10/22/2026
Good night, dear readers.
Tonight's good night is Guadalupana Cuidando Su Pueblo (1996) by Anita Rodríguez.
She rises out of the land itself. Our Lady of Guadalupe stands immense over a New Mexico valley, her blue mantle scattered with gold stars, her eyes closed, a gentle smile on her lips, cradling a glowing heart in both hands against her chest. Rays of flame, red and orange and pink, burst outward behind her into a deep blue sky. The hem of her red-gold gown spills down the hillside and sinks into the earth like the roots of a great cottonwood. Behind her, a river winds through piñon-dotted hills toward blue mountains. Below, at her feet, the people are coming to Mass. They walk in dark silhouettes along the dirt paths toward a small adobe church with three bell towers: families holding children's hands, an elder with a cane, women in shawls passing through the gate of the walled churchyard. Parked out front are a pink-and-green 1950s convertible, a pale blue sedan, and a red car seen from above. It is a Sunday morning in northern New Mexico, and she is watching over all of it.
Rodríguez was born in Taos to a nuevomexicano father and a painter mother who had come from Texas to study art. Before she was known as a painter, she was known as an enjarradora, a plasterer of adobe walls. The craft is a Pueblo tradition, women's work handed down through generations of mothers and daughters long before the Spanish arrived. Like so many indigenous traditions here, it passed into the Hispanicized villages of the north and survives there still. Her own hands have smoothed the earthen walls of buildings like the church in this painting. She went on to become an award-winning painter of kitchens, fiestas, comadres, and dancing calaveras, and in 2016 she published a memoir with recipes, Coyota in the Kitchen, about growing up between two very different families. She still lives and paints in Taos.
Since coming home, I have been going to Mass at a small church in New Mexico. I feel called to it by spirits. Some people in my life find that hard to understand, and I know all the usual arguments against the Catholic Church. Still, something is calling me, and I have decided to answer it. I am going to finally be baptized. Catholicism here is its own creature, unlike anywhere else on earth. It grew over four centuries out of Spanish, Puebloan, and Mexican roots, shaped by santeros, penitentes, enjarradoras, and grandmothers, until it became something that belongs to this place alone. Look at Rodríguez's Guadalupe and her gown rooted in the hillside. She is made of this land. So are those adobe walls, mud from the riverbanks shaped by women's hands. My ancestors are in that earth, in those churchyards, in those walls, in my blood and bones. I do not have to agree with every word spoken from every pulpit to belong to a people and a place, to walk through that gate on a Sunday morning with my neighbors, and to be home. She is watching over her people. I am one of them. She is watching over me, too.
Sleep well.
— Alisa 🕯️
Tap the image to see the whole glorious thing
