On September 11, 2017, between midnight and dawn, a statue of Fr. Junípero Serra—whom generations of California schoolchildren called “the Father of California”—was beheaded at Mission Santa Barbara.

Reading about the defiled statue in the paper, I immediately question my father, my dead father. (Looking up from his own perpetual quarrel with the morning paper, my father says the reason we exist at all, he and I—as mestizos, he means—is because of the Catholic missions in Mexico.) My father was a Knight of Columbus, though not of the degree that wears the plumed hat. My father was a boy during the revolution—Mexico against Mexico; he saw federal troops hang a young priest by the neck from a tree. For my father, the great tragedy of his birthplace was that Mexico had no unifying civic description of itself as potent as la Virgen de Guadalupe, whose apparition was the great consolation of his birthplace. In 1531, the Virgin Mary, dressed in the raiment of an Aztec princess, appeared to a converted Indian named Juan Diego. She addressed him in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. She sent Juan Diego four times into Mexico City to petition a skeptical Spanish bishop to raise a great church to her honor, thus reversing the dynamic of Spanish Catholicism by making a sincerely bewildered Indian the ambassador of the Mother of God.

You've reached the end of your free articles for the month.
Subscribe now to read the rest of this article.
Purchase this article for
only $1.99
Purchase
Already a subscriber?
Click here to log in.