Border Saints

As long as migrants have been around, they have had their own saints to pray to.

SANTA ANA de GUADALUPE, MEXICO April 27, 2004 (By Tessie Borden, Hispanic PR Wire) - As long as migrants have been around, they have had their own saints to pray to, taking their consoling images with them on their treacherous journeys. The Catholic Church recognizes some; others only have the sanction of the people.

Migration to the United States, whether permanent or temporary, is a long tradition dating to the end of the 19th century in a handful of states in Mexico, including Jalisco. And saints have been known to help these journeyers from the beginning.

Many come to Santa Ana de Guadalupe, a small Mexican highland town, to pay tribute to Saint Toribio Romo, one of the latest saints to listen to the migrants’ pleas and problems. Here, the migrants are easy to spot. They are the prosperous-looking ones.

“You know them by their clothes,” says Father Miguel Chávez, a priest at a nearby town who tends a shrine to an older Catholic patron. “They’re wearing their cowboy hats, their boots, their jeans.”

Their talk is also different. When Mexicans search for something to say, they stall with the word “este.” But the migrants use the more American “um.”

This small speck of a town in Mexico’s Jalisco state that began as an ejido, or communal farm, has been losing residents for years. They leave for the same reasons so many other Mexicans do—in search of jobs and a better life. Though a sign at the entrance to the town boasts a population of 395, Gabriel González, the local priest,
estimates that 284 people now live there.

But the migrants have been returning lately on Easter and other holidays—to worship, if not to stay. They pay homage to Romo, a priest martyred during Mexico’s bloody Cristero Wars of 1927-29, when a vengeful revolutionary government persecuted the Catholic church after centuries of its collusion and cooperation with the Spanish to subjugate Indians and mestizos.

At that time, Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles enforced anti-clerical laws that made priests and nuns second-class citizens. Church leaders reacted violently. They closed churches and fought pitched battles against federal forces all over central Mexico. Romo, a newly minted priest, was shot and killed in an ambush in the town of Tequila in February 1928. He died in his sister’s arms. Seventy-two years later, Pope John Paul II canonized him and 24 other Cristero rebels.

But many believers now say Romo has returned to help them face down thirst, hunger and the U.S. Border Patrol in their arduous, illegal border crossing to find jobs in the United States.

“Santo Toribio experienced all that,” González says. “He can understand the pain of the person who goes away and leaves his family behind.”

According to local legend, about 20 years ago a young man from the state of Michoacán who had been unable to cross the border successfully, was befriended by a man who told him, “I will take you across.”

And he did, though the young man had no money to pay him. “If things go well for you and you return to your homeland,” the man said, “come look for me in Santa Ana de Guadalupe.” Some time later, the young migrant returned to look for his benefactor. But he only had the man’s name. He knocked on door after door in Santa Ana, where many residents share the Romo family name, but no living person they knew answered the description he gave. Finally, an old woman showed him a picture of Toribio Romo, and the young man finally recognized his helper. The woman directed him to the local church, where an old ossuary with Romo’s bones was on display at the altar.

Chávez says there are other stories, like the one about two boys whose family commended them to Romo when they left for the United States. On returning from working the American fields, they saw Romo’s photograph in a corner altar of the family home.

“What’s his picture doing here?” they asked. “This is the man who helped us cross.”

Between 250,000 and 300,000 people now come to see Romo’s birthplace every year, and many have adopted him as their personal patron saint. Their dollars have followed them here.

Romo’s shrine is visible for miles, a pink stone church on a small hill comprising this tiny town of rain-rutted, unpaved roads. González has added to it in the past few years. Besides the church, there is a courtyard, a restaurant, a religious store, priests’ quarters, and, around the back, a long, wide esplanade in quarried rock, lined with the busts of Romo’s fellow martyrs. It leads across corn fields to another church built on the site of his birthplace.

González, who invokes Toribio Romo’s name at every Mass, says donations and a special contribution from the Church paid for construction, though he won’t reveal the total cost.

Other saints along the border
Toribio Romo is only the latest Mexican saint to answer the migrants’ prayers. Many border-bound migrants carry laminated pictures of the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of the Americas who appeared to an Indian in this land almost 500 years ago. In Tijuana, hopeful crossers light candles to Juan Castillo Morales, popularly known as Juan Soldado, a soldier killed by a mob in 1938 after being unjustly accused of the rape and murder of a little girl. And in Patambán, Michoacán, there is a figure of Christ the King who is also credited with helping migrants.
“It’s the same kind of story as Santo Toribio,” says Jorge Durand, who studies popular religiosity at the University of Guadalajara. “When you are in a situation of risk and danger, you affirm yourself in that which gives you security; what gives you security are your customs, your religion.”

Jalisco also has a long tradition of venerating its Catholic roots. After all, its capital is Guadalajara, perhaps Mexico’s most conservative and Catholic city. So the state has not one, but two migrant saints. The second is older, and a woman.

Not far from Santa Ana is a shrine to the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos, known also as La Sanjuanita, a colonial virgin who protected the fathers and grandfathers of Romo’s followers. Her ornate, two-spired church in the town plaza is the tallest building in town, and pilgrims and visitors come from all over the world to see her richly dressed image in a gilt altar.

Before Santo Toribio was canonized, legal and illegal migrants leaving for and returning from Phoenix, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York already were crediting her with safe passage, good health and good jobs.

And like Santa Ana, San Juan de los Lagos caters to migrants. The town has dozens of posadas, inexpensive hotels to shelter the 6.5 millon to 7 million yearly visitors to the church. They fill the pews at Easter and other times of year, including December 8, the celebration of Mary’s conception; February 2, the Candelaria festival; August 15, the festival of the Assumption and a day in which La Sanjuanita’s image is brought out to the main plaza; and the month of May, when believers sing “Las Mañanitas,” a traditional Mexican birthday song, to the virgin every morning at 5 a.m.

Migrants have left a profusion of tokens of their gratitude to the Virgin. The walls of a staircase near the main altar of the church are filled with mementos: wedding dresses, copies of university diplomas, baby clothes, locks of hair.

orshippers believe she has helped them marry well, get an American education, have a healthy baby. There are also the traditional retablos, folk paintings depicting the virgin watching over her charges when they run into problems, often while crossing the border. Durand says that, though retablos are a tradition throughout Mexico, no other virgin receives as many as La Sanjuanita.

A booklet for sale at the church gift shop has prayers designed especially for migrants on the journey north, prayers for those about to cross illegally and prayers for those being deported.

“I recognize that I have defied human laws,” one prayer says. “They arrested me for crossing a line that men have drawn as a frontier. I ask that You give me serenity to accept these conflicts of life and the necessary strength to overcome them.”

And just as migrants visit La Sanjuanita at her church, her image, too, goes to them. From July to October 2002, local priests took a replica to Chicago; Milwaukee; Devine, Texas; and several cities in California, including Fresno, Palm Springs, Moreno Valley, Roseville and Los Baños.