Mecca in Mexico

In mid-January, when we drove to Guadalajara from Leon, we passed mile after mile of people walking along the road. We must have passed eight miles of people walking, many with backpacks or bedrolls, adults and children, before we branched off the road and headed toward Tlaquepaque.

We speculated that this was a caravan of migrants headed toward the US border. Yet, we didn’t see anything in the press about anything the size of what we saw. We did, however, see some tweets and more tweets from the government of the state of Guanajuato about “pilgrims,” with estimates of 70,000 to 100,000 pilgrims. But we saw nothing in the US news.

When I asked about this on an expat forum, I discovered that these were actually religious pilgrims headed to the town of San Juan de los Lagos in the Mexican state of Jalisco to view a revered image of the Virgin Mary called Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos. This Madonna is said to be responsible for tens of thousands of miracles dating back to 1623. (Read more here, and note some of the powerful comments from people who have visited the image.)

The image itself is made of sugar cane paste and stands about 38 centimeters high. It is believed to have been brought from Michoacán, Mexico, in the early 16th century and refurbished 400 years ago. 

Somewhere between 7 and 9 million people yearly visit San Juan de los Lagos to see the image of the Virgin. The most heavily visited time, though, is Candelmas, when approximately 2 million people visit. Candelmas, or the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus, falls on Feb. 2, the 40^th day of the Christmas Epiphany season. In San Juan de los Lagos, they celebrate with a festival extending from Jan. 25 to Feb. 2 that includes fireworks, music and amusement rides.

This was the destination of the pilgrimage that we saw. Organized groups walk or bike for hundreds of miles. Most come to repay the image for a miracle they have received. There is a popular belief that people who fail to repay the Virgin risk being turned into stone.

So, even though there is another, much smaller, caravan of Central American migrants currently headed to the US (learn about it here and here), the miles of sojourners that we saw were religious pilgrims headed to San Juan los Lagos to keep from getting turned into stone.

Here's the caravan we saw: