Deer to visually record women’s contributions to this 500-year history. In the codex’s fourth panel, Six-Deer comes across Adora-la-Conquistadora, the artist’s revisioning of the New Mexican Catholic icon of Our Lady of the Rosary, La Conquistadora, the oldest figure of Marian devotion in the United States. Six-Deer contests the designs of the Virgin, who intends to forcefully convert the native peoples of New Mexico. Rather than capitulate, Six-Deer refuses to participate in New Mexico’s Reconquista of 1692. Although Montoya appropriated La Conquistadora’s traditional sartorial splendor, she proposed an alternate reading of this Conquering Virgin. This article reads Montoya’s depiction within the dimensions of La Conquistadora’s historical, religious, cultural, and iconographic contexts.
