Milagros, madres y mariachi: visiting the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Newport

NEWPORT – “Santa Maria, Madre de Dios, ruega por nostros pecadores ahora y en la hora de nuestra Muerte.”

The words to the Hail Mary, recognizable to a Catholic school kid by their seemingly universal cadence even when recited in a foreign tongue, rang out in a soft chorus from a small group praying the rosary in the front of St. Joseph’s church as the bells tolled six on a cold November Sunday.

By the time the rosary prayers concluded, over 100 people had filed into the pews, with senior citizens, families with children, and young men wearing backpacks as if on their way to or from work adding their whispering voices to the hushed chorus of supplicants praying to the Virgin Mary. Nearly all of them were members of Newport's vibrant and growing Hispanic community, which Conexion Latina estimates to be close to 5,000, or about 20% of the city's official year-round population.

At the back of the church, Yoli Macías greeted parishioners as they trickled into the narthex, repeatedly agreeing with people in hushed tones about how cold it was outside. In addition to her role supporting Newport’s Spanish-speaking community through her work at Conexion Latina Newport, Macías is an office assistant at St. Joseph’s, a banal job title for all of the work she does scheduling baptisms, first communions and other events and acting as a liaison for a Spanish-speaking congregation which is comprised mainly of indigenous Guatemalans but also has members from Bolivia, El Salvador, Mexico and other countries across the Americas.

“You have to come back for the Our Lady of Guadalupe feast day on Dec. 18,” advised Macías after the only Spanish-language Catholic mass on Aquidneck Island had concluded. “There will be mariachi at the mass, food, a raffle, and a piñata for the kids – and a lot of people will wear traditional clothing.”

What is the Catholic feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe and why is it so important in many Spanish-speaking cultures?

As the lore goes, the Virgin Mary appeared to an indigenous Nahuatl Aztec and early Catholic convert named Juan Diego in 1531, just a few years after Giovanni de Verrazzano and his crew became the first known Europeans to sail into Narragansett Bay, on the slopes of Tepeyac hill in what is now Mexico City. Significantly, she appeared to the now-beatified and canonized Juan Diego as a mestiza woman – a woman of mixed European and indigenous ancestry - spoke his native Nahuatl language and wore familiar traditional clothing.

Juan Diego told the Spanish bishop about his miraculous vision, and the bishop demanded proof, which Juan Diego’s mestiza María provided in the form of two combined miracles. First, she had Juan Diego find and pick Castilian roses which, in addition to growing out of season in December, are not native to Mexico. Second, after the Virgin Mary arranged the flowers in Juan Diego’s tilma, or traditional cloak, to carry down to the bishop, he opened his cloak to find the flowers had imprinted a color image of the Lady of Guadalupe onto the fabric.

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The story, which Vatican News reports is best known from a manuscript written in the Aztec Nahuatl language by the scholar Antonio Valeriano sometime after 1556, supposedly led to the eventual conversion of about 6 million indigenous people to Catholicism.

Juan Diego’s tilma is still on display to this day at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, and the site is surpassed in popularity as a pilgrimage destination only by St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. 20 million pilgrims make their way to Mexico City every year, with almost half of them arriving in December to coincide with the feast day.

Liturgical Mariachi: a post-Vatican II Mesoamerican Catholic musical tradition

While St. Joseph’s regular 6:30 p.m. Spanish mass on Sundays always features a small chorus accompanied by guitar, the church hired a mariachi group from Boston for this special mass. The mariachis from the Carlos Campos group, based in the Boston area, joined the procession to start the mass and played throughout different points of the service, including during communion. They arranged themselves in the south transept of the church, off to the side of a sanctuary specially decorated for the day with colorful roses, an image of the Lady of Guadalupe and the flags of many South and Central American countries, and backed traditional Catholic lyrics sung mariachi-style with a culturally distinct blend of violins, guitars, and trumpets.

According to the National Catholic Register, the earliest mariachi music written specifically for Catholic liturgy was "Misa Panamericana," composed in 1966 by Canadian priest Juan Marco Leclerc after the Second Vatican Council and commissioned to be used in the cathedral at Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico.

"Misa Panamericana" was popularized in the mid-1970s and is still used today as the traditional liturgical music standard Mass setting for mariachis, and mariachi music at mass has remained popular not only with Mexican Catholics, for whom both the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe and mariachi music carry a special cultural significance, but also with churchgoers from all over North, South and Central America.

Traditional clothing preserves and signifies different regional cultures in Guatemala

A parishioner from Guatemala named Julio explained, “To everybody in South America and Central America, the Virgin of Guadalupe is very important…We try to teach the kids to understand she is a really important person for us.”

At least three generations of Hispanic Newporters (and a few English-speaking friends and neighbors) were in attendance for the mass and feast, with many people, especially children, dressed in traditional Guatemalan folk attire. Julio, who was wearing a bright turquoise shirt with an embroidered design running around the collar, explained the cultural significance of the color, design and other elements of traditional indigenous clothing:

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“(This shirt) is something my mom sent me from Guatemala,” he said. “Guatemala has like 24 different cultures, and 24 different languages. Every single one has a different cloth with a different design.”

“It’s not just the color, it’s many things,” he continued. “Clothes like this designate where you come from. I grew up in northern Guatemala, in Cobán, Alta Verapaz; they have around eight different languages and eight different cultures there, so they each have their own design – especially for the women, they have a lot of designs.”

It was interesting to see the young children at the mass, many of whom were born in Newport and have never been to Guatemala, maintaining their connection to their regionally and linguistically specific indigenous cultures with the traditional clothing, literally wearing their Guatemalan identity even as they grow up as a new generation of Americans.

Tamales and multi-generational matriarchs in the basement of St. Joseph's

After the mass concluded with one last mariachi tune, many members of the congregation headed downstairs to the basement to enjoy coffee, sweets, tamales – a traditional Mesoamerican dish with a filling, in this case chicken, wrapped in a dough made from nixtamalized corn and steamed in a corn husk or a banana leaf – and a sweet fruit drink called ponche (punch) which is served warm with lots of fruit pieces in it and tastes a bit like liquid apple pie.

As people ate and chatted, two groups of Peruvian and Dominican dancers, from the Centro de Arte y Cultura de las Americas in North Providence and Grupo Arcoiris in Providence respectively, performed a variety of traditional dances. Raffle tickets were sold and winners announced, and at the end, kids took turns swinging a bat at a star-shaped piñata before descending on the cascading candy in a loud and joyous swarm.

All of the children had been called up to the front of the church by Father Scott Pontes earlier in the day to learn the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe (and to let the moms get photos of everybody sitting together in their cultural attire) during what must have felt to them like a very long mass, and the brief but raucous scrum for candy was their just reward for sitting so quietly and attentively throughout his presentation.

Iris Quiroe, one of the longest-tenured members of the community, was there with her teenage daughter Bella, who is a sophomore at the Met school in Newport. Iris moved to Newport in 1991 and learned that year she was pregnant with her first child. She has since raised three girls and two boys in Newport, with Bella being the youngest, and watched her church community grow correspondingly. However, she remembers the early days of the St. Joseph’s Hispanic community in the late nineties, when the entire congregation was only about 10 people.

Iris said she first worked as a server at the New York Yacht Club for eight years, then for three years at the Guatemalan consulate in Providence, and then ran a business on Broadway for about six years. Now she has her CNA license and cares for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. “It’s difficult, but I love it,” she said. “Someday someone will have to take care of me.”

Her daughter Bella explained she was interested in filmmaking and advocacy work – in addition to being interested in advocating for her Guatemalan community and heritage, she completed an internship at Clean Ocean Access in Middletown and is part of a group at school that raises awareness about and seeks to prevent dating violence.

Felicidad, an older woman from Bolivia sitting at the same table as Iris and Bella, told The Daily News she had lived in Newport for 16 years and that she regularly volunteered at St. Joseph’s weekly food pantry and soup kitchen in addition to being involved with the church’s Hispanic community. Speaking in Spanish, she told The Daily News, “(People) should come for the Christmas mass – it is so beautiful, especially hearing the chorus sing.”

As the three generations of women sat together and watched a fourth younger generation scamper and play around the basement, on the feast day commemorating a woman who they believe is the mother of all humanity and revealed herself as a mestiza woman specifically to drive that point home, the extent to which it is the women of the world who safeguard and advance humanity's varied cultures and communities became perfectly clear. So too did the extent to which this particular community has become deeply woven into the social fabric of the city of Newport.

For anybody interested in attending the Spanish-language mass at 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve, whether Spanish-speaking or not, the message from Father Pontes during the mass and parishioners like Felicidad afterward was clear: “Las puertas están abiertas a todos – the doors are open for everybody.”

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: St. Joseph's Church hosts Newport County's only Spanish-speaking Mass