Catholic Faithful Flock to Virgin Icon From Mexico

More than 1,000 faithful lined the streets of Oxnard’s La Colonia barrio Wednesday to view Nuestra Senora de Zapopan, a religious icon from Mexico’s Jalisco state that is said to have miraculous powers.

The small, brown, wooden statue--actually a replica of the 454-year-old original, modeled after the Virgin Mary--was enclosed in a plexiglass case, placed on a pedestal and carried in a procession from Camino del Sol and Rose Avenue to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church.

The key to the city of Oxnard, a gift last year from Mayor Manuel Lopez, dangled from its neck.

Local dance troupes in indigenous Mexican regalia shuffled and a Guerra band played a military welcome as vendors peddled everything from churros to smoke bombs. Oxnard parishioners and Franciscan priests from Zapopan, Mexico, tailed the procession, ensuring that the curious kept their distance.

“I was never able to see it in Mexico, never,” said Salvador Aguilar, a 51-year-old immigrant from Mexico’s Michoacan state who recently moved to Oxnard. “People crowd all around it. But I saw it here in Oxnard.”

The statue--believed to look after pregnant women and protect people from lightning, tempests and epidemics--will spend five days at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church for the second year in a row before moving to the San Fernando Valley on Monday.

Its home parish in Zapopan is filled with trinkets, photographs and money from often ailing people who say that after seeing the statue, they were able to walk again, shed life-threatening illnesses and suddenly reunite with relatives they had sought out for decades.

Since 1734, the statue has been carried on a four-month annual trek from Zapopan to a chain of Jalisco parishes. The tradition culminates every Oct. 12, when the icon is transported from Guadalajara back to Zapopan, as more than 2 million people watch. Even Pope John Paul II has made the pilgrimage to see La Virgen de Zapopan, as it is also known.

“There have been many, many miracle recuperations,” said Fray Carlos Woo, who accompanies the statue wherever it goes. “Of course, they are the work of God. But (people) like to show respect to the Virgin.”

Hundreds swarmed around the small, balloon-covered white car carrying the Franciscan priests and the statue as soon as it arrived in La Colonia. The priests, looking somewhat bewildered, kept the statue inside the vehicle until the chaos died down.

“It’s a very beautiful statue,” said Teresa Rivera, who scrambled to get a look at the icon with her three daughters as the multitudes rushed by. “It’s dressed differently than last year.”

Indeed, priests frequently change the statue’s dress to match the occasion, and its human black hair is regularly combed, said Fray Rafael Alvarez, who also travels with the statue.

For some of the spectators, the procession has revived a tradition they had all but been forced to relinquish when moving to the United States.

“We believe in the Virgin, and it means a lot to welcome it here to Oxnard,” said 50-year-old Jose Villalpando. “We can’t visit the church in Mexico every year to see it.”

Alicia Llinas, a former disc jockey at Oxnard’s KOXR Spanish-language radio station, organized the event for the second year. She hopes it becomes a tradition in Oxnard the way it is in Jalisco.

“The faith is so great that people cry just from looking at it,” Llinas said. “I cry, too. It’s not fanaticism. But when you see replicas in your house from an early age, the force of it is overwhelming. It unites a whole community.”