Our Lady Of Guadalupe Helped Blend The Cultures Of The Old World With The New -- In Her Image

Lupita Gutierrez-Parker was a promesa.

See, she was born in a car, on the way to the hospital in Toppenish. Toppenish, in Eastern Washington, is what it says on the birth certificate, but the way she knows the story, her mom rolled out of the car with Lupita already in her arms.

"I was a promesa - my mom didn't think I was gonna live, so she promised la virgen that if I made it that she would name me Guadalupe. That's a trip, huh?"

She smiles knowingly, her eyes wide with marvel. She has seen people react to this story before.

It didn't matter that she wasn't born on Dec. 12, the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Her mother, a native of Mexico City and a pray-every-night Catholic, had made a promise.

And so it happened that Lupita - a shortened version of "Guadalupe" - was named after Mexico's patron saint.

"Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool," she says at her home in Yakima, where she is a social activist. "Hey," she laughs, "somebody's on my side. Somebody's watching me."

She still wears a medallion bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, one of a multitude of versions of the Virgin Mary, whom Catholics see as the Mother of God. But to Mexico, 85 percent Catholic, and to those who find their roots there, la virgen is often much more than that: She is a badge of identity, a symbol of liberation, the reason Mexico as we know it exists.

That's another story Gutierrez-Parker knows.

Naturally, since Guadalupe is as familiar to Mexican culture as the Statue of Liberty is to the United States. And the story of her appearance to an Aztec Indian named Juan Diego, 10 years after the Spanish conquest of present-day Mexico, is as common a tale as Paul Revere's midnight ride.

Bus and taxi drivers post tiny pictures of the dark-skinned image on their dashboards. Small shrines to la virgen spring up inside homes. She's a 460-year-old icon with a sort of People's Choice celebrity status that means she shows up not just on religious medallions, but on caps and T-shirts, too.

Every year, on Dec. 12, millions visit the basilica they built for her in Mexico City. Inside, the image is imprinted - miraculously, they say - on the apron-like tilma, two sheets of cloth joined by a single common strand, worn by Juan Diego.

So the story goes.

And rebels like Father Manuel Hidalgo, who led the first fight for independence in 1810 under a banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, have made her a symbol of national identity that has come to the United States along with millions of Mexican immigrants.

"She's the mother of our people," says Gutierrez-Parker, who now differs with her mother - and the Church - on issues such as abortion. "I'm not a hardcore practicing Catholic. But now that my kids are growing up, I'm teaching them about her, too."

For two weeks in October, a traveling replica of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe sweeps through Washington, a gift from the basilica in Mexico City to the United States.

It starts in Mount Vernon, fresh from an appearance in New Orleans the night before, then swings down through Seattle, Bothell, White Center and Chehalis before looping east of the Cascades.

"I don't know that it's especially exceptional, except that this is an American relationship to Mary, one of the closest we have," says Sister Stephanie Van Leuven, principal of the mostly white school adjoining St. Francis Cabrini Parish in Lakewood, where the image makes another stop.

What is unique is the Mexican immigrant, who generally brings a faith more inherited than learned, as if it has been passed genetically from parent to child. You don't choose to be Catholic. You just are.

And with Catholicism, practiced or not, comes the distinguishing feature of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a figure so firmly embedded in the national identity that it's impossible to understand Mexico without it. Mexico's history ultimately is a story of triumph over oppression, and Guadalupe is a symbol of that victory. La virgen is a common bond of protection, hope, liberation and pride.

Washington's Hispanic population has soared 80 percent in the last decade, to 214,570 in last year's census count from a 1980 figure of 120,016. More than 70 percent of them are of Mexican background. More than a third became legal residents under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, meaning they likely were already here as temporary or undocumented residents.

Professor Erasmo Gamboa of the University of Washington says Mexican immigration started as early as the 1800s. By 1930, the state ranked 29th in terms of its Mexican population. But Gamboa says a common misperception is that the community is as new as a fresh coat of paint.

"For some reason, we're not expected to be here," he says. "Because we're so far removed from metropolitan Los Angeles, El Paso. But we have been here as long, if not longer, than all these other communities."

In Lakewood, south of Tacoma, five eighth-graders from St. Francis Cabrini tell a simple version of the story to their uniformed classmates.

Juan Diego, an Aztec convert to Christianity, is heading to Mass on a December morning when he hears a voice calling him from atop a desert hill called Tepeyac, in what is now Mexico City. There the Virgin Mary appears to him and asks that a Catholic church be built. Her skin is dark, like his; she even speaks the Nahuatl language.

Juan Diego tells this to the archbishop, but the guy won't believe him. Twice Juan Diego comes back. Still no go. Finally the woman tells Juan Diego to take the archbishop some roses from the top of the hill. It was December, and there shouldn't have been flowers there, but there they were, just the same.

He piles a bunch of the roses into the lap of his tilma and takes them into town. As he pours them at the foot of the archbishop, they both see that the spiritual image has been imprinted onto the fabric. She wears a turquoise-green, star-spangled mantle and stands atop a crescent moon with rays of light flashing from behind her.

This is the garment they say is framed above the altar in the basilica in Mexico City.

Real or not, the results were dramatic. The image was full of symbolism for the Aztecs, from the color of her mantle to the black band at her waist, signifying pregnancy. She had even appeared at the former site of a temple dedicated to Tonantzin, the goddess of fertility, a major deal for a culture to whom Earth represented mother.

Once the archbishop declared it a miracle, 9 million Indians converted to Catholicism within the next 15 years, something Franciscan missionaries had been trying to accomplish ever since Hernan Cortes and the Spanish had burst onto the scene and stripped the Aztecs of their own religious practices a decade before.

Who could have figured the rest? That, bonded by a religious belief, the Indians and Spanish would create a mestizo race known as La Raza, and that the new race would supply a new twist to the old story of the white man's conquest: Mexico spit Spain out of its borders, kept its language and religion, and did it all under banners of Our Lady of Guadalupe. There is no holiday to honor Cortes in Mexico.

In less than a decade, Hispanics are expected to be the largest group in the Catholic Church. They make up a third of the more than 50 million Catholics in the United States.

"We are the youngest race in the world," says Julio Romero as he and fellow orchard worker Jose Hernandez trim branches off rows of apple trees in Outlook, east of Granger. "We didn't exist before the Spanish came to the Indians."

"The miracle is that she united the two cultures," says Tonita Altamirano, who gives a spirited account of the story one afternoon in the dining room of her South Seattle home.

Her dialogue is funny, dramatic, sometimes exaggerated. She frowns when she tells how the archbishop doesn't believe Juan Diego, speaks gently when she acts out la virgen's attempts to convince Juan Diego that it is he who must deliver the message.

The Altamiranos have lived here for 15 years now, originally from the Mexican state of Sonora. Tonita's son is a student at the University of Washington. Business cards on a table advertise her out-of-home business selling cosmetic products.

Why did they come?

"Same reason as everyone else," she says. "A better future. Economics.

"We like Mexico better. But there is work here."

In an aging house on a quiet street in Mount Vernon, Rosemarie Becerra is describing the plans she has for the corner where she has posted her picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe. She cut it off the top half of a Mexican calendar when the year ran out, and it looks good now, framed, with the red, green and white ribbons above it. But a quartershelf below with candles would be nice.

Becerra wears jeans and a black T-shirt daring anyone to try to burn the American flag printed on its surface. She says she learned the story of la virgen in Bible classes as a girl. She and her family moved here six years ago to escape California. Not a healthy environment for kids, she says. Too many drugs.

When she first got here, she didn't notice many other Mexicans around, except for the seasonal fieldworkers. "Usually they'd come and they'd go, but in the last few years, they're staying," she says.

The Becerras are one of about 400 Mexican families in the Mount Vernon-Burlington area. But in the entire Skagit Valley, there is only one Hispanic priest to cater to the Spanish-speaking population, and missionary Maria Teresa Montes has been sent from Mexico City to help him.

Montes helps out at Casa Guadalupe, the shelter Father Emilio Gonzales has set up for homeless Hispanic families. The family here at the moment has had its share of bad luck: The father worked for free at one job until he was passed over for another he'd hoped to fill, then he was bilked of his wages at a different job, then his car was crushed by a tree that fell over in a storm.

Father Emilio leads a weekly rosary as faithful maintenance, and Montes says the shelter was named after la virgen to symbolize protection. Religious observance isn't a prerequisite for getting in, though. "Somos Guadalupanos," she says. We all belong to Guadalupe.

The parish where she is based - Immaculate Heart, in Mount Vernon - that afternoon will be the first stop for the traveling image touring the state. This is news to Montes. "Today?" she asks in disbelief.

She informs Becerra, who has pretty much the same reaction. Well, then, Becerra says. She certainly must go.

In less than half an hour, Becerra has dressed for the occasion and pulls up to Immaculate Heart in the family van. But the image has been delayed. Becerra will not be able to come back. And because no one told Montes about the visit, she has not had enough time to spread the word among the others in the community.

About a dozen mostly white people do attend the rosary when the 4 1/2-foot-tall image finally arrives in a pickup truck. Montes leads the Spanish portion of the rosary and heads for the door.

Outside, she frowns and says: "I'm disappointed. My community, nobody knew. It's very sad. It's sad for me, for my community and for my people."

She shakes her head a last time and walks away.

In church. On a rosary. On a medallion around someone's neck. These are the Virgin Mary's usual hangouts. But Guadalupe is far more creative.

"The most impressive Guadalupe I ever saw was, this poet I know from Tejas had it tattooed over his entire chest. One time we were talking and I said, `Sabes que, Raul?' - We'd had a little bit of tequila - `I really want you to will me that Virgen de Guadalupe when you die so I can make something out of it, like a lamp or something.' "

Roberto Maestas, the 52-year-old, raspy-voiced director of El Centro de La Raza in Seattle, is not a religious person. This he admits. He says he rejected Catholicism as a boy but never stopped liking la virgen. "It's more than a Catholic symbol," he says, feet propped on his desk, his head shrouded in a fog of cigarette smoke in his Beacon Hill office. "It's a Mexican symbol of identity and liberation."

He has seen the funky places where the image pops up throughout the U.S., from the tattoo on Raul's chest to the walls of El Centro when Maestas and a group of young Chicanos took possession of the building 19 years ago. He suddenly remembers a drawing someone sent him in the past, and fiddles through his closet to find it. The picture, a sort of self-portrait, is a play on the actual image: It shows a blond, angelic teenage girl, hands clasped in prayer, looking upward with rays of light behind her. "People do with la virgen what they will," he says. He means Guadalupe is prone to individual expression.

In Yakima, Marco Antonio Rodriguez, 22, has it painted on his faded blue 1979 Monte Carlo. He and his family came to Washington from the Mexican state of Michoacan six years ago as fieldworkers. Guadalupe is a symbol of strength, of protection, he says - for him. For the car, there is the flashing red light of a modern alarm system.

Not far away at Yakima Mall, Fernando Aguirre Castro walks with his 1 1/2-year-old son, Enrico, whose family name is stenciled in distinctive lettering on black sweats. Aguirre, 22, who moved here from Baja California, pulls out a wallet with la virgen on it. "I got this because I want her with me all the time," he says. "She protects me. From the gangs. From the drugs."

On a shelf in Del Rio Mexican Store in White Center, the eternal meets the ephemeral: A statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe is flanked by pinatas shaped like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

A few days after the 1989 Bay Area earthquake, the image appears in colored chalk near Oakland's crumbled Nimitz Freeway, the names of the dead scrawled in memory around it. A T-shirt design popular in the Southwest shows Our Lady of Guadalupe's arms outstretched over lowriders on Los Angeles' Whittier Boulevard. "Cruisin' Together," the logo reads.

She is embroidered art on a postcard, a black velvet street corner painting, a mural on a public park wall. A Mexican comedian calling himself "The Mexican Elvis" once wore her sequined figure on the back of his white jumpsuit. Gold Bulova watches bearing the image sell for hundreds of dollars in East Los Angeles jewelry stores.

"My tios (uncles), three of them owned furniture stores called Muebleria Guadalupana," says Rick Olguin, a Chicano Studies instructor at the University of Washington. "Our Lady of Guadalupe's furniture, I guess."

He laughs. He knows it sounds strange, this almost buddylike coexistence Mexico has achieved with Guadalupe. Olguin, a bundle of smiles, was born in Mexico City, got his doctorate in political science at Stanford University, but how to explain this? She's like the American flag, he begins, but that's not quite right, and he can't think of any religious symbol that inspires such nationalism besides, maybe, the Black Virgin Mary he has seen in Solidarity marches in Krakow, Poland.

"People don't feel bad using Guadalupe as the symbol of a car club, or tattooing it on their back," he says. "But you don't see people doing the same thing with a crucifix, or with any image of Jesus. See, a car club, that's a self-respecting group of people. You wouldn't see, for instance, a Cantina Guadalupana, because people would immediately recognize that as inappropriate."

Within Mexican consciousness, he says, there is a greater tendency to see parts of life as interrelated. Separation of church and state is an odd concept when for so long, the church was the state. Objectivity? There's another foreign concept. Listen to the soccer announcers on Spanish-language TV, who get much more into the action than their American counterparts.

But old ways can get filtered out with time and new generations.

"I don't really pay attention to that," says 16-year-old Eliasar de Leon as he climbs into the driver's seat of the family van and blasts the rap rhythms of 2 Live Crew. His mother, Anita, is close on his heels. Rolls her eyes. Kids.

Eliasar's father, Edalmiro de Leon, is a man who sends a few dollars to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City every time he wins at bingo on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. He thinks it's only fair. He has much to be thankful for, he says. His four sons made it home alive.

During the Persian Gulf War, all four - Ramon, Tony, Santos and Ricardo - were called to duty. Every night in his Burlington home, Edalmiro, 56, lit candles bearing the image of Guadalupe and prayed for their safety. All of them returned.

"After God, it's her, that's the way we see it," he says. "Since I was little, my parents believe in her so we still do."

In Seattle, the name Guadalupe rings a bell for concrete mason Rolando Rodriguez, 29. "Yeah, my grandmother gave me a poster with that guy, whatever his name is, carrying a bunch of roses," he says. The son of migrant workers, he was born in Prosser and remembers getting up at four in the morning to pick asparagus before going to school. Now he has his own family, but he admits he doesn't get to church much any more. "Sometimes I'm more busy around the house," he says. But there is a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe in his bedroom.

Sometimes the changes come too fast. Her daughter is 18 now, a college student in San Francisco who's gone and pierced her nose. Lupe Ortiz Peach can't figure out why. Such a nice, straight nose.

"When I'm doing something, I think, God protect her. Even when I'm doing dishes, I'm thinking that way. She's bound to make mistakes. I read these things about kids being taken by somebody to hurt them, so it's a constant thing I'm thinking, to protect my kids. And for my husband and my sisters, if they were to die, to make them feel no pain. We're living in a world, sometimes you don't know why it's so bad, you hear about it every second. I pray for that sometimes when my mind is alone."

She owns Lupe's Uruapan Mexican Restaurant in Fremont, a colorful tribute to her birthplace, an outlet for her to demonstrate what she can do with Mexican herbs and spices. Mexico remains part of her life; she remembers selling tostadas as a child from the front door of her home. After 25 years in the United States, she is still adjusting. She misses the sense of family she experienced in Mexico, where uncles and aunts often live next door or down the street, where children take care of their parents until death.

She feels her children being pulled away by outside forces, she says. There are two at home, Arthur, 10, and Isabel, 7. "When we get up in the morning, I tell my kids to do the sign of the cross. And when I talk to them about la virgen, I say, `La Virgen is your mom.' My daughter says, `I thought you were my mom.' And I tell her, `Yes, but she is your mom up in heaven.' "

On Sundays, her mother-in-law takes Isabel to church. It is a day Isabel anticipates. This is something that Lupe, who was born on Dec. 13 but was named after Guadalupe anyway, takes comfort in.

"At 14 and before that, I learned whatever my grandparents taught me, and I think all those things are good," she says. "When I go to Mexico, I do miss Seattle. I'm like in between. I can't forget Mexico. But I do know this is where I'm going to be."

You must balance political correctness against the demands of Jesus and Mary, Father Matthew Naumes tells the congregation at St. James Cathedral in Seattle.

It is the day the traveling image has come to the cathedral. Life, says Father Naumes, belongs to God and that makes issues like the right-to-die and abortion initiatives on November's ballot part of the congregation's political concerns. Myron Miller, the man responsible for chaperoning the image on the western leg of its trip, produces a letter from the Mexico basilica saying the purpose of the image's mission is to end abortion. Human sacrifice is the term he uses - the kind the Aztecs practiced in religious rituals before Guadalupe came to put a stop to it, he says.

It's not the first time la virgen has been drawn into politics.

A century after Father Hidalgo led his revolt against Spanish rule in 1810 under banners of Guadalupe, Emiliano Zapata led embittered farmers into Mexico City, pictures of la virgen tucked into the bands of their hats. Sixty years later, she came back to lead Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union campesinos in their march on Sacramento. In June, the image appeared on yet another banner, as Julio Romero and the farmworkers of Eastern Washington rallied at Yakima to protest poor working conditions.

But anyone who figures Catholics and pro-choice are like oil and water hasn't met Lupita Gutierrez-Parker, whose speech and Yakima home are crawling with evidence of a liberal bent. On her kitchen wall, next to phone numbers of Washington's congressmen and the White House, is a postcard of George Bush to which she has added a Hitleresque moustache and eyebrows.

In the days preceding the Nov. 5 election, she wore a "Yes on 120" button along with the Guadalupe medallion she treasures. She doesn't think the Church has any business telling women what to do with their bodies. It's that simple.

She and her mother differ sharply on the issue; she says her piece, her mom tsks and shakes her head and in the end, they are still family. She is comfortable with her stance and sees Guadalupe as a blessing in a religion where diversity among saints is as broad as a country club party list.

"It came out at my dad's birthday party that I supported 120, and everybody got real quiet," she says. Her brother-in-law, a conservative, was particularly startled. " `Why?' I asked him. `Because I'm Catholic? Because I'm a mother? Because I'm Mexican?'

" `Because you're Catholic,' he said. But I told him: God's gonna make the final decision."

Like the cotton strand holding together the tilma framed above the altar in Mexico City, the common belief that joined two cultures centuries ago still bonds the various pieces of the race that emerged. Religious traditions get pocketed away, but the Mexican culture and Our Lady of Guadalupe stick together like war buddies; after all, they are.

"For me, it's more of a national symbol that a religious symbol," says Mario Campos, a Seattle architect from Mexico City who has designed, among other things, the Woodland Park Zoo elephant house. "For some people it's the other way around, and for some it's both. But because of that, I suppose everybody gets that thing embedded in them. I can be here 20 years from now and if I go back to my roots, I've got to go back to Manuel Hidalgo, and Emiliano Zapata, and Our Lady of Guadalupe. That's just never going to go away."

Multiple studies still haven't explained the tilma, but those who believe in science say it will, someday. It's a crossroads where people encounter the unexplained and make their choice. Which is sort of what faith is all about.

Lupe Ortiz Peach, in her North Seattle home, believes her children will be OK if they pray to la virgen. It would be too confusing right now to try to explain Guadalupe's kinship with the Mexican people, she says; they'll figure that out later.

The lack of a centralized Mexican community in Seattle sometimes saddens her. Her mind toys with the idea of beginning a cultural commercial center, but she knows she cannot do it alone. Within her home, at least, she will pass on whatever traditions she can.

She is teaching Arthur and Isabel the rosary, a session of prayer that really is a tribute to the Virgin Mary. She teaches them the Spanish versions because those are the ones she knows.

Her work at the restaurant keeps her late most nights, so on her days off she prays a segment of the rosary with them before they go to sleep. They climb into her bed, Arthur on her left, Isabel on her right. Isabel uses the rosary beads Lupe wore on her wedding day. One by one they finger the beads, each representing a recitation of the Hail Mary or the Our Father. Lupe turns her head and watches Isabel and Arthur protectively as they recite their own halves of the prayer:

Santa Maria, Madre de Dios . . .

They finish with the sign of the cross and the children nuzzle into their mother's arms. "Tomorrow's Sunday," Isabel says. Above them, centered on the bedroom wall, the picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been carefully placed.

MARC RAMIREZ IS A REPORTER FOR THE SEATTLE TIMES SPECIALIZING IN EDUCATION TOPICS. BETTY UDESEN IS A TIMES STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER.