Mexican Americans and other Latinos across the country have been lighting candles, offering flowers and praying the rosary and, in Illinois, doing their famous annual pilgrimage to mark Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico and the Americas.
The feast day on Dec. 12 marks the miracle that took place almost 500 years ago, according to the Catholic Church, when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared several times to an Indigenous peasant near present-day Mexico City — and as proof left her life-size image marked on a cloak.
But in New York, Our Lady of Guadalupe is also the namesake of the city’s oldest Spanish-speaking Catholic congregation, whose founding 121 years ago and its subsequent generations of worshipers are a window into the history of the city’s Hispanic and Latino residents.
Some New Yorkers are fighting to keep the church’s original building — with a distinctive Spanish Baroque facade located in two former brownstone mansions — from being altered or destroyed, as it’s one of the last remnants of the once-bustling community known as Little Spain.
Our Lady of Guadalupe was founded in 1902 as the first church for a Spanish-speaking congregation in New York City.
To the left of the original building’s three-story entrance is a worn plaque that says in the first half in Spanish, “Iglesia Católica para los de la Lengua Española,” which loosely translates to “Catholic Church for those of the Spanish language.” In the lower half in English, it says “Roman Catholic Church Spanish-American.”
Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Spanish Benevolent Society — the oldest Spanish immigrant club in New York, popularly referred to as La Nacional (The National) — had been the focal points of a thriving enclave of Spaniards during the 1920s through the 1940s, when their population almost doubled in the city, from 14,659 to 25,283, according to “Hispanic New York: A Sourcebook.”
“The name of Our Lady of Guadalupe actually comes from Spain —…
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