In Mexico, where my mom’s family originated before they moved just north of the Rio Grande three generations back, May 10th is always Mother’s Day. Middle of the week, second Friday of the month—it doesn’t matter, wherever it falls, Dia de las Madres is always on the same day. Once every few years (the last time was 2009) the Mexican holiday corresponds with ours in the US, and then towns across south Texas—like Laredo and El Paso and Brownsville, where I was born—are filled with happy celebrants.
It’s happened on a handful of occasions in my lifetime—today marks the seventh, but even when we celebrate on different days, the holiday is generally the same in both countries, broadly speaking. Moms, or at least the need to celebrate them, is universal it seems. There are handmade gifts prepared by children, school plays and special meals—but in Mexico, where the patron saint is Our Lady of Guadalupe, the celebration takes on a distinctly religious air.
When I was little, my mother loved to tell me the story of Juan Diego, the poor Indian farmer, walking amid the thorns and cactus thistle growing out of the dirt on Tepeyac hill. It was important to her that he was a humble, brown skinned, farmhand—a person like her grandfather who helped raise her. And it was important that he spoke in the indigenous Náhuatl, rather than in the conquistador’s tongue. The first account of Diego’s miraculous encounter is the 16th century El Nican Mopohua, the work of a minor politician, who composed it in the native language.
Were it not for Juan Diego, my mother would say, we might think Catholicism was meant only for kings and knights and courtly ladies. But here was a peasant receiving the blessed mother—and in the story, the virgin also appears brown-skinned. She asks Diego to visit the Bishopric in the big city, and petition to have a church dedicated to her on the spot. Diego is uncertain, but he does as he’s told (you don’t second guess the holy mother) and predictably the Bishop laughs and throws him out. He returns to the virgin who instructs him to collect desert flowers from the hill in his tilma, a traditional Indian cloak, and take them back to the Bishop as proof.
The Basilica that houses the sacred cloak of Juan Diego sits a little less than an hour north of the capitol city, and on May 10th its wide plaza is packed with families, children in their church best, grandmothers in traditional huipils, and men of all ages in their finest guayaberas. In the summer of 1999, I taught for six weeks in Mexico, and visited the Basilica, watching pilgrims who’d made the long trek to Guadalupe step up to a continuously moving walkway that had been installed to manage the crowds that flock to the church each year. As I stood toward the back of the cavernous nave, hundreds of visitors (maybe more) knelt on the conveyor belt and rode left-to-right, looking up at Juan Diego’s resplendent apron, which hangs fifty feet up a golden wall, behind the front-most altar.
I imagine many of them said a private prayer as they went. And I remember thinking, too, mother would love this. Not just the history, the culture and church—but the simple human ritual. The vendors in the plaza outside, hawking little toys and steamed corn on sticks and hunks of pineapple dusted with bright orange cayenne. The smell of cinnamon and sugar and pepper, and the bougainvillea pouring over the stone walls in bright clumps, pink and peach petals blowing into the street. She’d love the boys and girls running about, brandishing churros like swords. And she would love the language and the music and the crowds—many of them simple folk like Diego, colorfully dressed, who’d travelled to this hill to catch a brief glimpse of the mother.
The first time Mother’s Day fell on May 10th in my lifetime was the day I was born. Mother liked to say that this made it our special day, the day she became a mother. I, on the other hand, liked to offer it as proof of my impeccable timing—especially useful when I was a day or two late for anniversaries and holidays, or with birthday cards. As some of you already know, my mother passed away last summer after suffering a massive stroke. The loss was unexpected and immediate; she was there one moment, gone the next. Today I turn forty-five, the first time I’ve celebrated the day without her.
She wouldn’t want me to spend too much time on this—linger on a personal sadness. She’d tell me to find a place in the sun and open air and sit—remember all the things I have to be grateful for. I console myself knowing that when she went she was happy, dressed in her ‘going out’ clothes, at dinner with family, nursing a glass of wine, surrounded by the people she loved.
But the day is undeniably different now, and I think of my brothers and sisters back home who are celebrating today somberly at her grave site. I think of my children, my nephews and nieces who’d only barely begun to know their Nana. I think of my tia, my mom’s only sister, who flew all night to be with us when mom died.
And all the motherless children on this day, the brokenhearted, the ones for whom Mother’s Day is a time of grieving—and for all those who’ve mothered us through our hurt, our despair, despite never actually having borne us, I think of you, too—maybe most of all. From me and my mom, who loved the simple and strange, the subversive and unexpected, we hope you receive all the heartlove you need today. Abrazos, D.
DCH