A saint who did not want us to leave
In 1920, a twenty-year-old seminarian wrote a short one-act play titled Let's Go North! (¡Vámonos al Norte!). It was a moralizing comedy, written to be performed at village festivals. The main character, Don Rogaciano, returns from the United States full of airs and broken English, despising his own people. Sancho, a peasant who never left, disarms him with common sense and good humor. The message was clear: the North saves no one. It is not worth leaving.
The seminarian's name was Toribio Romo González. Eight years later, in a ravine near Tequila, federal soldiers shot him for being a priest.
And seventy years after that, Mexican migrants crossing the Sonoran Desert began to say that a young man in a blue shirt had guided them to water, to a road, to work on the other side. When they returned to Santa Ana de Guadalupe to give thanks and saw his image on the chapel wall, they recognized him: it was him.
The man who had once written a play asking his people not to leave became the unofficial patron saint of those who had no choice but to go. That is the starting point of this site, and probably also the key to understanding the saint.
Saint Toribio Romo is one of the 25 Mexican martyrs canonized by Pope John Paul II on May 21, 2000. He was not particularly well-known during his life — he was a rural priest who pastored five parishes in Jalisco, taught catechism to the poor, and hid in an abandoned tequila distillery so he could keep celebrating Mass after public worship was outlawed. They killed him at dawn on February 25, 1928, at twenty-seven years old, with no trial, a rifle to the chest while he was trying to rise from his bed.
What came afterward — the devotion, the shrine receiving a million pilgrims a year, the appearances in the desert — is a religious and social phenomenon that Mexican anthropology is only beginning to study in earnest. This site gathers what is known: the life, the martyrdom, the canonization, the migrant cult, the prayers, the writings, the sources.
This is an open archive. It updates as new material comes in. If you are family, descendant, pilgrim, or witness to a favor received, the site has a contact form at the bottom.