“Loca, please!” Sofi shook her head at Loca’s “look,” but no slave of fashion herself, she didn’t say nothing else. After all, she was so glad that Loca was joining her that day that she didn’t dare discourage her with a weak argument on personal style.

“What’s wrong?” Loca said, looking down at her eclectic outfit and then, referring only to the chenille bathrobe, said, “It’s blue. Blue is good.” And this was no naive remark coming from a young woman who knew, among other things she was never given credit for knowing, that in her land, blue was a sacred color and, therefore, very appropriate for the occasion.

So it was that Loca, bareback on Gato Negro (Sofi fretted over Loca bringing the horse along but doña Felicia, who came with them, calmed her. “Leave her be! Anyway, there must surely be animals in heaven, too! Remember that dogs licked the wounds of San Lazaro!”), and her mother on foot joined their vecinos and members of various cooperative efforts in the Way of the Cross Procession through the main streets of the villages and then on to the city.

This Procession—which grew as it went along, comprising ultimately as many as two hundred people—did not flagellate itself with horsehair whips. There were no pitos blown nor alabadas sung, neither. As a kind of main feature, however, a supposedly famous woman singer named Pastora Somebody or Other did join the procession with her guitar and sang some of her own songs; and though they were not in the least religious in nature but about workers and women strikers and things like that, the way she sang them made some people sigh and some even sob and still others sang along with their eyes to the sky.

No brother was elected to carry a life-size cross on his naked back. There was no “Mary” to meet her son. Instead, some, like Sofi, who held a picture of la Fe as a bride, carried photographs of their loved ones who died due to toxic exposure hung around the necks like scapulars; and at each station along their route, the crowd stopped and prayed and people spoke on the so many things that were killing their land and turning the people of those lands into an endangered species.

No, there had never been no procession like that one before.

When Jesus was condemned to death, the spokesperson for the committee working to protest dumping radioactive waste in the sewer addressed the crowd.

Jesus bore His cross and a man declared that most of the Native and hispano families throughout the land were living below poverty level, one out of six families collected food stamps. Worst of all, there was an ever-growing number of familias who couldn’t even get no food stamps ’cause they had no address and were barely staying alive with their children on the streets.

Jesus fell,