Indigenous roots of the Holy Cross in Mexico
By Arturo Morales Tirado


Talk with Slides
Santa Cruz celebration 
Arturo Morales Tirado
Tue, May 5, 1:30pm
Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
60 pesos

This talk has been postponed.

May 3, the day of Santa Cruz in the Catholic calendar, nowadays marks the festival of the construction workers. However, Catholic tradition indicates Santa Elena (mother of Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor) made a walk to sacred ground to recover the original cross where Jesus died, thus originating this ritual near 326 CE.

Over time, it was associated with the symbol of the trinity. She built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site where she discovered the cross. 

Mesoamericans commemorated the outlined cross (symbol of Venus and thus of Quetzalcóatl) at the end of April and beginning of May, at the start of the rainy season. Tláloc, the feared Aztec god of rain, flood and drought, is associated with fertility of the soil, with life, reproduction and the identity of the community. These indigenous Mesoamerican cultural roots are the same ones found in the rural communities of San Miguel de Allende around the Laja River.

More than 2,500 years ago, in the Chupícuaro region (present territory of San Miguel), the cross represented the five corners of the universe in three planes, the vertical, the horizontal and the cross-sectional.


At the same time, the cross marked the agricultural calendar and the passage of the sun through the equinoxes and solstices. It represented the cycles of nature, death and life, of fertility and drought, feminine and masculine. Duality also was associated with the cross symbol, a mark between equinox and solstice. Other quadrants were expressed in symbols that integrated the vertical cross and the inclined one in the form of an “X.”

A blending of Mesoamerican indigenous culture and the Catholic Christian culture has produced the present expressions of Mexican popular celebrations in San Miguel and the Laja River rural communities.

The Santa Cruz celebration in the spring is one of the main national festivities (after Guadalupana, Easter and Carnival) and continues, in San Miguel, being reflective of this syncretism between the Cross of Jesus and the one of Tláloc. The parallels will be illustrated with slides throughout the lecture.