In 1531, a glowing apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared near Mexico City before a peasant named Juan Diego.
Today in Southern California, Mary’s image materializes in settings even more humble: laundromats, liquor stores, bakeries, florists, convenience stores and tire shops.
Murals featuring the likeness of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as she’s known, are commonplace in immigrant Latino communities.
The street art is usually based on a classic image, in which the Virgin is seen at full length, in a cloak, hands in prayer, eyes down, skin some shade of brown. Her entire figure radiates a glow, as if she had just been exfoliated.
Sam Quinones began snapping casual photos of the murals on a whim while stationed in Mexico City as a reporter, curious about their ubiquity and what they might represent. After returning to the U.S., Quinones began noticing the murals all over Los Angeles County, and sometimes beyond.
He began taking the photos more seriously, concentrating on the time of day, the surroundings, the presence of passersby.
The result is “Our Lady of the Angels: The Virgin of Guadalupe on the Walls of Los Angeles,” a newly published book from Angel City Press of his mural photos. His text is a prose poem about the murals’ existence and meaning.
I went to Saturday’s book launch event in Echo Park for a few reasons. For starters, Quinones was raised in Claremont, where I live. Although he’s long lived in Pasadena, and his reporting specialties are crime and opioids, I’d always thought I should meet him.
Secondly, while the book is about murals in L.A., the Virgin of Guadalupe is of wide interest in Latino communities, including in the immigrant-rich Inland Empire.
And it didn’t hurt that for the event, Quinones would be interviewed by my columnist compadre Gustavo Arellano. Sold.
Probably 50 of us crowded into a meeting room of the Los Angeles Public Library’s Edendale branch. We came from all over. Arellano recognized several who, like him, had driven up from Orange County. I was surprised to find fellow Claremonter Lydia Henry, who’d gone to school with Quinones.
At the outset, Quinones explained his interest in the Virgin of Guadalupe: “I’m not Catholic, or Christian really. But when I lived in Mexico City, I saw what she meant to people, especially to poor and working class people.”
Probably in the 1980s, immigrant entrepreneurs began operating from L.A.’s cheapest real estate: indoor swap meets and strip malls. Virgin of Guadalupe murals soon followed.
The expressions of faith were also, Quinones said, a way of protecting business owners’ tenuous piece of the American dream. Even hardened gang members are reluctant to paint graffiti atop an icon of their culture and might otherwise leave the business alone.
As Quinones writes in “Our Lady”: “Police presence was intermittent. A mural of the Virgin was about all the private security these immigrant entrepreneurs could afford.”
Spiritual protection may also be sought from the Virgin’s presence. Writes Quinones: “She might bless both the store and the person who shopped there.” Everyone wins!
The occasional incongruity of the images are part of their charm, as seen in some of the photos Quinones included in his slide show.
Sometimes the Virgin appears as one of a string of amateurishly painted images, the others depicting products for sale inside.
“You can’t be a Virgin muralist and not know how to paint milk jugs, egg cartons and Mazola corn oil,” Quinones joked. Her image might appear near a slogan like “coldest beer in town.”
More broadly, these images are appearing far from any religious context.
“No one is praying to them,” Quinones observed. “She is simply there watching over you.”
He showed us a photo he’d taken of a young skateboarder rolling along a sidewalk past a Virgin mural. “She always has folded hands. It’s like she’s praying for this boy,” Quinones said.
Another photo was of a mural, inexpertly rendered, in the Ramona Gardens housing project. The Virgin looks angry, or maybe disappointed.
“I like her with a Mona Lisa smile,” Quinones said. “Here it’s like, ‘you guys, you are really screwing up.’”
It’s possible to chart the shifts in immigrant population by where the murals appear, Quinones said. South L.A. is more recent territory as Latinos have moved to areas that were once heavily Black.
Likewise, the murals disappear as gentrification occurs and a mom-and-pop meat market becomes a Subway. They are also relatively rare outside of L.A.
“Once you move to the suburbs,” Quinones theorized, “you want to leave the old style behind. Maybe,” he added, “you have a lot of life’s problems resolved.”
A map of Southern California with pins for nearly 200 Virgin murals, some of which no longer exist, can be found at samquinones.com/virgin-map. Quinones wants people to submit photos of murals they see or to share a memory of murals already posted.
More about him: Now 67, Quinones attended the Claremont schools Oakmont Elementary, El Roble Middle School and Claremont High, where he graduated in 1977. His father taught English at Claremont McKenna College. Quinones’ first journalism job was at the Orange County Register.
Switching things up after two grim books on the drug crisis, Quinones’ most recent, “The Perfect Tuba,” is about a sunny subculture: tuba players. Thus far no reviewer has given it a “blat.”
Afterward, a long line of people clutching copies of “Our Lady of the Angels” waited to meet Quinones and get his signature. When the line cleared, we spoke for a few minutes.
I showed him photos I’d taken of Virgin murals in Riverside and Pomona. He told me about one in San Bernardino.
“There’s a softness to her,” Quinones said of Virgin images. “Even though people may be struggling economically, even though there’s a hardness to people’s lives.”
I had an epiphany, albeit not brilliant enough to have been divinely inspired: “She’s a mother. She’s the ultimate mother.”
“She’s a mother,” Quinones affirmed. “That’s the whole point.”
Later I read the story of Juan Diego. He’d missed an appointment with the apparition for their fourth meeting because his uncle, Juan Bernardino, was dying. Mary appeared anyway and chided him.
She said, in his native tongue: “Am I not here, I who am your mother?”
She sounded disappointed — but as mothers do, she forgave him.
David Allen asks for your forgiveness Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook or Instagram, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.