Jesus on a Tortilla - A Very New Mexican Story

A touching retelling of a strange episode in New Mexico's history:

One October morning in 1977, Maria Rubio was in her small green stucco house in southeastern New Mexico, preparing her husband’s lunch. It was 6 a.m., and she was making burritos—cooking beans, scrambling eggs, and preparing tortillas from scratch. And then she saw it, as she was putting together the second burrito: a burn mark on one of the tortillas, in the shape of a little face. Maria felt chills, and she could sense her body moving, though she wasn’t sure if it was out of joy or fear.

Maria shouted at her 17-year-old daughter, Rosy, to come into the kitchen. She asked Rosy what the burn mark looked like to her. “Oh, my God,” Rosy recalls thinking. “That looks like the face of Jesus.” Maria agreed. She hadn’t wanted to say it out loud, because she didn’t want Rosy to think she was crazy.

...That image was about an inch tall and an inch wide. If you look at photos from back then, the likeness is unmistakable: It’s Jesus Christ in profile, complete with a beard and a crown of thorns. Maria and Rosy were overwhelmed with excitement. But Eduardo felt warier. He worried the tortilla might be a bad omen.

...By the end of 1977, more than 6,000 visitors had signed Maria’s guest books. People streamed in from all over New Mexico, many of them Latino, drawn by word of mouth and local news stories. “We related a lot more to the Mexican Catholic people,” Rosy says. “Those were the people I remember just coming in with a lot of faith, with a lot of intention.” The visitors prayed for sick relatives and lit votive candles. One woman said that she was “looked down upon because she [was] poor and Mexican American.” She believed that Jesus had appeared “in a poor person’s house to show … people are all the same.”

...Maria and Rosy did a lot of interviews. But the one they taped in 1994 was their biggest yet. The Phil Donahue Show was recorded in front of a live studio audience in New York City. That trip was the first time that Maria had ever been on a plane. As they took off, Maria said, “I think I’m going to die now.” For Rosy, it was thrilling to be in New York, but Maria was overwhelmed. When they went to a nice dinner downtown, Maria was too nervous to eat her apple pie.

Filming the show itself wasn’t any easier. The studio audience started laughing less than 30 seconds in, when Donahue uttered the phrase “Jesus in a tortilla.”

...On The Phil Donahue Show, Maria and Rosy got presented as potential scammers. “If you give up your caution and your common sense,” one guest, a well-known debunker of phony religious miracles, said, “any charlatan with a pocketful of magic tricks can come in and take your money and sometimes your life.” Later in the episode, an audience member told Donahue, “Although I’m not much for tortillas, I am going to keep a close eye on my potato chips.”

On the outside, Rosy managed to keep her composure. But on the inside, she says, “I remember just seething.” What she wanted to do most of all was give that potato chip woman the finger.

After that experience in New York, Maria told Rosy that she was done with TV interviews. The next year, when The Oprah Winfrey Show called, Rosy went to Chicago without her mother. But her second big television appearance didn’t go much better than the first. “I just don’t know why Jesus would want to be on a tortilla,” Oprah said. And the crowd roared with laughter.

...By the 1990s, Jesus on a tortilla had become a kind of small-scale meme. Kurt Cobain wrote in his journal, “I saw Jesus on a tortilla shell.” The Simpsons referenced it. (“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to appear on a tortilla in Mexico,” God tells Homer.) There’s even a feature film, Tortilla Heaven, about Jesus’ image miraculously appearing on a tortilla in New Mexico. The Rubios weren’t consulted for that movie, which critic Justin Chang called “as flat as a tortilla and considerably less nourishing.”

In Tortilla Heaven, everyone tries to make a buck off the holy image, charging admission fees to see it and selling tortilla merchandise. That was the popular conception—that anyone who saw Jesus on a tortilla surely had impure motives. But for Maria, the tortilla was always a duty. Something she’d been asked to share, for reasons she didn’t understand. In 1977, she opened her home to the entire world. But over many years, very gradually, that sense of obligation to the public started to go away. 

...The tortilla broke sometime around 2005. “My mom says she lent it out to one of my nieces,” Angelica says. But she thinks nobody wants to tell the real story. “They’re afraid of what might happen,” she says, “which is nothing. Like, the tortilla’s a tortilla, it was bound to break at some point.” The tortilla now sits in pieces, and the part with the actual burn mark has gone missing.