“Materiality and the Lord of Miracles”. A reflection by Connie Gagliardi.

My notes from the feast of El Senor de los Milagros are a haphazard collection of the fury of discoveries, queries, emotions and realizations that came upon me that weekend in Los Angeles.

I remember how great it was to land in sunny Los Angeles and feel the warm air on my skin, unlike the much cooler and crisper Toronto I had left behind. Downtown Los Angeles was a place I had never been before; it felt empty and austere, that Friday evening when the group of us trekked to the Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels to watch the hermandad prepare for Sunday’s celebration. Yet on Sunday, these same downtown streets felt alive with presence, as the devotees of El Senor, donning their purple clothes, gathered to march the image from the Cathedral to La Placita in a several hour-long procession.

This monumental image, requiring the manpower of 32 men simultaneously, literally stopped traffic. There was something about the performance of the laborious body throughout this feast celebration that engendered one’s religious persona. Men shared in carrying the weight of this image, often with men of other hermandades. Women walked in front and always faced the image, singing and holding incense burners whose smoke carried with the wind in the direction of El Senor. Even the children were employed in carrying their own miniature-sized image, as members of the newly-formed hermandad for children.

Other members of the gathering were also engaged in forms of “labour,” so to speak. The presence of many young children required their fathers’ shoulders to sit atop for a better view, while keeping them out of arm’s length of the many advantageous peddlers who came selling food or drinks or purple trinkets to spectators. Drones flew atop the crowds, undeniably capturing the massive crowds that surrounded this monumental image. Some spectators even FaceTimed with absent friends and family members, allowing for their virtual presence to be felt as phone screens were passed along familial circles and held up amongst the crowd.

There was something very captivating about the materiality of the image itself. Sunday’s celebration was but one of several feasts put on in October by the neighbouring hermandades of Los Angeles, who were often in competition with one another to host the biggest and best feast for El Senor de los Milagros, each in veneration of their own image. As told to us by a Peruvian priest whom we had the chance to interview, the purpose of attending the procession of the image was both to subject oneself to the penance of being squished within the crowd, while attempting to get close to the image, to touch the image and ask it for favours from God.

This is where the monumentality of the image transcends its materiality; unlike images of the Virgin Mary, who protects all those look upon her by virtue of her gaze and gesture, El Senor is impenetrable in size and stature. The image is overpowering and demands bodily subservience, as those who wish to touch it must concede to its depiction. Children are held up to kiss the face of Jesus, but the gold that surrounds the holy figures is never to be touched.