Our Lady of Guadalupe
This is everyone’s Fiesta! Gather your family, join your neighbors, or your co-workers, find out when is your hotel’s pilgrimage (say “peregrinación”), but don’t miss it!
On the first days of December we can enjoy and participate in one of the most deeply ingrained and genuine tradition in Mexico.
Because these are the celebrations leading to December the12th, when we celebrate the anniversary of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. (By the way, anyone named Lupe or Lupita, it’s because his or her name is Guadalupe).
The members of every neighborhood, every family, every company, organize to parade together through the streets of Puerto Vallarta, all the way to the Parrish (known to most as The Cathedral) built to honor Our Lady of Guadalupe, singing, carrying candles, offerings, banners expressing their devotion to the Virgin, and even floats and wagons featuring the various ways in which we perceive and appreciate her apparitions and her favors.
 It is a celebration that is full of colors, music, dancers, peddlers of food, toys, balloons. But mainly, it is a feast that overrides all that could otherwise confront or separate us, as social and wealth levels, racial or geographic origin, political or sexual orientation, commercial jealousy or rivalry, etc.
All in all, it is by far the Fiesta that best unites us all, Vallartans and visitors alike.
So goes the legend, that almost 500 years ago, in 1531, the Virgin of Guadalupe made her appearance to an Indian named Juan Diego on the hill of El Tepeyac, in the outskirts of Mexico City.
The Virgin asked of him for a Shrine to be built in her honor, he, in turn informed the Bishop of the New Spain, Fray Juan de Zumárraga.
Juan Diego gave testimony of her repeated apparitions though the Bishop was not convinced of their veracity.
The Virgin then asked Juan Diego to cut some roses (that only she could make blossom at that time of the year) and to take them along with her request.
So did Juan Diego, and upon opening his “tilma” (a mantle-like indian garment), it miraculously bore a most artistic rendering of the Virgin the falling flowers left behind.
The Bishop was so impressed by this proof, as to the extent of ordering the construction of the Shrine of Guadalupe, a place of veneration where this miraculous mantle occupies the most prominent space and is now the second most popular and most visited Christian Shrine in the world after Saint Peter’s in the Vatican.
The Virgin of Guadalupe, la Virgen Morena (the Dark Skinned Virgin). Is the second most revered religious figure in Mexico, only comparable to JesusChrist; many called her Tonantzin. Some sort of substitution that the former Aztecs could find more assimilable is understandable as this was the name of the Aztec gods revered at the same site of the Virgin’s apparitions.
Later, in 1810, Don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the catholic priest that initiated the rebellion for our independence, would bear a standard of Our Lady of Guadalupe to head the uprising that would defeat the Spanish Crown’s colonial rule of Mexico. From then on, he is known as the Father of our Nation.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, the omnipresent image to which we Mexicans, invoke in times of despair and sorrow, she is the undisputable Mother of our Nation.
Eduardo Rincón Gallardo
E-mail: toureps@prodigy.net.mx
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