The migrants and their unlikely saint

The paradox

A saint who did not want us to leave

In 1920, while still a twenty-year-old seminarian, Toribio Romo wrote a one-act play titled Let's Go North! (¡Vámonos al Norte!). It was a moralizing comedy meant to be performed at village festivals, in the style of Mexican Christmas pastorelas but with contemporary subject matter. The plot was simple: a character named Don Rogaciano returns to his village after several years in the United States speaking broken English and despising the ways of the countryside. A peasant named Sancho, who never left, disarms him with common sense and the humor of Los Altos. In the end, Rogaciano acknowledges that in the North he had lost more than he gained.

The message of the young seminarian was the message of the entire Mexican Church of his time, and especially of the bishops of Los Altos: don't go. The North corrupts you. They lose you to the factory, the tavern, the distance. Stay on the land.

It is one of the great ironies of recent Mexican religious history that the author of that play — a priest who devoted part of his ministry to dissuading the peasants of Tequila from crossing the border — became, decades after his death, the unofficial patron of migrants. The paradox does not invalidate the devotion. But it complicates it, and it is worth facing squarely before entering into the stories themselves.

The source that documents this fact is unexpected: an essay published in Texas Monthly in November 2010 by David Romo, a Texan writer and great-grandnephew of the saint. Romo traveled to Santa Ana de Guadalupe at fifty, for the first time, to try to understand what his priest-uncle — a nearly taboo figure in the family — had to do with the man in the red pickup truck that migrants spoke of. His essay is tender and skeptical at once. It recognizes the popular devotion as a real phenomenon while casting doubt on its more concrete details. It remains, to this day, the best critical text on the cult.

The accounts

The young man in the blue shirt

The first documented stories of Saint Toribio appearing to migrants in trouble begin to appear in the 1980s. There is no exact starting date because the phenomenon emerges, as popular devotions often do, by accumulation: one person tells it, another repeats it, it appears in a Sunday homily, it reaches the religious press, and one day it is clear that it already exists.

The accounts share a common structure. A Mexican migrant — almost always male, almost always young, almost always undocumented, almost always from western Mexico — tries to cross the desert of Sonora, Arizona, or California, usually at night or dawn. He gets lost. His water runs out. He feels he is going to die. At that moment a figure appears: a young man, sometimes with dark skin and hair, sometimes blond and blue-eyed, dressed simply — blue shirt and jeans, some say; hat and boots, others; cassock, a few. Sometimes he arrives in a red pickup truck. The man offers him water, food, sometimes money. He points the way. Sometimes he takes him to a farm that needs workers. Before disappearing, he asks only one thing: that when he can, the migrant should go to Santa Ana de Guadalupe, in Jalisco, to thank him. Weeks or months or years later, the migrant arrives at the village, asks after Toribio, and someone says: «There's no Toribio here, only Father Toribio, who rests in the chapel.» He enters, sees the photograph, and recognizes him.

The first documented witness — the one who begins, so to speak, the series — is usually cited as María Nick Rivera, who said she was guided by Toribio through the Altar desert in Sonora toward the end of the 1980s. Then came dozens, then hundreds. The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Univision all ran features between 2002 and 2014. The cult's popularity exploded.

The blond man variant

There is a variant of the account that deserves separate mention, because it says something about the way migrants imagine their own salvation. Some witnesses insist that the man who helped them did not look Mexican: he was blond, white, with blue eyes, speaking Spanish with an accent. In those accounts, when the migrant recognizes the photograph at Santa Ana, he recognizes the resemblance too — but continues to insist that the man who saved him seemed American. Father Miguel Ángel Padilla, rector of the shrine, has told the press that these testimonies are frequent.

Anthropologists who have studied the cult read the variant as a psychological device: the saint who saves the migrant is not only Mexican; he is also, momentarily, American. He protects from both sides of the border. At this point the devotion is no longer purely religious: it is a commentary on the experience of migration itself.

The walls of the shrine

What those who returned write

Inside the shrine of Santa Ana de Guadalupe, the walls are covered with ex-votos. They are humble pieces — handwritten messages on cardboard, notebook paper, napkins; photographs of relatives, American work IDs, photocopied Social Security cards, empty backpacks. Sometimes they accompany small traditional Mexican painted retablos. Sometimes they are just a line of thanks in the handwriting of people who did not get much schooling.

The anthropologist Renée de la Torre, who has studied the cult for over fifteen years, recorded the following among hundreds:

The testimony refers to the Victoria, Texas trailer tragedy of May 14, 2003, in which nineteen migrants died of asphyxiation inside a trailer abandoned by the smuggler. Dagoberto was one of the survivors. His ex-voto was written with no mediation from a priest or a spell-checker. It is photographed, recorded, and — as far as is known — still hangs on the shrine wall.

What appears on the ex-votos is not always a plea for help crossing the desert. Increasingly, thanks are given for things that the current immigration system has rendered miraculous: a visa granted, an asylum case that moved forward, a court hearing that went well, a deportation avoided, a stable job after years of uncertainty, a family reunification after twenty years of separation. In the past five years, with the tightening of US immigration policy, supplications for absences have multiplied: for a child who has not written in months, for a husband in detention, for a father who died on the other side before his children could see him.

The making of a patron saint

Three men and a shrine

The devotion to Saint Toribio Romo did not arise spontaneously or fall from the sky. It is the result of three overlapping priestly careers and a historical and migratory context that made its expansion possible. It is worth naming the three priests, because without them the cult would have remained at the scale it had in 1990: a few dozen thank-yous in a notebook.

Father Román Romo (1907–1981)

The martyr's younger brother. Ordained a priest a few weeks before the martyrdom, he survived the war and dedicated the rest of his life to preserving Toribio's memory. He wrote the first unpublished biography, gathered testimonies from eyewitnesses, negotiated the translation of remains from Guadalajara to Santa Ana in 1948 with civil and ecclesiastical authorities, built the original chapel on the Mesita, and kept local devotion alive through correspondence with emigrant families from the ranch who had already settled in California and Chicago. Without Román there is no cause for beatification. He died in 1981, eleven years before the cause finally advanced.

Father Gabriel González Pérez (rector from 1997)

He arrived at Santa Ana in 1997, five years after the beatification, when migrant devotion was beginning to become visible but the shrine was still a modest chapel with nowhere to receive visitors. Gabriel built, literally and metaphorically. He raised dining halls, shops, bathrooms, a retreat house, a small museum dedicated to John Paul II, a walkway flanked by busts of the martyrs, a replica of Toribio's birthplace, and finally the new shrine — inaugurated progressively between 2012 and 2020 — with capacity for two thousand faithful. He negotiated the shrine's inclusion in the state's Cristero Route, gave interviews to Univision, Telemundo, Televisa, and TV Azteca, and positioned Santa Ana as the third most important pilgrimage destination in Jalisco, after San Juan de los Lagos and Zapopan. He has his critics: the question of commercialization is an open debate.

Father Miguel Ángel Padilla (current rector)

Successor to Gabriel González in the rectorship of the shrine. He has continued construction and deepened the migrant profile of the cult. He is the shrine's public voice in Mexican religious media.

The critique

David Romo, in his 2010 essay, asked Father Gabriel directly about accusations of commercialization. The priest's answer — transcribed in Texas Monthly — was pragmatic: when he arrived in 1997, Santa Ana had nowhere to buy a taco; now the church offers three dining halls with grilled meat for twenty-five pesos a plate. He prefers to hire villagers. For Gabriel, it isn't commercialization: it is service to the pilgrim. Critics — some academics, some clerics, some distant relatives of the saint, like David Romo himself — add nuance: it is hard to tell where service ends and tourist infrastructure begins. The answer is probably not black or white. A shrine is, among other things, an economy.

The academic reading

Religious rescaling

Contemporary Mexican anthropology has a name for what happened with Saint Toribio between 1992 and 2000: rescaling. The term is used by Renée de la Torre and Alejandra Aguilar Ros, the two researchers who have best studied the phenomenon, and it describes the process by which a local cult — devotion restricted to a village, a family network, a neighborhood — is elevated to a national or transnational scale through a confluence of factors: a miraculous narrative with emotional pull, an institutional infrastructure willing to promote it, a diasporic audience that needs it, and a historical moment that makes it plausible.

In the case of Saint Toribio, all four factors converged in the 1990s. The beatification of 1992 gave it ecclesiastical legitimacy. The arrival of Father Gabriel in 1997 built the infrastructure. The Mexican community in the United States — demographically enormous by then, especially in California, Texas, and Illinois, with active ties to Los Altos de Jalisco — needed a saint who spoke to their concrete experience. And the tightening of US immigration policy beginning in 1994 (Operation Gatekeeper in California, then Hold the Line in Texas, then the physical wall) pushed migrants onto more dangerous routes through the desert, where stories of apparitions found the most fertile ground.

The canonization of 2000 was, in this framework, not so much the cause of the cult as its official confirmation. By then, Santa Ana was already receiving tens of thousands of pilgrims a year. After the canonization, the number rose to hundreds of thousands, and by the 2010s to one million annually.

What this academic analysis adds to the devotion is not skepticism — anthropologists are not required to believe or disbelieve apparitions — but context. The miracle, if there is one, does not void the historical mechanism. The historical mechanism, if it exists, does not void the miracle. Both can be true at the same time, and usually are.

Coda

The compassion of the saint toward those who left

One question this chapter has been deferring from the beginning: how is it that a saint who in his lifetime wanted his people to stay became the protector of those who had to go?

There are three possible answers, and none of them is exclusive.

The first is that Father Toribio changed. Between 1920 — when he wrote ¡Vámonos al Norte! — and 1928 — when he was killed — eight years passed of revolution, religious persecution, civil war, and forced displacement. The very conflict that cost him his life pushed hundreds of thousands of Mexicans toward the North. His own people in Tequila, in Cuquío, in Sayula — those he knew by name — left or had to hide. An official hagiography says something beautiful on this point: «Perhaps for this reason he has become a special protector, from heaven, of the migrants and workers who suffer poverty and the forced leaving of their homes.» In other words: the saint is no longer the same seminarian of 1920. He has seen the war. He understands.

The second is that popular devotion does not demand biographical coherence. The devout people do not choose their saints by auditing their youthful writings. They choose them because at some moment they feel that this saint is there — in the desert, in the hospital, in the courtroom — and the rest falls away. The biographical record gets reorganized afterward, sometimes uncomfortably.

The third, perhaps the most sensible, is that paradoxes are not defects of religious devotion: they are how it works. A powerless people will not choose a Napoleon as their patron. They will choose one of their own — poor, young, badly killed, badly buried — who shares the experience of what it means to have the world against you. This is what the migrant people did with Toribio Romo. And in that gesture, more than in any apparition, lies the core of the devotion.

If you want to visit the shrine where all of this is manifested most intensely, continue to Chapter IV. →