Francesca de Garcia

Retablos painted by The Saint Lady of Mesilla. Photo by David Lansing.

In the afternoon, I went looking for The Saint Lady. The saint lady is Francesca de Garcia. The last time I was in Mesilla, Garcia had a little shop called Casa de Santiago—House of the Saints—where she sold inexpensive retablos of over 200 saints, many I’d never heard of before.

Garcia had started painting the saints shortly after her husband died, as I remembered. But Casa de Santiago was gone. Or perhaps it had moved. I went into a shop selling bright red ristras not far from the old plaza and asked the woman there if she knew what had happened to The Saint Lady, fearing she had died. The woman said she was still around.

“She usually sets up at the Mercado on Friday afternoons,” she said. “If she’s feeling well.”

I walked over to the Mesilla Square and soon found her retablos. But she wasn’t around. An older gentleman said she was in Las Cruces. Like I said, The Saint Lady painted every saint you could imagine but her specialty seemed to be the Virgin Mary.

There were dozens of them on the table in the plaza. There was Our Lady of Refuge and Our Lady of Sorrows and Our Lady of the Snows. You could buy Our Lady of Czestochowa-Poland or Our Lady the Virgin of Charity (Cuba) or Our Lady of Guadalupe (several versions of this Mexican icon).

Our Lady of Copacabana.

I ended up buying Our Lady of Copacabana, the patron saint of Bolivia. I liked the way she looked. Very, very stylish. Like Madona. The rock star, not the virgin. And I liked that there was a Virgin of the Copacabana. It wasn’t like she was the patron saint of nightclubs or anything, but I didn’t care. I liked the idea anyway.