Days of devotion in the California desert
Purépecha community celebrates the Virgin of Guadalupe through music, dancing and food
Outside a Catholic church in Mecca, about 150 miles east of Los Angeles, a nine-piece band launches into a song that recounts the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Desde el cielo, una hermosa manaña/La Guadalupana bajó al Tepeyac
From heaven, one beautiful morning/the Virgin of Guadalupe descended to Tepeyac
As the notes of the song waft through the cool desert night, María Elías stares into Our Lady of Guadalupe church. It is packed with Latino families from the eastern Coachella Valley who have gathered for las mañanitas, the Mass held on the eve of the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Elías, a farmworker and mother of five, stands shoulder to shoulder with women grasping blazing tapers; the candlelight accentuates the set of her jaw. Preparing to lead a procession into the church, she cradles a steaming bowl of incense in her hands.
Elías and her husband, farmworker Audelio Díaz, are members of a Mexican indigenous group known as the Purépecha. Since last December, they have played integral roles in the community’s honoring of the Virgin of Guadalupe. They invited people to their mobile home on tribal land near Thermal, California, for dance rehearsals featuring live music and bubbling pots of food over the past week.
Elías – clad in a white dress embroidered with colorful flowers and a red shawl draped around her shoulders, her dark hair braided into two long plaits adorned with ribbons – will lead a statue of the Virgin into the church, followed by a band and more than 100 young dancers.
“I have a lot of faith in the Virgin,” Elías says. “I know she protects me and can help me.”
Hosting the celebration, she says, is a way of offering thanks. The community, she says, donates money, cases of soda and bags of flour and cornmeal. They contribute time, labor and artistic skill, all in the name of devotion.
“I don’t have a lot of money,” she says, “but I can give love.”
A ‘constant battle’
The Purépecha have lived in the mountains of western Mexico since the Pre-Columbian era. They are subsistence farmers renowned for their weaving and pottery.
For decades, many have migrated north to the USA in search of economic opportunities. Among those is Merejildo Ortiz, who left the village of Ocumicho in the Mexican state of Michoacán and arrived in the USA in the late 1980s. Ortiz, a father of four, is the leader of the Coachella Valley’s Purépecha community.
More than 15 years ago, the Purépecha community in the valley began to hold Virgin of Guadalupe celebrations, incorporating the music, food and clothing traditions of their homeland, Ortiz says. Fewer than 100 Purépecha attended the initial festivities, he recalls. As the community swelled to nearly 2,500 people, he says, the events grew to include a week’s worth of preparations and community meals, as well as performances at the church that are attended by more than 1,000.
Ortiz says it has been a challenge to instill in his kids a sense of pride in the Purépecha language and culture, while encouraging them to embrace the diversity and opportunities available in Southern California.
“It’s a constant fight,” Ortiz says.
‘An honor’ to care for the Virgin
One family cares for a framed image of the Virgin, on loan from the Catholic church in Mecca, and a smaller statue of her for a year in this community.
That duty fell to Graciela Elías, 23, a Chico State graduate, and her parents, María Elías and Audelio Diaz, for most of 2019. They housed the Virgin in a plastic shed, decorated with string lights and tapestries, in their yard in the Oasis Mobile Home Park.
“It’s an honor to have her because she’s going to bring las bendiciones to our family,” Graciela says, swapping in the Spanish word for blessing. “She’s the mother to all of us, and she’s our guidance also.”
Catholics believe the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared before Juan Diego, an indigenous Mexican peasant, four times in December 1531 in a suburb of Mexico City.
Diego reported her appearance to the archbishop of Mexico City, Fray Juan de Zumarraga, according to Catholic accounts. The archbishop, the story goes, told Diego to ask her for a miraculous sign to prove her identity. She assured Diego his ailing uncle would recover, and he did. Diego’s uncle claimed to have seen her and said she wanted to be known as Guadalupe.
After accounts of the Virgin speaking to an indigenous man in his language, millions of indigenous people converted to Catholicism. St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin was canonized in 2002.
Purépecha families visited Graciela’s family’s mobile home throughout the year. They brought her fragrant bouquets of flowers and lit tall candles as they prayed for miracles. Graciela and her mother cleaned dried flowers from the shed each week.
Graciela’s family, as the Virgin’s caretakers, are responsible for hosting the week’s worth of rehearsals and celebrations at their home. It’s a commitment they are confident the Virgin will reward.
“We don’t really have much money, but people think we have money because we’re doing the celebration,” Graciela says. Her parents, she says, “knew that if we had the privilege to receive her last year, it’s because she wanted to help us grow as a family and financially.”
During the Virgin of Guadalupe celebration, Graciela and her family will transport the image and statue to another home in their neighborhood. Soon, another family will be bestowed with her blessings.
Rehearsals and reunions
As the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe approaches, Graciela Elías’ niece, Yesenia Elías, 15, ties an apronlike skirt around her waist and fastens her highheeled shoes.
In front of the Virgin’s shed, below tarps strung with colorful lights and colorful tissue paper flags known as papel picado, Yesenia and the other young people rehearse over five nights to banda music performed by a band, complete with clarinet, saxophone, horn and bass players.
The females, ranging from age 4 to college graduates, swing the edges of their skirts as they shuffle their highheeled feet and spin their long, dark ponytails. The males, from miniature to married, stomp in a hunched position, as if they were elderly. Incorporating elements of a traditional Mexican folk performance known as la Danza de los Viejitos, or the Dance of the Old Men, they hold canes in one hand and keep their other hand behind their backs.
Yesenia, a sophomore at Desert Mirage High School in Thermal, says she’s participated in the performance since she was 3 years old. It’s an opportunity to feel a sense of pride in her ancestral traditions and to wear the expensive, hand-embroidered costumes her aunt sends from Michoacán each year.
The celebration may be the closest, culturally, she’s been to Ocumicho. Yesenia, who was born in the USA, has never observed the holiday in her family’s hometown and doesn’t speak Purépecha.
“I’ve never been there,” she says. “My parents won’t let me go.”
As Yesenia and the other dancers practice, a group of women stir steaming pots of atole verde – a drink made from masa, or corn dough, and spiced with anise – over an open fire. The family members and friends who watch the rehearsal in the yard, wrapped in blankets and drinking generous helpings of
the beverage from Styrofoam cups, return home that night with their hair smelling of a campfire.
The Virgin is Purépecha
The Virgin of Guadalupe statue leaves the shed Dec.11, the eve of the holiday. She takes her place on an altar decorated with pink and white flowers and twinkling lights. She is draped in a dress embroidered with flowers and sparkles. A knit rebozo, or scarf, covers her shoulders.
There have been many interpretations of the Virgin throughout history. Today, she is Purépecha.
As the Virgin looks on, more than 30 women engage in an elaborate tortillamaking operation in the yard outside the home. They roll balls of cornmeal in their hands, then press them into flat disks. They warm the tortillas on the stove and flip. The women continue this assembly line – roll, press, warm, flip – until they have cooked enough for everyone to have three with their caldo de res, or beef soup. More, if the guests are lucky.
A smaller group of women nearby peel carrots and chop zucchini for the soup, using meat from one of two cows the community members butchered for the celebration.
The Virgin is loaded into a black Ford F-150 as the sun sets.
In the bed of the truck, she rides down the dirt roads of the mobile home park, past the eastern Coachella Valley’s expansive agricultural fields. The twinkling lights of her altar guide the young dancers and their families as they travel, caravan-style, along the dark rural roads to Mecca, where they will join a procession to the Catholic church.
The community of about 8,000 people shares a name with Islam’s holiest city in western Saudi Arabia, where millions participate in another religious pilgrimage.
A tradition preserved
Outside a Mecca elementary school, María Elías, clad in her traditional finery, joins other people in a procession to the church.
As caretaker of the Virgin, Elías walks in the center of a group of Purépecha women, adding more copal, or tree resin, to the incense holder whenever the sage-scented smoke starts to dissipate. Behind her, several Purépecha men cart the statue of the Virgin.
As the faithful arrive at the church, the band kicks into “La Guadalupana,” which recounts the story of the Virgin.
The young dancers leap into action. The boys wear masks and sandals festooned with bells. The girls are a rainbow of ribbons and sparkles.
Elías is at the front of the train as they arrive at the church doorway.
A year of time, energy – devotion – has culminated in this moment.
Elías enters the church, shuffling her feet to the music, with the young dancers in tow. Some young men stomp their feet with so much passion, the bells fly off their sandals and roll under the pews. Thrilled parishioners record the performance with their cellphones.
It’s a scene that – if tradition holds true – will be repeated next year, and the next, and the year after that.