A SPIRITUAL MISSION
In 1946, a Bataan Death March survivor’s walk to Chimayó helped revive a tradition
The Bataan Death March survivors have to be given credit for reviving the pilgrimage. What it is today is largely to their efforts.”
Conrado Vigil was free from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp barely seven months when he set out on a 125-mile trek from his home in Belen to Chimayó
on April 9, 1946. Vigil, then 28, had vowed while a prisoner that if he survived World War II, he would make a pilgrimage to Chimayó, site of El Santuario de Chimayó, the rustic, 19th-century adobe shrine that now draws tens of thousands of pilgrims during Holy Week. Wire services documented his journey. The Associated Press reported on April 11, 1946, that Vigil told a New Mexico state trooper that he’d made one other memorable trek in his life: the Bataan Death March.
The annual Holy Week pilgrimage to Chimayó, which peaks on Good Friday, stretches as a tradition back to the 19th century, although it had waned by the early 20th century.
The pledge by Vigil and other Bataan veterans who followed his example really revived the practice, which grew into the tradition it is today, said Stephen C. Martinez, assistant professor of history at given said “The Santa Tuesday. credit Bataan Fe Community for “What Death reviving it March is College. the today pilgrimage,” survivors is largely have to Martinez their to be efforts. Only They a handful really of need veterans to be who given served credit in there.” the 200th and 515th Coast Artillery Regiment are still alive. Eleven live in New Mexico and three in other states, according to the New Mexico Department of Veterans’ Services. Six of those veterans contacted this week said they did not take part in the
Stephen C. Martinez assistant professor of history at Santa Fe Community College
Chimayó pilgrimage. A seventh, 96-year-old Albuquerque resident Santiago Lucero, a corporal in the 515th, said Wednesday he did not remember joining Vigil and other Bataan veterans in 1946 but that he made the pilgrimage in later years with his family, originally of Santa Fe. His thoughts had turned along the way to his World War II captivity and the death march.
“I would give thanks to God for everything, for bringing me home,” Lucero said.
Vigil, who left the Army as a corporal, died in 1992, according to the Santa Fe National Cemetery, where he is buried. During the war, he served in the Philippines, first with the 200th Coast Artillery and then with the 515th. National Guard soldiers from New Mexico made up the bulk of those units, about 1,800 men in total, which arrived in the Philippines in September 1941, according to the New Mexico Military Museum. About half survived to return home.
Four months after Japanese forces invaded the Philippines, American forces holding out there surrendered on April 9, 1942. Their captors put the Americans and their Filipino allies, about 75,000 men total, on a forced march of 65 miles up the Bataan Peninsula to a railhead, from which they were transported to Camp O’Donnell, a training facility the Japanese turned into an internment camp. Soldiers of the Japanese army considered surrender a dishonorable act that, in their eyes, dehumanized their captives, whom the Japanese routinely brutalized. They beat many and killed those who fell behind. About 10,000 men — 9,000 Filipinos and 1,000 Americans — died during what became known as the Bataan Death March, according to the military museum. Another 26,000 Filipinos and 1,500 Americans died of disease and starvation in camp, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Many of the survivors were taken by ship to Japan, where they were put to work in labor camps. Vigil was released from a Tokyo-area prisoner-of-war camp after the Japanese surrender on Sept. 2, 1945.
Vigil, who walked barefoot the last miles of his 1946 Chimayó pilgrimage, spurred more Bataan veterans to undertake the trek, according to contemporary news accounts. Less than a week after Vigil set out from Belen, former Army Staff Sgt. Jesus M. Silva of Santa Fe, 32, announced he and 11 other Bataan veterans would undertake their own pilgrimage that month.
“It’s not so long as the death march,” Silva told the AP. “I think we’ll make it all right. We’re in better condition — yes, quite a bit better.”
The veterans who started out for Chimayó originally intended to end not at the santuario, but at the nearby chapel erected in 1857 by Severiano Medina in honor of the child Jesus Christ, the Santo Niño de Atocha. It made sense as their destination, given the story behind the Santo Niño de Atocha, said Richard L. Rieckenberg, a freelance photographer from Santa Cruz. Rieckenberg researched the story for the santuario website.
When Muslims ruled Spain in the 15th century, according to legend, Christians imprisoned in Atocha, a suburb of Madrid, and their families prayed to the Virgin Mary for relief from their suffering. The jailers allowed children to bring food and water to their fathers in prison, but those without families went hungry. Until, the story goes, a boy whom no one knew and whose bread basket never went empty appeared to feed those unfortunates. The child was presumed to be Jesus Christ, and Santo Niño de Atocha became the patron of orphans and the abandoned, Rieckenberg said Tuesday.
“Local New Mexicans were familiar with the santuario and the Santa Niño and had prayed to him during World War II,” he said.
However, the Santa Niño chapel was still privately held by the Medina family, so the priest gave the veterans permission to go instead to the santuario, a block away. And they set up a shrine to Santa Niño, which is still there, Rieckenberg said.
The Archdiocese of Santa Fe acquired the Santa Niño chapel in 1992 and renovated it. Today it serves as a shrine to childhood. Its colorful interior includes tree trunks decorated with wooden birds of various species, handcarved by local children.
News accounts did not report when Vigil, accompanied by a 15-year-old cousin, Manuel Sedillo, completed his walk. Accounts show that the next wave of Bataan veterans, about two dozen of them and their families organized by Staff Sgt. Silva, set out April 28 from Santa Fe and arrived Sunday, April 29. Neither Vigil nor the larger group made the trek during Holy Week. Good Friday fell on April 19 that year.
The publicity around the two pilgrimages by Bataan veterans brought renewed fervor to what had been a local tradition, Martinez said. Newspapers from Miami to Minneapolis to Phoenix, including those in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, followed along with the pilgrims. That, and the advent of widespread, postwar travel by automobile helped popularize and reinvigorate the tradition, he said.
The veterans themselves told reporters they undertook the pilgrimage in thanks that their prayers were received and in remembrance of comrades who fell during the death march and in subsequent captivity. Martinez said the pilgrimage probably provided the men something personal.
“Given the trauma and posttraumatic stress of World War II and, particularly, their experience, it became a form of real therapy,” he said. “It was really a spiritual experience for them.”