The Virgin of El Barrio

Marian Apparitions, Catholic Evangelizing, and Mexican American Activism

Kristy Nabhan-Warren

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780814758809
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Marian Theology

In 1998, a Mexican American woman named Estela Ruiz began seeing visions of the Virgin Mary in south Phoenix. The apparitions and messages spurred the creation of Mary's Ministries, a Catholic evangelizing group, and its sister organization, ESPIRITU, which focuses on community-based initiatives and social justice for Latinos/as.

Based on ten years of participant observation and in-depth interviews, The Virgin of El Barrio traces the spiritual transformation of Ruiz, the development of the community that has sprung up around her, and the international expansion of their message. Their organizations blend popular and official Catholicism as well as evangelical Protestant styles of praise and worship, shedding light on Catholic responses to the tensions between popular and official piety and the needs of Mexican Americans.

1
Estela Ruiz and the Virgin of the Americas
An Intimate Relationship

On the night of December 3, 1988, Estela Ruiz was deep in prayer. She was praying the rosary in her bedroom, accompanied by a small group of family members that consisted of her husband, Reyes; her son Fernando; and her daughter-in-law Leticia. Estela says that she was praying for three of her four sons and her two daughters, who were following the “ways of the world” and whose faith in God and Mary was lukewarm at best.¹ On this particular evening, Estela was praying especially hard for her youngest son, Reyes Jr., who was battling a drug addiction, and for a mending of Leticia’s and Fernando’s troubled marriage. Estela remembers clutching her rosary tightly as she stared at a print of the Sacred Heart of Mary that hung on the wall in front of her. She fingered the crystal beads, praying to the Blessed Mother to take care of her family.² As she was reciting the last decet of the rosary, she says, she saw a light emanating from the portrait; it grew brighter and brighter and she had to close her eyes. Estela describes this as a profoundly moving and life-altering moment:

I began to see this cloud form around the bottom of the Blessed Mother, but before the cloud, a bright light appeared. I tried to let go of the rosary to rub my eyes but I couldn’t; it’s like it was stuck to my hand. I felt like I was paralyzed, but not in a bad way. . . . My heart was going bum bum, bum bum. . . . I knew that we were praying the rosary, I knew what was going on . . . then She spoke to me and said “don’t you know that I am going to take care of your children?” I was praying for my children and She was listening the whole time! . . . After She spoke I knew it was Her. I began to cry “La mujer bonita! She’s here! Oh my God She’s so beautiful!” I was crying and tears were rolling down my face. . . . ³

This vision marked the first in a series of apparitions and locutions from Mary that would span more than twelve years.⁴ These encounters with the Virgin started with Estela’s experience as a visionary, and it is to the intimate relationship between Estela and Mary that this chapter turns. As the historian of Marian visions William Christian Jr. has written, “What people hear the saints say, or the way they see the saints, reveals their deepest preoccupations.”⁵ When we take a close look at Estela’s life before and after the onset of the visions, we can understand more clearly the moods and motivations—the preoccupations—that led to her apparitions. Estela was a middle-aged Mexican American woman in a self-declared “crisis,” and she desperately needed an intervention—which, according to her narrative, came in the form of the Virgin Mary.

Estela’s apparitions are very real for her, and to reduce them to one overarching explanation (e.g., the psychological explanation offered by Carroll) would render her experiences and her interpretations of them unfairly simplistic and unsophisticated.⁶ A multifaceted analysis, on the other hand, which melds sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, and theology can help illuminate Estela’s relationship with the Virgin. Estela’s experiences as a visionary are rich and complex, and they warrant and deserve an equally complex reading. In order to understand the familial visionary phenomenon that is an integral part of her own experiences and interpretations, we must start from the beginning—with Estela’s story, her historia. When we take a close look at Estela’s narrative, we can see that she grappled with ethnic in-betweenness and gendered expectations, and that her experiences with the Virgin enabled her to construct gendered, religious and ethnic identities that empowered her within the boundaries of her faith and her family.

“In and of the World”: Estela’s Life before the Visions

The Virgin Mary has been an integral part of Estela’s life since that first apparition on December 3, 1988. The emotionally charged evening marks the boundary between Estela’s old life and her new one, between profane and sacred time. She sees her old life/self in sharp contrast with her new life/self. Estela asserts that Mary arrived not a moment too soon, because her life was spinning out of control; she says that her desire for power and prestige in her career was taking her away from God and her family. Even though she was praying most earnestly for her children on that December night, Estela says that she was also praying for a more spiritual life for herself. What she calls her “conversion” had begun slowly in the months preceding her first vision, and Estela says that this is because she was being “prepared” by the Virgin Mary for her new role as visionary and communicator of the Blessed Mother’s messages to the world. According to Estela, the life-altering event that took place in her bedroom that December evening did not occur randomly; she says she was specifically chosen to be one of Mary’s messengers. Mary appeared to her, Estela says, because “She had to. I needed a radical conversion and to have my world turned upside down.”⁷

The Virgin of the Americas, center, as she appeared to Estela Ruiz. Painted by Reyes Ruiz in 1988. Photo by author.

Estela says that unlike her husband, Reyes, whom she describes as a “lifelong devoted Catholic,” she was deeply involved in “the ways of the world” and was not a model of Catholic piety and maternity. After four of her six children had moved out of the house to attend college, Estela felt that she had made enough sacrifices and that it was time for her to start doing things for herself. In her early forties she returned to college and earned a bachelor’s degree in education and a teaching certificate from the adult education–focused Ottawa University in Phoenix. Soon after, she enrolled in Northern Arizona University’s Masters in Education program.⁸ Estela remembers herself as “arrogant” and “distanced” from religion and spirituality while in graduate school. “Most academics are without God in their lives, they don’t want to be in touch with God and are afraid of being spiritual,” she once declared to me during an interview.⁹

During this time, Estela recalls that education was her “god,” and she believed that she was in control of her life. “I was really into feminism and I bought all of the rhetoric. At the same time, I had what I call ‘university faith,’ I thought, ‘I can tell me what to do, I’m in charge.’”¹⁰ When I asked Estela if she thought it was possible to be an academic and a spiritual person, she said, “yes, but it is very difficult and rare.” Rare, indeed—Thomas Aquinas, Ignatius Loyola, and Augustine were the only examples she could think of.

Estela was hired by Phoenix’s Murphy School District in the early 1970s, and she worked her way up the bureaucratic ladder until she became the administrator of bilingual programs for the district. In the mid-1980s, she was earning more than $40,000 a year, driving a new car, and wearing “fashionable clothes” and jewelry. “I was materially and physically vain: I had my prematurely gray hair professionally colored black and I never, I mean never, went outside without wearing makeup. I mean, I was a successful woman so I had to look and act the part.” Estela says her family paid a price for her success and that she became “unavailable” to them. Her son, Armando, confirms his mother’s personal assessment and adds that she was “not a very affectionate woman” at this time.

Professionally, she was very sophisticated. I would call her a hatchet person, the kind of person who comes at you and takes your head off and you don’t see it coming. A lot of times you didn’t know it was her. She was very manipulative, very successful. She loved her children and grandchildren but there were conditions. There was an appropriate time.¹¹

Estela has internalized her son’s and her family’s critical assessment of her and she agrees with Armando’s unflattering characterization. When she recalls the woman she was before her apparitions, Estela makes a clear demarcation between the woman she was then and the woman she is today. The “old” Estela was a “driven” woman, bent on attaining academic degrees and career-related success to the detriment of her family, marriage, and religious life. Estela says that she chided Reyes for his fourth-grade education and that she was condescending toward him for making less than a fifth of what she made annually. Most of all, she says, she was angry at his devout love for the Virgin Mary.

According to Estela, she was envious of Reyes’s love for the Virgin, whom, she says, was “the other woman” in Reyes’s life. “I was so jealous of the Blessed Mother because Reyes spent a lot of time with Her. One time, I was so angry with him when he told me that he was thinking of dancing with the Blessed Mother—when he was dancing with me at a St. Catherine’s dance!” Estela says she had “had enough” of Reyes’s love and devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe. In the Virgin of the Americas, she has her own Virgin, one who was not already claimed by her spouse, one in whom she can confide. Instead of a dark-skinned Mexican Virgin appearing to her, a fair-skinned, bilingual Virgin, with whom her husband did not have a relationship, told her she was her mother, friend, and confidante.

Before her apparitions began, Estela was what she calls a “Sunday morning Catholic,” attending mass on Sundays with Reyes but nothing more. “I was in the mode of ‘what can the priests tell me, I’m better off than them!’”¹² She says she was frustrated and embarrassed by her husband’s behavior. Reyes, who had carried a rosary with him at all times since he was a child, described himself as “falling in love with Her when I was inside my mom; all of my family are Marianos, they’ve said millions of rosaries.” A son of New Mexico farm workers, Reyes grew up praying daily in the field’s Marian shrine. One of several jobs in his adult life was working for the diocese of Phoenix as a minister to farm workers throughout the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. He prayed with the workers, had them over to his and Estela’s modest South Phoenix home, and said the rosary at his own home shrine several times a day.

In addition to his involvement with ministering to farmworkers, Reyes was also involved in the encuentro movement in the 1970s and ‘80s. These encuentros, “encounters,” the Catholic theologian Moises Sandoval writes, were an integral part of Hispanics’ struggle to be recognized within the American Catholic Church and were successful in organizing Hispanic Catholics and developing Hispanic leaders who assumed important roles in their dioceses.¹³ In 1985 he was invited to the Tercero Encuentro held in Chicago—an “intense meeting,” according to Reyes, that addressed the 1983 Bishop’s Pastoral Letter on Hispanic Ministry. Reyes says that he was “frustrated” at this Encuentro because they did not address farmworkers.

I was so upset because it was like the farmworkers did not even exist; they were being ignored. I stood up at this meeting, I was so nervous, and I said that everyone was ignoring the common person. I said “what about the farmworkers?”

I mean, I had been sent to represent a large group of people who were being ignored here, at a conference that focused on Hispanic people!¹⁴

After the four-day meeting, Reyes was made the new national farmworkers’ representative, and he traveled to all of the Rocky Mountain area regional conferences, held in Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. Yet he still felt like a “token,” he said, because there were no farmworkers besides him who attended the meetings. Reyes felt a “real sense of accomplishment” when farmworkers were a presence at the next national Encuentro.

Estela remembers being “annoyed” by her husband’s involvement with the diocese and with the Encuentros, and with his overt devotion to the Virgin, which made her “extremely irritated.” She didn’t like the farmworkers in her house when she arrived home from work; she felt that she was “above them” as an educated middle-class Mexican American woman. She says that she used to call Reyes a “holy roller” and wanted nothing to do with his or his friends’ piety. At work, she says, she was surrounded by educated men and women who were “cold and formal” in their dress, religion, and habits; the more she was around this subculture, the more she became like these people, as she admired their intelligence and power.¹⁵ “I had been in school for so long that I thought Reyes was going insane. You see, I was the intellectual who thought the spirit world was crazy.”¹⁶

Estela is one of many Mexican American women of her generation who have achieved high levels of success in education and work. In their lives and stories we are able to see the tensions between class, ethnicity, gender, and religion that arise as a result of this success. Estela, like other Hispano-Mexican American women, has internalized the familial and community pressures and critiques of her decision to have a career; the more involved she became outside of her home, the more she was accused of losing her ethnic identity. These critiques were compounded by her husband’s “badgering” about her lack of Catholic devotion. Yet Hispano and Mexican American women throughout the twentieth century have had a history of working outside the home, both from economic necessity and for personal satisfaction.¹⁷

Estela says that she was “fortunate” to obtain an education, because many of her childhood friends did not graduate from high school, let alone earn a college degree. She says she realizes she had more opportunities than many Mexican American women her age and older, and her career parallels the 1980s increase in well-paying jobs for Hispanic women. According to Estela, Reyes was supportive of her career goals but did not like the fact that her Catholic faith suffered. A crusader for Mexican Americans’ rights himself, Reyes understood his wife’s passion for defending Mexican Americans’ interests through education, though it was “very difficult at times,” he admitted to me once, because “Stella worked all of the time.”

Estela’s discussion of Reyes as a supportive husband is echoed by other Mexican American women who cite their husbands as their biggest supporters, which highlights the one-dimensional and unnuanced character of the prevailing stereotype of the Mexican macho male. Of course, given the diversity of Mexican American women and their families, their opinions vary as to whether or not Mexican American men are generally supportive of successful wives. Some have talked about their supportive husbands and others about the difficulties their spouses had with their successes.¹⁸

Estela was achieving her goal of attaining a powerful position within education, and she claims to have had the support of her spouse. Oral narratives and history have shown that Mexican American women have always worked outside the home and have simultaneously been activists. Despite the limited opportunities available to them, these women pressed hard for more opportunities for themselves and their families. As the historian Sarah Deutsch shows, Hispanic women in the Southwest have a history of creating their own structures in response to their lack of power in Anglo society and culture. Hispanic women, according to Deutsch, became especially adept at generating “strategies of survival.”¹⁹

Estela began moving up the bureaucratic ladder during the height of the Chicano movement in the 1970s, when recently politicized Mexican Americans were demanding better wages and services and more opportunities, and were finally starting to see some results.²⁰ An important figure in the city of Phoenix’s bilingual movement, Estela campaigned heavily for the dual use of Spanish and English in classrooms. She received a government-funded grant for $100,000 and wrote the manual for bilingual education that was adopted by Phoenix’s Murphy School District, and she campaigned in the streets in support of bilingual education. She also publicly supported her son, then-State Representative Armando Ruiz, in his ultimately successful campaign against the nativist Proposition 106. This proposition, sponsored by Arizona Republicans in the mid-1980s, sought to establish English as the official language of Arizona.²¹

Estela’s entry into the workforce coincides with the Chicano movement, and, importantly, the parallel Chicana movement. As the historian Vicki Ruiz writes, the Chicana movement found itself grappling with issues of feminism, familism, and the image of soldaderas—soldiers. Most Chicanas dealt with the tensions that existed between the various representations of the larger Chicano movement, and most opted to...