Madona de Guadalupe Tonantzin

The Mexican people who cross our border pack among their scanty belongings a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The face of the Virgin and the story of her meeting with Juan Diego (the young Aztec man recently declared a saint by Pope John Paul II) symbolize the powerful and dramatic birth of a community.

Caught between two cultural worlds and arriving at a border marked by violence the indigenous people of Mexico discover the face of the “God through whom we live.”

With her dark skin and facial features combining both races, the white and the brown, Guadalupe liberates the capacity and the courage in the hearts of indigenous people to travel the path of rebuilding a community butchered and raped of its human dignity.

Every migrant has to learn that only the strength of poor people can change the direction of world history. Yes, whoever has power can lord it over many things. Yet the truly profound human transformations happen when “flower and song,” as the indigenous say, are united— when a people who aren’t even aware of their own rights and dignity dare to lift themselves up, to believe, and to set out on the road. Those people have indeed become, each one, a Juan Diego. They feel new strength, they have a “mother” who encourages them and has faith in their capacities. “Am I not right here and now your own mother?”

The transformation of what was impossible is under way.