Lopez, Julian (Week 3)

I grew up in San Diego - a city very close to the border, like a 15 minute drive to the border close. The demographic in San Diego, well, in the places my family would stay, majority would be latinx/ chicanx people. My dad is christian, mom is catholic, so religion was a weird topic in my household until it wasn't. My mother believed and praised/ worshipped la virgen Maria, while my dad despised the idea of worshipping her, he didn't think of her as a saint or held her on any pedestal. He told me christians didn't praise nor put her on a pedestal as my mother did within the catholic religion. My step-mom is also catholic and she also worships la virgen Maria, mentioned to me that my dad thinks of her otherwise. Currently, my mother lives 5 minutes from a park known as Chicano Park in San Diego and it consists of a lot of murals regarding chicanx culture. Of course, some of these murals consist of la virgen Maria. From my knowledge, all I know is the she is the mother of Jesus Christ. She became pregnant miraculously without losing her virginity, without the help of a man. She was praised as holy for being 'pure' and not committing sin and delivering a baby without sin, Jesus Christ. growing up, my mother would always have a shrine somewhere around the house of her. This one time, we were moving out from our old apartment and she had this medium sized shrine of her. I had kind placed her rough on the trunk of the car and she saw how I handled it with not so much care and she raised her voice at me; she doesn't take any disrespect towards la virgen. Other than that, I wasn't really taught nor did I go out of my way to learn more about the importance/ role she played in the community/ culture, even in religion.