In the small pueblo of Atotonilco (a Náhuatl word for "place of hot waters"), a plain white church draws people who seek to be healed. The church was built in 1746 under the direction of the Jesuit priest Luis Felipe Neri de Alfaro after he had a dream in which he witnessed Jesus carrying the cross. The outside of the church is largely unadorned, but inside, unlike any other church I have seen in México, the walls and ceilings are painted with verses of poetry and intricate frescoes depicting Biblical scenes. In 1810, the priest who led the Mexican Independence movement, Miguel Hidalgo, took the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe from this church's sanctuary and raised it as a standard before the insurgent troops to inspire their charge.
When I visited the parroquia, a boy in a wheelchair, a man with one arm, and many more people quietly gathered on the terrace of the church's entrance and walked through its doors to ask for a miracle. As I sat on a short wooden bench in the small sanctuary, a gentle chorus drifted in from the streets. A group of more than twenty elderly women entered the church singing call-and-response refrains in sweet, tremulous, mesmerizing voices. They proceeded in two lines, their gray hair in long braids down their backs, their dark and wrinkled faces soft and contemplative. As each woman reached the wooden floor of the sanctuary, she knelt and went the rest of the way to the altar on her aged knees.
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