Don’t eat the bear
Sometime before its eighteenth century settlement by Spanish priests and pobladores, California had been referred to as El Rincon del Mundo (the edge of the world). To the Spanish mind of the age it was truly out there at the edge of their known world. It was too far north from Mexico and the rest of Spain’s vast empire. Some thought it might be an island called California inhabited by women and ruled by a queen called Calafia. California’s name itself was the fruit of the imagination of a Spanish novelist, Garci Ordoñez de Montalvo. He envisioned this California as a place of unimaginable mystery and fantastic visions maybe even paradise itself. Guadalupe, like the southwest itself, has changed hands a number of times: first the Chumash Indians settled and inhabited the area, then the Spanish, then the Mexicans. The United States ultimately forced Mexico to surrender California and the present-day southwestern region through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The vitality of the imagination, its revolving door of ethnicities, the resiliencies of the residents and its return to its essential Mexican roots have enhanced its fundamental quality across the years.
Presumably the town takes its name from the patron saint of Mexico: La Virgen de Guadalupe, or from an 1843 (or 1840) Mexican land grant called Rancho de Guadalupe, originally deeded to the original Mexican residents, Teodoro Arrellanes and Diego Olivera. Arellanes and Olivera had acquired a massive 30,000-acre land grant from the Mexican government. Almost certainly their land grant was one of the more than 800 land grants given by the Mexican government in those days as part of its grand plan to secularize the missions and privatize its land holdings. Mexico hoped to populate the region, develop a diversified economy and protect it from European or American interests. In any case, according to the Catholic Church’s religious teachings, La Virgen appeared to a humble Indian, Juan Diego, on December 12, 1531 at the already sacred site of the Aztec Goddess Tonantzin. She was a brown Madonna that spoke to Juan Diego, a young Indian, in his native Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs and the dominant American language at the time of the Spanish Conquest in early sixteenth century. The fact of her appearance confirmed the very humanity of the Indians of Mexico at a time when their humanity was doubted by Spanish orthodoxy. She came to champion the humane treatment of the natives. As a result, she is closely associated with the aspirations of the humble folk across the centuries. Her image has been carried by famous political figures such as Miguel Hidalgo, Emiliano Zapata and the more recent movement to organize the farm workers by Cesar Chavez. And if Comandante Marcos were a religious man, which he is not, he most likely would also carry her image to bring the humble people to his cause like so many have before him.
La Virgen’s miraculous image, imprinted on Juan Diego’s garment, hangs in the Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City as a testament to the authenticity of the miracle. So the church has recently beatified Juan Diego, further etching the veracity of the event into church history and tradition. With the exception of the image of Jesus Christ on the cross, she is the most ubiquitous religious icon in Mexico and wherever Mexican Catholics reside. Guadalupe’s church is appropriately enough, Our Lady of Guadalupe; a symbol of Catholic humility for a humble town. Curiously it was originally called St. Isadore Catholic Church in 1875, rebuilt and renamed in 1957, to complete construction of the current church on its present site. Many of the Sons of Guadalupe and their families frequently attended church services here. No doubt, family members prayed for their safe return by pleading for the intervention of La Virgen.
And many of the Sons of Guadalupe attended weekly catechism classes through the Maryknoll sisters. Henry Alfaro recalled being inexplicably required to work Saturdays on church chores, in a sort of modern-day indentured servant position. He would be picked up in the morning and brought home later that afternoon. At noon he would be fed a somewhat mundane sandwich and Kool-Aid. To this day he has no idea why Saturdays were gobbled up by work for the Maryknoll sisters. Maybe he was being rescued from heathenism or they had a special fondness for him. He still doesn’t know.