The Virgin of Guadalupe by John Annerino

Author:John Annerino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
Published: 2012-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

One summer I set out to explore the Camino del Diablo on foot. I wanted to experience firsthand what tireless Jesuit missionaries like Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino had seen and endured during their remarkable journeys through merciless deserts. The only people who dwelled in what pioneers and forty-niners later cursed as hell on earth were the indigenous Hia Ced O’odham (People of the Sand), who roamed the Empty Quarter of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Sonora on a never-ending quest for food and liquid, which they harvested from natural sources to sustain them in one of the harshest deserts on earth. Everyone else was just passing through—if they could survive the journey.

Many did not. The dry winds of the largest sand sea on the continent blew across the forlorn trails of missionaries, California-bound emigrants, and gold seekers. Their rough, often waterless, journeys fomented apparitions of a mysterious Lady in Blue. She was later identified as Franciscan nun Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda. When the renowned mystic was interviewed in Spain in 1631 by Fray Alonso Benavides about her travels through the deserts of New Spain, the venerable nun vowed she’d had hundreds of trance-induced bilocations from Spain and that she had ministered to the Indians in the deserts of West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona between 1620 and 1631. Church investigators did not want to believe such raptures, but the Jumanos of New Mexico confirmed they had been taught by the “Woman in Blue.” She had received a calling and she traveled on the winds of God. Some believe her benevolent spirit still floats across the mysterious desert hinterlands.

The Lost Mission of the Sierra Madre, Saint Arcangel de Guadalupe of Satevo Mission, Chihuahua, Mexico.

La Misión Perdida de la Sierra Madre, Misión de Santo Arcángel de La Guadalupe de Satevó, Chihuahua, México.

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