Resumo
This article focuses on the genealogy and instrumentality of a particular item of "folk culture": Our Lady of the Minho. It is an image of Mary made in the late 1950s in which the iconographic features of the Virgin merged with those of the lavradeira, the paramount icon of the Alto Minho region. I attempt to frame the history of this image and its respective cult within the interplay of (1) a local religious folk culture, (2) a Minhoto regionalist movement particularly active from the 1920s onwards, and (3) ecclesiastic cultural and political trends at international, national, diocesan and parish levels. By means of this framing, I try to understand not only how the fusion of an image of the Virgin with the lavradeira became possible, but also how it has been open to different kinds of appropriation and significance.
