‘Tortilla miracle’ brought hope and mockery to family
State Rep. Rubio recalls limelight after holy manifestation appeared on food item in 1977
One morning in 1977, two years before freshman state Rep. Angelica Rubio was born, her mother heated a flour tortilla on a skillet to make bean burrito for her husband at the family’s Lake Arthur home in southeastern New Mexico.
As Maria Rubio, a devout Roman Catholic, wrapped the tortilla around the beans, she noticed a thumb-sized face on it. She asked her oldest daughter, Rosy Rubio, what she thought the face looked like. The daughter confirmed her mother’s suspicions: the face was that of Jesus Christ.
It was an encouraging sign for the woman.
Now, as the 40th anniversary of the tortilla miracle approaches in October, Angelica Rubio is coming to terms with a deeply personal experience that became an international curiosity for years, drawing thousands of faithful people on a pilgrimage to the family’s home but also exposing Maria Rubio, a Spanish-speaking immigrant from Mexico, to doubt and even mockery at a difficult time in her life.
In an interview with The New Mexican, Angelica Rubio, a Las Cruces Democrat elected in November to the state House of Representatives, recalled how she had been ashamed of the manifestation but eventually grew to embrace it. For the past three years, she has been writing about the episode, how it affected her and the cultural meaning it has for her on a blog titled The Tortilla Kid.
By some accounts, the tortilla has been described as the first culinary manifestation of Jesus’ face — or at least the first Jesus-on-a-tortilla miracle. Since then, there have been numerous reports of Jesus and other holy figures appearing on food, part of a phenomenon of holy sightings that date back centuries.
The tortilla had been preserved until about a decade ago, when it broke into pieces.
The goal of Angelica Rubio’s blog, which also chronicles her first year as a lawmaker, is to explain to those who have rejected her mother’s claim about the tortilla — and even ridiculed the woman — that the image of Jesus was a sign to Maria Rubio that God would soon lift her family out of a rough period.
The family had been living in poverty, Maria Rubio was suffering from depression and her husband was battling alcoholism.
As the tale goes, when Maria Rubio discovered the image of the face, she cut it out of the tortilla to preserve it and went to her local priest, asking him to bless it. He did but would later dismiss the miracle.
“I’m not too impressed with that kind of miracle,” The Rev. Joyce Finnigan told a Los Angeles Times reporter, according to a story published in 1978. “Since Mrs. Rubio came to me, I’ve fried a lot of tortillas, and I’ve found that if you do it often enough, you’ll get a lot of things.”
Still, Angelica Rubio said, the priest spread the word about the face of Jesus on the tortilla, and in the following years, thousands of people from nearby communities and across the world came to the home to leave flowers and photograph the tortilla.
When she was a child, the tortilla’s fame overwhelmed Angelica Rubio, the youngest in the family of five sisters and one brother. Her parents worked a lot, she said, so she was often home alone when the strangers came, eager to get a glimpse of the tortilla. She would open the door and direct them to a shrine inside the home.
The visitors gave her a nickname, “The Tortilla Kid,” a sobriquet she hated because it was condescending, Angelica Rubio said.
Countless journalists interviewed Maria Rubio, and she went to New York for an appearance on a TV show. The incident also inspired movies, including a feature film in 2007, Tortilla Heaven, starring famed comedian George Lopez.
Not all of the attention to Maria Rubio was flattering.
When Angelica Rubio went to college at New Mexico State University, she began researching articles about the tortilla. What she found angered her, she said, because many of the stories mocked her mother.
“A story that was super personal evolved into something that was made fun of,” Angelica Rubio said. “It made it difficult for her over time.”
Still, her mother continued to give interviews, maintaining her faith, and welcomed guests to her home.
“I tell them my message,” Maria Rubio told the Los Angeles Times. “I believe I must show my faith because I believe the appearance of Christ is a message for all to unite with each other and become brothers and sisters.”
In 1994, she appeared on The Phil Donahue Show with her daughter Rosy, who served as a translator.
She has never watched the whole episode, Angelica Rubio said, because the audience turned the tortilla miracle into a spectacle.
During the introduction of the show, as talk show host Donahue recapped the Rubios’ story, members of the audience snickered. And toward the end of the show, during a question-and-answer segment, one woman made a comment to her mother and sister that Angelica Rubio believes
was condescending, if not subtly racial.
“I just want to say that although I’m not much for tortillas, I am going to keep a close eye on my potato chips,” the woman said as she winked at the Rubios and gave them an OK sign.
In retrospect, Angelica Rubio said, if she would have been asked to accompany her mother to New York for the show, instead of her older sister, she would have said no.
The message that didn’t get across, she said, was that amid a perilous time for the family, her mother had been looking for any sign that things would turn around — that her depression would let her live comfortably, that her husband would stop drinking and that the family would no longer live in poverty. The tortilla gave her hope. “I think was a sign for her at the time and became a symbolism that she needed,” Angelica Rubio said.
In part, she said, it was a challenge for her mother to get that message out because she only speaks Spanish.
Gustavo Arellano, author of the syndicated column ¡Ask a Mexican! and editor of the alternative newspaper OC Weekly in Orange County, Calif., has suggested that it wasn’t just Maria Rubio’s language that led people to question the credibility of her message, but her Mexican heritage itself.
In his book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, Arellano wrote the following:
“The Miracle Tortilla became an icon of roadside America, dismissed as the hallucinations of funny old Mexicans — no less an authority than God Himself, at least as portrayed in The Simpsons, once excused himself from talking to mankind by stating, ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have appear on a tortilla in Mexico.’ ”
Contact Uriel Garcia at 505-986-3062 or ugarcia@sfnewmexican.com. Follow him on Twitter @ujohnnyg.