The project “The Virgin everywhere“That she seeks to bring images of Santa María de Guadalupe to every corner of the world, completed her most recent challenge: mark the entire perimeter of the Mexican Republic.
This was announced by Alejandro Olivares through his Tiktok account on July 13. “Everything ends where it begins. We are in Ciudad Juárez Chihuahua, in the church of San Lorenzo. We just finished the Mass, we are giving thanks because we start here to put images of the Virgin on the border and today we end up.”
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“There are already images from Tijuana to Matamoros,” he said. “There were many kilometers traveled to put the Virgin everywhere and today we finished, but we not only finished the border, we finished the entire perimeter of this great country.”
“The Virgin everywhere” began during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, in Monterrey, Nuevo León (Mexico), as a joint initiative of Alejandro and a friend of his, Juan García Gaeta.
Five years later, “we have already reached 120 countries,” Alejandro shares with ACI Press, on July 25. Among other countries quite distant from Mexico, he points out, “in Zambia there is already one, in New Zealand there is one, in Australia there are more than three, in Iceland there are five, etc.”.
Outside Mexico, he estimates that “there are about a thousand” images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, of a total of 52,000 that have produced in these five years. The others are “within Mexico.” All the locations of “The Virgin everywhere” in the world can be seen on this map.
Only in this challenge of marking the perimeter of Mexico with images of the Virgin used around 1,700.
How to have one?
Since its inception, project mechanics remain the same: someone buys an image through the website of www.lavirgenentodoslados.com And he takes it home, and with that money the team rescues and paints a wall in the street and installs a similar image.
The images are pumping in metal, and are painted with electrostatic paint so that they can resist outdoors.
This resistance was put to the test for forest fires in California (United States). In June of this year, the project shared on Instagram A series of photos “of a friend who lost his house in one of the fires in California.”
“They told him that the temperature reached more than 1,200 degrees Celsius,” continues the publication, which adds: “Even so, an image of #lavirgenentodoslado was recovered and an image of Santa Maria de Virgen de Guadalupe de mud that had on a shelf and fell to the ground and the colors changed.”
“Many people cries with emotion” upon receiving the gift of the Virgin
Alejandro shares how in these years he has seen how he impacts carrying the image of the Virgin A, yes, everywhere.
The reaction of the people often “is of surprise, of gratitude … have touched us many people who cry with emotion,” he says. “Yes it has been a thing that nobody expected and says, ‘Let’s see, you were glad.'”
It also shares a very particular story of the impact that “the Virgin has left everywhere.” In a colony called Infonavit La Huasteca, he said, an area marked by violence. There, encouraged by Fr. Humberto Noel Lozano, then parish priest of the Christ Obrero parish in the area, came to put images of Santa María on more than 50 walls.
When the priest was finally going to be transferred to another parish, said Alejandro, “the municipality went to thank him because they are no longer killing people, there is no violence and there is no drugs.”
“Then you say: the social fabric changes, that is, it works (…) It is worth putting it everywhere, right?”
“A miracle”
For Alejandro Olivares, the growth of this project is summarized in that “it is a miracle.” “When we started only a friend was the one who cut images of the Virgin and little by little people have been added without looking for it. Right now there are seven companies that make images of the Virgin for free.”
“Free metal, free paint, free cut, who does that? (…) Is it because of my beautiful face? I think not, it’s for the Virgin,” he said.
“The other day a man told me: ‘Hey Alex, I want to give you metal, I love your project, I want to give you 20 tons of metal. Do you know how many are 20 tons of metal? It is a barbarity. They are two supercargon trailers,” he added.
And the reach of “the Virgin everywhere” continues to surprise him. “The other day a friend went to Machu Picchu”, in Cusco (Peru), “And he says: ‘Hey, in a little store of lunches From here in Machu Picchu I found the Virgin everywhere. ‘ And I say: ‘Well, it’s everywhere.’ ”
Stories like that, from almost the entire planet, which Alejandro makes “clearly the action of the Virgin.”
The following challenge
Once this challenge concluded, there is already one more: the plan is to take the Virgin “to all the inhabited islands of Mexico”, which adds 85.
“We have been barely 7,” he says, while calculating how on his next trips he will take the Virgin to several more. And it won’t end there. Then, he says, “Let’s see what the Virgin says and the Holy Spirit.” It can be to complete Latin America, beginning either by Guatemala, from north to south, or from Tierra del Fuego, to do it from south to north.
At the moment, from Opus day tipsyoung Catholics of Monterrey who are in Rome right now by the jubilee of the Digital Missionaries and Catholic influencers, have traveled images of “The Virgin everywhere” that will be distributed by the eternal city.
David Ramos
Graduate in Communication Sciences by the Private University of the North in Trujillo, Peru. With more than 12 years of experience in Catholic journalism working in ACI Press, I am based in Mexico since 2018. I have covered the trips of Pope Francis to Ecuador, Paraguay, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru and Panama.