My own Santo Niño de Atocha

Neda Bezerra
On the outskirts of Madrid, on the Camino Real, between the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, there was a shrine of humble construction, the ermita de Atocha, built in the Middle Ages, where rural workers and peasants would stop and pray and venerate three images of the Virgin Mary: Our Lady of Antigua, Our Lady of Pregnancies, and Our Lady of Atocha (Pescador 2009, 7). Legends say that the image of the Virgin of Atocha first came to Madrid from Antioch brought by St. Peter. The story of Our Lady of Atocha mixes fact and fable, history and legend, and has been told so many times in verse and in drama that the characters in it have become real, and the fabulous context in which they took part have been accepted as history (Allardyce 2003).

In July 1523 that small shrine, which had become an important sanctuary in the Castilian countryside, was given to the Dominican Order and the “Monastery of Nuestra Señora de Atocha was officially born, with the blessings of the pope, Adrian VI, and Carlos V’s permission” (Pecador 2009, 5). For at least four hundred years before the Dominicans were given the keys to the shrine, people had venerated the three different images of the Virgin Mary and asked her protection and help and hundreds of miracles had been attributed to the three images of the Virgin Mary in that small chapel in the Castilian countryside. The miracles continued to happen after the shrine became part of the Dominican monastery. By 1562, the Dominicans had removed two of the images and kept Our Lady of Atocha as a single miracle worker in the small chapel. Pescador argues that the reason “why the Dominicans simplified and narrowed those three different local venerations is not entirely clear” (Peascador 2009, 16). The Sapnish imperial family also became devoted to the Virgin of Atocha and soon made her the patroness of the Royal Court of Madrid (Allardyce 2003). Pescador explains that the veneration to the Virgin of Atocha provided a religious practice that seemed to link local pious traditions with “the ruling house and its spiritual needs” (2009, 21). It was a “harmonious link between the monarch and his folk, the court and the city, and Madrid and its countryside” (Pescador 2009, 21).

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the devotion to Our Lady of Atocha had already crossed the Atlantic and come to New Spain. In 1704, in the mining town of Fresnillo, in the state of Zacatecas, the Confraternity of Santo Cristo de Plateros requested permission to build a chapel to honor Santo Cristo de Plateros, a miraculous image of Christ (Pescador 2009). The Spaniard Count of San Mateo Valparaiso provided the chapel with its images, one of which was Our Lady of Atocha, which was place in a secondary altar. It was there that the public devotion to Our Lady of Atocha emerged. Pescador (2009) contends that the devotion to Our Lady of Atocha most likely came to Zacatecas with the Dominicans, who had built a convent there in 1604 (Pescador 2009). The confraternity of the Señor de Plateros helped promote the devotion to Our Lady of Atocha by including it in its regular calendar her feast day (Pescador 2009). By the end of the eighteenth century, social and political changes had taken place in the lives of the local people of Fresnillo. A new shrine to honor the Christ of Plateros was built next to the old one in 1792 and the images of Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the Virgin of Purification started being venerated in the new shrine (Pescador 2009). An even more important transformation came about in the area: the emergence of the devotion to the Santo Niño de Atocha, who had by then been separated from the image of Our Lady of Atocha (Pescador 2009). By 1816, this Holy Child had become a very popular and powerful saint. Thus, the devotion to the Santo Niño de Atocha is part of the late colonial period and predates the independence of Mexico (Pescador 2009). Most importantly, the veneration of the Santo Niño de Atocha “had no documented roots in Spain” (Pescador 2009, 71). The popularity of the devotion of the Santo Niño de Atocha grew fast and by the mid-nineteenth century it was the primary religious image in the sanctuary of Plateros. Pescador argues that the Santo Niño de Atocha became “not only an independent entity in the sanctuary of Plateros but also the religious icon that best mirrored the religious and social concerns of people in the region” (Pescado 2009, 75). Thirty years later, the devotion to the Santo Niño de Atocha had spread from Fresnillo to Aguascalientes, León, Guanajuanato in the province of Zacatecas and to the rural areas of Bajío region and Jalisco. By the 1850s and 1860s it had reached Durango, Chihuahua, and New Mexico. For Pescador (2009), the devotion to the Santo Niño de Atocha represents “the struggle by Mexican families in the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro to create new ways in which they could relate to the sacred world,” which were “more in accordance with the challenges of new times, without accepting the subordinate status they inherited from the colonial era” (Pescador 2009, 75).

Novenas became the way through which Mexican families shaped local devotions after Mexico independence, when there was a lack of clergy in Mexico. Popular Catholic devotions such as novenas, pilgrimages, inexpensive tin paintings helped in the diffusion of the devotion to the Santo Niño de Atocha from Zacatecas, north along the Camino Real de Tierra Adientro, all the way to northern New Mexico. The booklet of Nueva Novena narrated miracles in each of the nine days of prayer and helped in the development of the reputation of the Santo Niño wherever it reached. The first historical record of the Santo Niño de Atocha in New Mexico dates to 1857, when a girl was christened with the name Manuela de Atocha, in the town of Santa Cruz de la Cañada, in northern New Mexico. Pescador argues that “the baptismal record of Manuela de Atocha provides crucial evidence of the introduction of the Santo Niño in New Mexico. The devotion to the Santo Niño soon spread all over northern New Mexico. Severiano Medina, from Chimayó, after going on a pilgrimage to the chapel of Santo Cristo de Plateros, in Fresnillo, Mexico, built a private chapel next to his house to venerate the Santo Niño, which by then had been tailored after the 1848 Nueva Novena. He was now wearing clothes that indicated he was a wanderer. His crown was replaced by a wide-brim hat and his little globe in His left hand was replaced by a little food basket. His scepter was replaced by a rod with a gourd hanging on it, which, according to Pescador, was an “unequivocal symbol of pilgrimage and travelling” (Pescador 2009, 85). It did not take long for the devotion to the Santo Niño de Atocha to obfuscate the devotion to the Crucifix of Our Lord of Esquipulas and to become the most important veneration in the region both among the Pueblo and the Spanish families (Pescador 2009). By the end of the nineteenth century, an image of the Santo Niño was placed in a room to the side of the main altar at El Santuario de Chimayó. The first account of veneration of the Santo Niño de Atocha in Chimayó dates to 1890, when María Montoya Martinez, a ten-year old Pueblo Indian from San Ildefonso, visited the sanctuary while making a pilgrimage from her home to pay back a promise her mother had made to the Santo Niño of Atocha for her full recovery from a serious illness (Pescador 2009). Martinez’s visit to El Santuario de Chimayó to pay homage to the Santo Niño de Atocha demonstrates the diffusion of the devotion to the Santo Niño in New Mexico. During the decades that followed the placing of the Holy Child at the Sanctuary of the Lord of Esquipulas (El Santuario de Chimayó), the devotion to the Santo Niño expanded to include faithful from all corners of New Mexico. In 1929, when the Diocese of Santa Fe took possession of the sanctuary, the image of the Santo Niño was placed back at the original Medina chapel, which was renamed Capilla del Santo Niño de Atocha, located just a short walk from El Santuario de Chimayó.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allardyce, Isabel. Historic Shrines of Spain. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2003.


Pescador, Juan Javier. Crossing Borders with the Santo Niño de Atocha. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009.