Zócalo Field Producer Laura Villalpando photographed these murals and altars in Los Angeles.

“The most complex and original creation of New Spain was not individual but collective, not an artistic but a religious creation: The cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. If the fecundity of a society is measured by the richness of its mythical images, New Spain was very fecund…. She was a true apparition, in the sense of the divine numen: a constellation of signs come from all the skies and all the mythologies, from the Apocalypse to pre-Columbian manuscripts, and from Mediterranean Catholicism to the pre-Christian Iberian world. In this constellation each epoch and each Mexican has read his destiny, from the peasant to the guerrillero Zapata, from the baroque poet to the modern poet who exalts the Virgin with a sort of sacrilegious passion, from the seventeenth-century scholar to the revolutionary Hidalgo. The Virgin was the standard of the Indians and mestizos who fought in 1810 against the Spaniards, and a century later she became the banner of the peasant armies of Zapata. She is the object of a private, public, regional, and national cult. The feast day of Guadalupe, December 12, is still the feast day par excellence, the central date in the emotional calendar of the Mexican people.

“Mother of gods and men, of stars and ants, of maize and agave, [she] was the imaginary compensation of the Indians for the state of orphanage to which the Conquest had reduced them. The Indians, who had seen the massacre of their priests and the destruction of their idols, whose ties with their past and their supernatural world had been severed, took refuge in [her] lap…. “

-Octavio Paz in his forward to Jacques Lafaye’s Queztalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness 1531-1813