Emilia Garcia has been robbed at gunpoint half a dozen times in the nine years she's owned her Lincoln Heights store, La Guadalupana.
But no criminal has dared touch the mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe painted outside. Even as taggers and gang members scribble graffiti on every adjacent wall, the painting remains pristine. Garcia believes that she and her business have been protected by the mural.
"The Virgin, for us Catholics, is our mother," said Garcia, a native of the Mexican state of Jalisco. "Everyone has a picture of their mother. Maybe that's why everyone respects her."
Faith and entrepreneurial self-interest have found a common cause in the serene image of the Virgen de Guadalupe, the dark-skinned icon of Mexican Catholicism. Hundreds of murals of la Virgen cover storefronts in Latino neighborhoods from the Eastside to the San Fernando Valley, where the holy image is perhaps the only protection against the spray-painted noms de guerre of taggers and gang members.
At Garcia's store, pious neighbors cross themselves when they pass by the mural. The artist, an ex-gang member, capped off his 10-foot high painting of the Virgin Mary with a message to those who might consider defacing her: "Respect Please."
He need not have bothered. Ask any street tough if he would paint graffiti on the Holy Mother, and he will give you an unequivocal no. Some things, it seems, are still sacred.
"Anyone who writes on these knows they're going to get racked up," said Paris Hernandez, 23, one of a group of gang members gathered beneath a huge mural of the Virgin at the Ramona Gardens housing projects in Boyle Heights.
"I don't really trip on her," he continued. "If I pray, I pray straight to God. But I respect her because she's the mother of God. She was pregnant through the spirit."
Just a few paces from the Virgin Mary is a two-story-high mural that brings together a string of images from Mexican American pop culture: a turn-of-the-century Mexican revolutionary, an ancient Aztec warrior and some very modern-looking homeboys. It has been vandalized with a series of gang monikers.
Asked why this painting is defaced, Hernandez said, "Nobody sees this mural the way they see the other one."
Highland Park muralist Chaz Bojorquez said representations of la Virgen de Guadalupe--also known as la Lupita, la Tia Lupe and la Guadalupana--don't have to be painted by a professional artist to be effective against graffiti.
