Read Avenue of Mysteries for Free Online

Oaxaca since 1954, was providing for the Christmas parties (las posadas).
    In fact, only the dump kids called the place on Independencia the virgin shop; everyone else referred to it as the Christmas-parties store—La Niña de las Posadas was the actual name of the ghoulish shop (literally, “The Girl of the Christmas Parties”). The eponymous Girl was whatever virgin you chose to take home with you; obviously, one of the life-size virgins for sale could liven up your Christmas party—more than an agonizing Christ on the Cross ever could.
    As serious as Lupe was about Oaxaca’s virgins, the Christmas-parties place was a joke to Juan Diego and Lupe. “The Girl,” as the dump kids occasionally called the virgin shop, was where they went for a laugh. Those virgins for sale weren’t half as realistic as the prostitutes on Zaragoza Street; the take-home virgins were more in the category of inflatable sex dolls. And the Bleeding Jesuses were simply grotesque.
    There was also (as Brother Pepe would have put it) a pecking order of virgins on display in various Oaxaca churches—alas, this pecking order and these virgins affected Lupe deeply. The Catholic Church had its own virgin shops in Oaxaca; for Lupe, these virgins were no laughing matter.
    Take the “stupid burro story,” and how Lupe loathed la Virgen de la Soledad. The Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad was grandiose—a pompous eyesore between Morelos and Independencia—and the first time the dump kids visited it, their access to the altar was blocked by a caterwauling contingent of pilgrims, countryfolk (farmers or fruit pickers, Juan Diego had guessed), who not only prayed in cries and shouts but ostentatiously approached the radiant statue of Our Lady of Solitude on their knees, virtually crawling the length of the center aisle. The praying pilgrims put Lupe off, as did the local-hero aspect of the Solitude Virgin—she was occasionally called “Oaxaca’s patron saint.”
    Had Brother Pepe been present, the kindly Jesuit teacher might have cautioned Lupe and Juan Diego against a pecking-order prejudice of their own: dump kids have to feel superior to someone ; at the small colony in Guerrero, los niños de la basura believed that they were superior to countryfolk. By the behavior of the loudly praying pilgrims in the Solitude Virgin’s basilica, and given their cloddishly rustic attire, Juan Diego and Lupe were left with little doubt: dump kids were definitelysuperior to these wailing and kneeling farmers or fruit pickers (whoever the uncouth countryfolk were).
    Lupe also had no love for how la Virgen de la Soledad was dressed; her severe, triangular-shaped robe was black, encrusted with gold. “She looks like an evil queen,” Lupe said.
    “She looks rich, you mean,” Juan Diego said.
    “The Solitude Virgin is not one of us,” Lupe declared. She meant not indigenous. She meant Spanish, which meant European. (She meant white. )
    The Solitude Virgin, Lupe said, was “a white-faced pinhead in a fancy gown.” It further irked Lupe that Guadalupe got second-class treatment in the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad; the Guadalupe altar was off to the left side of the center aisle—an unlit portrait of the dark-skinned virgin (not even a statue) was her sole recognition. And Our Lady of Guadalupe was indigenous; she was a native, an Indian; she was what Lupe meant by “one of us.”
    Brother Pepe would have been astonished at how much dump reading Juan Diego had done, and how closely Lupe had listened. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio believed they had purged the Jesuit library of the most extraneous and seditious reading matter, but the young dump reader had rescued many dangerous books from the hellfires of the basurero.
    Those works that had chronicled the Catholic indoctrination of the indigenous population of Mexico had not gone unnoticed; the Jesuits had played a mind-game role in the Spanish conquests, and both Lupe and Juan Diego