When is a walk more than a walk? When it's a caminata. I found that out by accident a couple of days before Christmas. I took the 1st Street exit on the southbound 101 headed to Boyle Heights for a Christmas folk art sale. The offramp was supposed to lead me east on 1st Street to Casa 0101 but because of the light rail extension all traffic must turn away from Boyle Heights.
But you can only turn right at the end of the offramp. So there I was scheming, wondering whether I could get away with an illegal left or U-turn and remembering a ticket and the time are not worth it. So at the traffic signal, with Gabriel Garcia Marquez street on the right I decided to turn left and do a u-ie in the middle of the street.
That's when I saw a group of about a hundred people: grandmas, kids, adults, all bundled up, white i-Pod cords dangling from teen ears and 10 year old boys thumbing hand held games. It was a posada, the traditional Latin American Catholic procession done nine days before Christmas to recreate the pilgrimage of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem.
Of course I was curious. My posada days go back to Mexico City when I was about 3 years old. My uncle in Guanajuato organized Posadas around the Cantador park before he died this year. The procession and singing are followed by piñatas and lots of eating fo tamales and drinking of a hot fruit drink called ponche. This Boyle Heights posada was organized by nearby Mission Dolores.
The church's pastor Robert Dolan said the church organized it and paid for the tamales, rolled tacos, tostadas, pozole, and ponche. The 40 minute procession, or caminata, took people to the neighborhood's back streets.
Dolan said seven years ago this family's young daughter was killed in front of the family house in the crossfire of a gang shooting. He led a caminata, reading prayers for the dead, from the church to the spot where the girl died and held a mass on the spot. A gang member had been shot nearby too and Dolan blessed that location too.
55 year-old Yolanda Gallo remembers this neighborhood as pretty bad a couple of decades ago. She raised three kids in this area. One's a construction worker, another a social worker and the third a lawyer. She left Durango 40 years ago. At the home's doorstep, with about a hundred people around, huddled, she gave the night's blessing. Mid way through pleaded for the safety of people in Mexico, to be spared violence from drug traffickers. She has relatives in Ciudad Juarez, drug trafficking's made it one of country's deadliest cities. She hopes Mexico can turn around, just like this Boyle Heights neighborhood has.
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My days as an altar boy did not include posadas back east, but this did remind me of working early morning novenas (6am?) attended largely by the elderly ladies, as well as having to work bake sales and other church-run events. Slave labor for Christ, basically.