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had learned a lot about the Jesuitical conquistadors of the Roman Catholic Church. While Juan Diego had at first become a dump reader for the purpose of teaching himself to read, Lupe had listened and learned—from the start, she’d been focused.
    In the Solitude Virgin’s basilica, there was a marble-floored chamber with paintings of the burro story: peasants were praying after they had met and were followed by a solitary, unaccompanied burro. On the little donkey’s back was a long box—it looked like a coffin.
    “What fool wouldn’t have looked in the box right away?” Lupe always asked. Not these stupid peasants—their brains must have been deprived of oxygen by their sombreros. (Dumb countryfolk, in the dump kids’ opinion.)
    There was—there still exists—a controversy concerning what happened to the burro. Did it one day just stop walking and lie down, ordid it drop dead? At the site where the little donkey either stopped in its tracks or just died, the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad was erected. Because only then and there had the dumb peasants opened the burro’s box. In it was a statue of the Solitude Virgin; disturbingly, a much smaller Jesus figure, naked except for a towel covering his crotch, was lying in the Solitude Virgin’s lap.
    “What is a shrunken Jesus doing there ?” Lupe always asked. The discrepancy in the size of the figures was most disturbing: the larger Solitude Virgin with a Jesus half her size. And this was no Baby Jesus; this was Jesus with a beard, only he was unnaturally small and dressed in nothing but a towel.
    In Lupe’s opinion, the burro had been “abused”; the larger Solitude Virgin with a smaller, half-naked Jesus in her lap spoke to Lupe of “even worse abuse”—not to mention how “stupid” the peasants were, for not having the brains to look in the box at the beginning.
    Thus did the dump kids dismiss Oaxaca’s patron saint and most fussed-over virgin as a hoax or a fraud—a “cult virgin,” Lupe called la Virgen de la Soledad. As for the proximity of the virgin shop on Independencia to the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, all Lupe would say was: “Fitting.”
    Lupe had listened to a lot of grown-up (if not always well-written) books; her speech might have been incomprehensible to everyone except Juan Diego, but Lupe’s exposure to language—and, because of the books in the basurero, to an educated vocabulary—was beyond her years and her experience.
    In contrast to her feelings for the Solitude Virgin’s basilica, Lupe called the Dominican church on Alcalá a “beautiful extravagance.” Having complained about the gold-encrusted robe of the Solitude Virgin, Lupe loved the gilded ceiling in the Templo de Santo Domingo; she had no complaints about “how very Spanish Baroque” Santo Domingo was—“how very European. ” And Lupe liked the gold-encrusted shrine to Guadalupe, too—nor was Our Lady of Guadalupe overshadowed by the Virgin Mary in Santo Domingo.
    As a self-described Guadalupe girl, Lupe was sensitive to Guadalupe being overshadowed by the “Mary Monster.” Lupe not only meant that Mary was the most dominant of the Catholic Church’s “stable” of virgins; Lupe believed that the Virgin Mary was also “a domineering virgin.”
    And this was the grievance Lupe had with the Jesuits’ Templo de laCompañía de Jesús on the corner of Magón and Trujano—the Temple of the Society of Jesus made the Virgin Mary the main attraction. As you entered, your attention was drawn to the fountain of holy water—agua de San Ignacio de Loyola—and a portrait of the formidable Saint Ignatius himself. (Loyola was looking to Heaven for guidance, as he is often depicted.)
    In an inviting nook, after you passed the fountain of holy water, was a modest but attractive shrine to Guadalupe; special notice was paid to the dark-skinned virgin’s most famous utterance, in large lettering easily viewed from the pews and kneeling