Women Walking: Experiences of Sacred Time on Mexican Guadalupan Pilgrimage

Each July, 60,000 Catholic pilgrims walk from their home state of Querétaro, Mexico, to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City, a journey totaling 17 days and 450 km. Roughly 25,000 of these pilgrims are women, who walk in their own group, one day ahead of the men (Catholic News Agency, 2018). The goal of this pilgrimage is to see the Virgin of Guadalupe, a strong symbol of Catholic and Mexican identity since her original appearance to an indigenous peasant man in 1531. Yet, for many of these women pilgrims, the pilgrimage process is just as important as the end. For them, the pilgrimage provides an experience of sacred time: a time of sisterhood and personal freedom, prayer and devotion, thanksgiving, travel, encountering different cultures within one’s country, upholding and challenging gender norms, and building relationships, among other things. During the summer of 2023, I spent a month in Mexico researching this pilgrimage and walking with the women’s pilgrimage group from Querétaro to Mexico City. We journeyed from remote mountains to urban centers, benefiting from the hospitality of many local communities along the way as well as from the presence of governmental support in the form of military, police, and medical escorts. Drawing upon my work as an ethnographer and theologian and my reflections as a fellow pilgrim, I will address the following questions in my paper: What makes the time of pilgrimage sacred for these women? How do experiences of community and personal freedom— two key themes that arose in interviews—affect their notions of sacred time? And how does this sacred time affect their experiences of time for the rest of the year?