Oct 12. Our lady of Zapopan

October 12 is a day the “Traveling Lady of Zapopan” comes “home” to spend the fall and winter months in her own stately basilica.
South of the border, this crisp fall day is actually “The Day of the Race”, an important national holiday since it marks for these people the new flood of human blood which rose in New Spain as one of the conquest, Mexico became predominantly populated by “mestizos” or Spanish-Indians. To foretell the physical characteristics of the mestizo came the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1531, when the portrait of the Blessed Virgin as a Spanish Indian woman appeared on the tilma of Juan Diego.
Guadalajara, capital and jewel of the state of Jalisco, celebrates “The Day of the Race” by rendering ecstatic homage to “The Little Virgin” as Our Lady of Zapopan. She is Spanish in origin but completely Mexican in the tradition of more than four hundred years that surround her cult. Brought to Zapopan by Father Antonio de Segovia in 1541, the “Little Virgin”, less than fourteen inches high, found herself in the heart of a territory, then called New Galicia, still groaning under the barbarous conquest of Nune de Guzman. The precious statue, which the warm heart of the Mexican personifies, was the instrument by which Heaven vouchsafed to turn the fears and animosities of the natives into a confidence and love which enabled the zealous Franciscan to gather then into the fold of the Good Shepherd. The story is told that, as he preached, the little statue of Our Lady which he always carried with him, emitted rays of light.

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