A Thoroughly Modern Miracle: Economic Modernization and Pilgrimage to San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco

More than seven million pilgrims make their way by foot, bike, and bus to the Basilica of the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos in rural Jalisco annually from throughout Mexico and the United States.  The town of San Juan de los Lagos has become a city since the middle of the twentieth century, a city that pilgrims built.  Pilgrims came to thank the Virgin of San Juan for their intervention in their lives, often to fulfill a promise they had made her in exchange for a favor.  While this phenomenon wasn’t new, the size and frequency of popular pilgrimages to her shrine increased rapidly at this time.  The number of pilgrims to San Juan grew by the tens of thousands annually in the middle decades of the twentieth century.  Pilgrims came from throughout the United States and Mexico, outside of the regional ambit that had previously characterized the devotion.  Modernization changes directly supported the growth of pilgrimage to the Virgin of San Juan’s shrine.  Newly paved roads, a burgeoning popular press, and a highly mobile population with access to cash all contributed to the rapid expansion of pilgrimage to San Juan.  Using archdiocesan records, newspapers, and oral history interviews, this paper examines the mid-twentieth-century transformation of San Juan de los Lagos.  It challenges the idea that modernization implies secularization, by showing the ways that modernization encouraged and transformed “traditional” religious practices.  It also provides a case study of the way that rural-urban and transnational migration, and the flows of ideas and cash that accompanied them, affected provincial Mexican places during the Mexican miracle.