Crossing Borders with the Santo Niño de Atocha

By Juan Javier Pescador

Crossing Borders with the Santo Niño de Atocha journeys through the genesis, development, and various metamorphoses in the veneration of the Holy Child of Atocha, from its origins in Zacatecas in the late colonial period through its different transformations over the centuries, across lands and borders, and to the ultimate rising as a defining religious devotion for the Mexican/Chicano experience in the United States.

It is a vivid account of the historical origins of the Santo Niño de Atocha and His transformations "Everywhere He ever walked," first in the nineteenth century, along the Camino de Tierra Adentro between Zacatecas and New Mexico, to His consolidation as a saint for the Borderlands, and finally, to His contemporary metamorphosis as a border-crossing religious symbol for the immigrant experience and the Mexican/Chicano communities in the United States.

Using a wide variety of visual and written materials from archives in Spain, Mexico, and the United States, along with oral history interviews, participant observation, photography, popular art, thanksgiving paintings, and private letters addressed to the Holy Child, Juan Javier Pescador presents the fascinating and intimate history of this religious symbol native to the Borderlands, while dispelling some myths and inaccurate references. Including narrative vignettes with his own personal experiences and fragments of his family's interactions with the Holy Child of Atocha, Pescador presents the book "as a thanksgiving testimony of the prominent position the Santo Niño de Atocha has enjoyed in the altarcitos of my family and the dear place He has carved in the hearts of my ancestors."

Visit the author's website at www.pescadorarte.com to learn more and to see images of the Santo Niño de Atocha included in the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780826347114

Juan Javier Pescador

Juan Javier Pescador is professor of history and a photographer. He teaches Chicano history and Mexican cultures in the United States at Michigan State University, East Lansing.

Book preview

CROSSING BORDERS WITH THE SANTO NIÑO DE ATOCHA

Crossing Borders with the Santo Niño de Atocha

Juan Javier Pescador

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS

ALBUQUERQUE

© 2009 by the University of New Mexico Press

All rights reserved. Published 2009

Printed in the United States of America

First paperback edition 2023.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Pescador, Juan Javier.

Crossing borders with the Santo Niño de Atocha / Juan Javier Pescador.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8263-4709-1 (clothbound)

ISBN 978-0-8263-4710-7 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-8263-4711-4 (e-book)

1. Holy Childhood, Devotion to—Mexico, North—History.

2. Holy Childhood, Devotion to—Chihuahua Trail Region—History.

3. Holy Childhood, Devotion to—Southwest, New—History.

4. Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint—Devotion to—Spain—Castile—History.

5. Christian patron saints—Mexico, North—History.

6. Christian patron saints—Chihuahua Trail Region—History.

7. Christian patron saints—Southwest, New—History.

8. Mexico, North—Religious life and customs.

9. Chihuahua Trail Region—Religious life and customs.

10. Southwest, New—Religious life and customs.

I. Title.

BX2159.C4P474 2007

232.92’7009721—dc22

2009015504

Designed and typeset by Mina Yamashita.

Robert Slimbach with display set in Pompeia Std Inline by Victor De Castro.

Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. on 55# Natures Natural.

A mi familia

Al desierto, a sus luces y silencios

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Sandals in the Desert

CHAPTER 1:

DRAFTING THE VIRGIN

The Cult of Our Lady of Atocha in Imperial Spain, 1523–1700

CHAPTER 2:

PLATEROS

A Shrine on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, 1704–1848

CHAPTER 3:

A SAINT FOR THE BORDERLANDS, 1848–1880

CHAPTER 4:

PEREGRINOS DEL NORTE

EPILOGUE

Saint Making in Global Villages

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

List of Illustrations

Figure 1. Real Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Atocha

Figure 2. Our Lady of Atocha (postcard)

Figure 3. Our Lady of Atocha wearing Queen Isabel II’s royal mantle and Spanish military decorations

Figure 4. Santuario de Plateros, Fresnillo, Zacatecas, 2005

Figure 5. Nueva Novena Dedicada al Milagrosísimo Niño de Nuestra Señora de Atocha

Figure 6. First printed image of the Santísimo Niño de Atocha

Figure 7. Vignette representing favor granted to Maximiana Esparza, 1829

Figure 8. Vignette representing favor granted to mining worker Jorge García, 1836

Figure 9. Vignette representing miracle granted to doña Juliana Codina, 1840

Figure 10. Verdadero retrato del Santo Niño de Atocha (True portrait of the Holy Child of Atocha)

Figure 11. Santuario del Señor de Esquípulas, Chimayó, New Mexico, ca. 1904–7

Figure 12. Potrero de Chimayó, New Mexico, ca. 1911

Figure 13. Medina Chapel, Chimayó, New Mexico, ca. 1911

Figure 14. Santuario del Señor de Esquípulas, main altar, Chimayó, New Mexico, ca. 1911

Figure 15. Medina Chapel, Chimayó, New Mexico, 1928

Figure 16. Medina Chapel, Chimayó, New Mexico, ca. 1935

Figure 17. Altar to the Holy Child of Atocha, Medina Chapel, Chimayó, New Mexico, ca. 1935

Figure 18. Holy Child of Atocha retablo, oil on tin

Figure 19. Holy Child of Atocha retablo, oil on tin

Figure 20. Holy Child of Atocha retablo, oil on tin

Figure 21. Holy Child of Atocha retablo, oil on tin

Figure 22. Kissing the Holy Child of Atocha

Figure 23. Santo Niño de Atocha altar inside the Edén Mine

Figure 24. Chapel to the Holy Child of Atocha, La Rana, Cd. Jiménez, Chih., 2002

Figure 25. Thanksgiving retablo

Figure 26. Thanksgiving retablo

Figure 27. Un testigo más de sus maravillas….

Figure 28. Thanksgiving retablo

Figure 29. Thanksgiving retablo

Figure 30. Salón de Retablos, Santuario de Plateros, Fresnillo, Zacatecas, 2002

Figure 31. Thanksgiving retablo

Figure 32. La señora Lupe Figueroa Herrera le da gracias al Santo Niño de Atocha….

Figure 33. Thanksgiving retablo

Figure 34. Thanksgiving retablo

Figure 35. Thanksgiving retablo

Figure 36. Tumba de Juan Soldado, Cementerio Civil, Tijuana, Baja California, 2005

Figure 37. Tumba de Juan Soldado, interior detail, Cementerio Civil, Tijuana, Baja California, 2005

Figure 38. Tumba de Juan Soldado, interior detail, Cementerio Civil, Tijuana, Baja California, 2005

Figure 39. Capilla San Simón, San Andrés Itzapa, Guatemala, 2005

Figure 40. San Simón, main altar, San Andrés Itzapa, Guatemala, 2005

Figure 41. Offerings to Hermano San Simón, Capilla San Simón, San Andrés Itzapa, Guatemala, 2005

Figure 42. Shrine of don Pedro Jaramillo, Los Olmos Ranch, Falfurrias, Texas, 2008

Figure 43. Tomb and altar of don Pedro Jaramillo, Los Olmos ranch, Falfurrias, Texas, 2008

Figure 44. Thanksgiving items and pictures for don Pedrito, Shrine of don Pedro Jaramillo, Los Olmos Ranch, Falfurrias, Texas,

Figure 45. Holy Child of Atocha, Pilsen Via Crucis, Chicago, 2002

Figure 46. Pilsen Via Crucis, Chicago, 2002

Figure 47. Pilsen Via Crucis, Chicago, 2002

Figure 48. Virgen de los Inmigrantes, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2002

Figure 49. Virgen de los Inmigrantes, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2002

Figure 50. Pilsen Via Crucis, Chicago, 2006

Figure 51. Pilsen Via Crucis, Chicago, 2006

Map 1. Camino Real de Tierra Adentro

Map 2. U.S.-Mexico Transnational Railroad Network, 1880–1910

Map 3. Virgen de los Inmigrantes itinerary: Mexico City–Grand Rapids, 2002

Introduction

Sandals in the Desert

When I was a child, my parents used to take the whole family to the Santuario del Señor de los Plateros, a shrine in the middle of the desert outside Fresnillo, Zacatecas. My mother would go inside the church while my father watched us running in the front and playing adivinanzas (guessing games) with the car license plates of other visitors. I have not forgotten the excitement of seeing cars from so many distant places: California, Texas, New Mexico, Chihuahua, Guanajuato, Michigan. My mother would say she promised somebody inside the church she would be back with us next year if things went well with school, work, and family. The holy person we visited was a little statue of Baby Jesus placed on the hand of a Virgin Mary’s image with the name of Nuestra Señora de Atocha. By extension, the Baby Jesus’s name, I learned, was the Niño de Atocha, or, as He was also called, the Santo Niño, El Tejanito, El Morenito, and the Santo Niñito. My mother would visit and pray to the Santo Niño like many other women and families from the Chihuahuan desert, in good times and in adversity. She would ask Him for the recovery of my younger brother, who died of AIDS in 1997, or for the protection of my father, a bus driver, in his twenty-four-hour long trips, for the successful outcome in the family’s pregnancies, for the promotions and career advancement in her children’s different occupations, for the recovery of my late father from alcoholism …

Only as an adult did I learn the Santo Niño de Atocha was also the subject of academic research, artistic inspiration, kitsch folklore, religious art books, and even pro-life campaigns. It was certainly a surprise to see His image as a commodity in New Age bookstores, santería boticas, mass-produce candles, and even norteño band music CDs.

Scholars have correctly suggested that both Our Lady of Atocha and the Holy Child came from Spain to the Borderlands, but not the Holy Child my mother and my family used to visit every time we could. That Santo Niño, for all I know, has always lived in my home.

This is a history of the devotion to Santo Niño I experienced in my house and the one I researched in the archives, churches, yard shrines, home altars, and even little oratories on the highways across the Borderlands. This is a history of the Santo Niño de Atocha everywhere He ever walked …

This book traverses the genesis, development, and various metamorphoses in the veneration of the Holy Child of Atocha, from His origins in Zacatecas in the late colonial period through the different transformations experienced in this devotion over centuries and across lands and borders.

Using a wide variety of sources, it traces the unique evolution of Our Lady of Atocha and the Holy Child on both sides of the Atlantic world since the foundation of a Dominican monastery in 1523 outside Madrid and the subsequent emergence of the Holy Child as an autonomous religious icon toward the end of Spanish colonial times in Mexico. It then follows the unexpected diffusion of this veneration along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro between Zacatecas and New Mexico in the nineteenth century and the consolidation of the Santo Niño as a saint for the Borderlands. Finally, it delineates the contemporary metamorphosis of the Holy Child as a border-crossing religious symbol for the immigrant experience and the Mexican and Chicano communities in the United States.

At the heart of this book is the narrative of the Santo Niño de Atocha as a shapeshifter. His reputation has evolved in surprising and rather complex ways, from His humble origins in Zacatecas to His elevation as protector of families on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, His consolidation as a saint for the Borderlands, and His ultimate metamorphosis into a border-crossing saint for translocal and transnational communities.

Although the relationship between the official church and this devotion is addressed throughout the book, it does not constitute its focal point. Its central narrative revolves around the different ways in which families and communities across time and places constructed, shaped, and reshaped the devotion to the Holy Child of Atocha.

In order to document the historical changes in the formation and growth of the veneration of the Holy Child of Atocha, I sought information in a wide range of civil and ecclesiastical archives in Spain, Mexico, and the United States. I consulted parish church records, diocesan internal documentation, private testaments, church inventories, property records, official letters, and internal correspondence between parish priests and church authorities.

Printed materials analyzed in this book include novenas, prayers books, devotional pamphlets, printed religious images, local Roman Catholic newspapers, hagiographic volumes, devotional postcards, and religious lithographs. I also looked at private and institutional religious art collections, exhibits and inventories of retablos (votive paintings), and contemporary graphic and written artworks (religious and nondevotional) referring to the Santo Niño de Atocha.

Ethnographic materials analyzed in this book include a wide range of sources: thanksgiving paintings; letters sent to the sanctuaries; personal written requests and thanksgiving messages posted on the walls of various shrines; public demonstrations of favors received; domestic religious altars; yard shrines; historic and contemporary photographs; advertisements from stores featuring religious images, devotional literature, medals, and jewelry; and images sold in sanctuary shops. I also studied materials in popular culture from northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest: folk stories, local legends, and religious lore, as well as traditional ballads from the Borderlands, referring to the miraculous deeds of the Holy Child. All the translations from Spanish in the text are mine.

For the chapter on contemporary developments I conducted oral history interviews with active members in the devotion to the Holy Child of Atocha; former and active rectores (head priests) of the Santuario del Señor de los Plateros in Zacatecas; domestic altar keepers; pilgrims; families; and devotees of the Holy Child in Zacatecas, Chihuahua, New Mexico, Texas, California, Illinois, and Michigan. I talked and listened to participants of religious rituals organized along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Finally, at the beginning of each chapter, I included narratives or vignettes of my own personal experiences and fragments of my family’s interactions with the Holy Child of Atocha. As I was writing the different sections, it became clear that this book represented to me more than a picturesque research subject through which I could claim academic productivity and climb the bureaucracy of promotions and scholarly citizenship. I ended up reenvisioning this manuscript as a thanksgiving testimony praising the prominent position the Santo Niño de Atocha has enjoyed in the altarcitos of my family and the dear place He has carved in the hearts of my ancestors.

Right on the imaginary line that divides North American deserts from central Mexico’s tropical lands lies the Sanctuary of Plateros in the state of Zacatecas, Mexico. Plateros also straddles the historical borders of the colonial kingdoms of New Spain, Nueva Vizcaya, and Nueva Galicia, and is located at the very origin of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro to New Mexico, the ancestral heartland of the Spanish Borderlands in North America. A mining town in colonial times, Plateros owed its existence and its location on multiple borders and roads to silver ores. Since the sixteenth century Plateros has been part of a chain of silver towns that stretched along the Camino Real from Zacatecas to Durango, Chihuahua, and Santa Fe.

The Spanish empire is gone, as are the silver bonanzas. Yet today Plateros remains a meeting place for people of Mexican descent. Pilgrims from northern and central Mexico, Mexican immigrants living in the United States, and U.S.-born Mexicans pack its dusty streets with their cars, vans, and pickups, especially in December and in summer, to pay their respects to the Santo Niño de Atocha. Trucks and cars with license plates from California, Texas, Illinois, Florida, Michigan, and many other states in the United States and Mexico overcrowd the narrow streets in Plateros.

Originally a mere attachment to the Holy Virgin of Atocha, a colonial religious icon, the Santo Niño became a special saint for the people of the Borderlands in the nineteenth century. Devotion to the Santo Niño quickly spread: first, along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro from Zacatecas all the way up to northern New Mexico, and then, in the 1880s, with the A.T.S.F. and Ferrocarril Central Mexicano railroad lines linking Mexico City, El Paso, and Santa Fe. Poor people in general, but especially miners, prisoners, pregnant women, travelers, migrants, pilgrims, soldiers, muleteers, the sick and disabled, railroad workers, captives, hostages, prostitutes, and even thieves found a religious entity they could relate to in the Santo Niño. The underclass and the lower class in the great Chihuahuan desert and its outer limits developed a local veneration for the Niñito, the Morenito, the Tejanito, or the Santo Niño de Atochita, as His various names go. Without the official sponsorship of the Roman Catholic Church and sometimes despite its blatant opposition, people in the area established a chain of shrines to venerate the Santo Niño from Plateros to Chimayó in northern New Mexico, especially in Chihuahua, Durango, Jiménez, El Paso, and Española. Today, devotion to the Santo Niño has spread well beyond the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. As Mexican immigration to the United States reaches its highest point in history and the Mexican American population spreads beyond the U.S. Southwest, the Santo Niñito’s humble hat and sandals can be recognized in New York City, Iowa City, Los Angeles, or Chicago. Each year, at least since the last decade, the Sanctuary of Plateros receives, by mail, by hand, or via intermediaries, an average of four thousand letters addressed to the Santo Niño de Atocha. Three-quarters of this correspondence originates in the United States. Although most of these letters come from the U.S. Southwest where the Mexican presence has deep historical roots, an increasing number of missives arrive from other areas, especially the Midwest and East Coast, mirroring new trends in the destinations of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans.¹

The Santo Niño de Atocha has developed into a transnational devotion, with shrines, altars, and churches in places as distant as Chicago, Los Angeles, and El Paso in the United States or Tuxtla Gutiérrez in Chiapas and Coatepec, Veracruz, in southern Mexico.

In July 1998 the image of the Santo Niño de Atocha visited the Church of Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Angeles, or La Placita, in Los Angeles, California, and was received by more than one hundred thousand peregrinos (pilgrims).²

Scholars in Chicano history have started to pay attention to Mexican religious traditions in the United States only recently, but despite how new this interest is, a new surge in the field is uncovering the deep spiritual dimensions of the Mexican-Chicano experience in U.S. territories.³

New views on the vibrant religious traditions of people of Mexican descent are in the process of reshaping our understanding of Chicana and Chicano history beyond its traditional boundaries in labor history, political activism, and civil rights.

According to the old sociological point of view on Mexican immigrants, religious beliefs represented at best a reminiscence of rural traditions in Old Mexico and at worst, a formidable obstacle in the process of cultural assimilation and economic prosperity.

For many scholars, preoccupied with analyzing the process of assimilation into the American system of values and modernity, traditional religion had only hindered the full incorporation of Mexican communities into American society. Popular religion was then inevitably associated with traditional values carried over from Spanish colonial times and Old Mexico. These traditions contributed to the formation of a fatalistic system of values and practices based on rural ignorance, economic stagnation, and cultural decline.

Popular religious expressions by people of Mexican descent have traditionally been seen as distortions or deviations from an originally clear message Iberian priests and friars conveyed since colonial times, which, under the effects of time, lack of supervision, and plain ignorance, have become unintelligible to practitioners and scholars, dispossessed of basic rationality, and deeply corrupted by magical thinking, frivolous associations, and unjustified superstitions.

In this process of degradation of the original values the colonial clergy seeded, the study of religious practice by local communities had only a folkloric value. Manuel Gamio’s pioneer works on Mexican immigrants illustrate this. In his 1930 Mexican Immigration to the United States, the religious values and practices of Mexican immigrants basically consisted of myriad naïve superstitions cultivated to mirror the lack of economic opportunities in oppressive rural conditions and pushed forward by the immigrants as a mere reflection of their lack of control and power in their new social milieu.

According to Gamio such a mentality would be the first casualty in what he described as the natural process of adjustment into the host society’s rational values.⁴ In Gamio’s view American values regarding schooling, work discipline, civic participation, and scientific optimism would eventually displace and extinguish the Mexican immigrant’s mentality arising from popular religious beliefs. Once this assimilation process took off, it would be irreversible, and the traditional practices would be left behind as relics of a colonial past. Recent scholarship in postcolonial, cross-cultural, and transnational studies have shown that subaltern groups often articulate ways to challenge the cultural hegemony of dominant groups in the framework of popular religion and its folklore expressions.⁵

Subaltern groups respond to cultural domination by decentering prominent hegemonic symbols, recreating and appropriating religious icons that originally contained emblems of racial and ethnic subordination. Maya peasants, for instance, have rebelled against colonial and national authorities by embracing Maya re-creations of the Virgin Mary and the holy cross that vindicate local language, culture, and political rights. The reinvention of these religious symbols in a Maya context not only validated the political rights of Maya communities against oppressive states in the colonial and national periods but also affirmed, through different ways, the local rituals and ceremonies of the Maya religious practitioners.⁶

Scholars have identified and traced the religious creativity, cultural survival, and life impulse in native societies subordinated by colonialism and oppressed by institutional racial hierarchies, challenging the traditional view of contemporary subaltern groups as dispossessed of their cultural ancestral traditions or disconnected from their glorious past. Studies on local religion, Native American history, and the history of mentalities have successfully demonstrated the ways in which nondominant groups are able to articulate criticism, reforms, and alternative rituals to the official religion’s practices when the institutional clergy fails to meet their specific religious needs. Recent scholarship show how lay groups, women, nonprofessional practitioners, peasants, and marginalized racial and ethnic groups react to what they perceive as alienating, intrusive, or deficient official religious policies by generating new ways of connecting to the sacred and creating alternative rituals, symbols, and practices that better fit their spiritual needs.⁷

The history of the Santo Niño de Atocha certainly sheds light on the evolution of a local devotion of peasants and travelers in the fifteenth-century Castilian countryside. He first became a Spanish imperial religious icon in the colonial period, only to be reshaped as a lower-class and underclass saint in the nineteenth century. In recent times, He has been transformed into a transnational symbol of hope and redemption.

Our Lady of Atocha’s origins are to be found in a rural shrine in the Castilian landscape, finally absorbed into Madrid’s urban development as the city expanded in the sixteenth century. As the emperor, Carlos V, converted the shrine into a Dominican monastery in 1523 and named the Virgin the Reina de las Batallas, Our Lady of Atocha was drafted to perform miracles and intermediations on behalf of the royal family in particular and the Spanish monarchy in general. Her completely remodeled shrine became a public oratory and private chapel for the royal family where many baptisms and weddings would be celebrated. Furthermore, Our Lady of Atocha would acquire a warrior reputation as helper of Spanish troops and vassals in Europe and overseas. Most major military victories in both worlds would be followed by a ritual celebration at the Monastery of Atocha.

At the dawn of the seventeenth century when Felipe III declared her the patroness of all Spanish dominions, it was clear that Our Lady of Atocha had become an imperial symbol and her formerly humble shrine one of the Spanish empire’s ritual centers. Flags and emblems captured from Protestant, Muslim, and other rival armies in the world were displayed at the Virgin’s feet in a tradition that continued well into the twentieth century. Current postcards at the monastery still display the tradition of dressing the Virgin with Queen Isabel II’s royal mantle, the blue and white colors of the Bourbons, medals denoting high honor, a military baton, and a crown, while the Holy Child appears as a royal prince, wearing a crown and holding a rosary, replacing the little scepter held in previous times. Even on May 29, 1939, right after Generalissimo Francisco Franco entered Madrid with the Nationalist Army to end the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish commander presented his sword to the Virgin. In the ensuing victory parade, Our Lady of Atocha was at the forefront as the patroness of Spain.

Our Lady of Atocha, then, was deeply associated with the providential mission of the Spanish monarchy in Spain and Spanish America, for she represented the divine predilection for Spaniards in their crusades against Protestants, Muslims, pagans, and others. For more than four centuries she incarnated the divine protection for Spanish soldiers and seamen whenever they were away from home. She represented the motherland and the city of Madrid as the home of the royal family and the center of the colonial empire.

It is within this imperial context that images of Our Lady of Atocha crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the hands of Dominican friars, Spanish soldiers, royal bureaucrats, and sailors to find new places of veneration in the colonial dominions. Fray Juan de Escajedo, a Spanish Dominican friar, was commissioned to cross the sea and spread the devotion to Our Lady of Atocha in New Spain in the first decade of the seventeenth century.

As Dominican houses in New Spain embraced the image of Atocha’s redesigned message as a symbol of the Spanish monarchy, the city of Madrid, and the special destiny providence had designed for the Spanish empire, colonial elites adopted this veneration.

In 1704 a noble and prosperous Castilian landowner sponsored the construction of a shrine in a semiabandoned mining camp near Fresnillo. Don Fernando de la Campa y Cos, a prominent vecino from the city of Zacatecas, financed the Chapel of the Señor de los Plateros, featuring a large crucifix with a Black Christ. On the temple’s collateral altars a small representation of the Virgin of Atocha and the Holy Child was hosted.

The history of popular devotion to the Santo Niño de Atocha in the New World certainly illustrates some of the unique ways in which people of Mexican descent in the Borderlands have reshaped traditional Roman Catholic symbols and re-created them to conform to a peculiar set of historical experiences. Through generations, the image and reputation of the Santo Niño has been reinvented to better mirror the social expectations and religious sensitivity of Mexican communities in northern Mexico and the United States.

Born as a religious icon completely detached from the Virgin of Atocha in the early nineteenth century, the Santo Niño’s image rapidly evolved from a newborn royal prince into a youngster pilgrim or traveler, always eager to respond to the needs of local families and workers. Following the precolonial trend of the Virgin of Atocha in the Castilian countryside, who protected people from external dangers, the Santo Niño became a patron saint of those away from home in dire need: the disabled who could walk again, prisoners released from jail, prostitutes redeemed, miners recovered from work-related accidents, mothers who found their lost children, travelers recovering from being attacked on the road, thieves who got away from authorities, Nuevo Mexicano captives released from their Apache kidnappers.

The nineteenth-century Santo Niñito consistently managed to help people who had been separated from their homes in some way. He could control and undo the negative consequences of being in a transitional state, had authority over liminality, and became a saint of borders.

In 1848 a novena illustrated with