All that bad talk regarding M.O.M.A.S.’s discriminating against men, or rather the mothers of men, probably got its start back in Belen with la Mrs. Torres, the mother of Fe’s one-time fiancé, Tom, who, on no fewer than twelve occasions over a period of twenty-five years—until her death, in fact—kept applying for nomination.

The thing was, of course, that the first and obvious reason why she was never eligible was simply because of the unfortunate but crucial criteria that the martyr or saint up for consideration would have to have transcended this life already, the form of “death” itself sometimes being the all-telling proof of qualification.

Everyone knew that.

Tom Torres, meanwhile, lived well beyond the national average for anybody and kept Mrs. Torres company as her dutiful son until his mother’s passing. “What does she have to complain about?” Sofia would ask the committee every time it got a new application from Mrs. Torres. “I think it just kills her that her ’jito never ‘mounted to nothing more than the manager of a gas station!” And of course, she was right.

The decision as to whether a “’jito” of a M.O.M.A.S. member would be designated as a saint or a martyr was also very touchy for a lot of people. To be a martyr, of course, was a lot easier than to be considered a santo by anybody’s standards. Saints had the unquestionable potential of performing miracles while martyrs were simply revered and considered emissaries to the santos. In many cases, this was nearly an impossible decision to make, except in the one of the original founding president’s; there was never no question at all about that: Sofia had truly been the mother of a saint.

La Loca did not have to appear with the stigmata or thorn marks on her forehead before her final death to prove her sainthood to no one. And, remaining as ornery after she “transcended” as in her incarnated days, she made very occasional ectoplasmic appearances at the national and international conventions—although locally, back in Tome, for a long time people claimed to catch sight of her by her favorite acequia where a shrine in her honor had been built by don Domingo (“Father of the Saint”), shortly after her burial.

She was not particularly noted for answering the pleas of the desperate and the hopeless, neither, like el Saint Jude, for example, who is the patron saint of los desesperados.

In other words, people never really could figure out who La Loca protected and oversaw as a rule, or what she was good to pray to about. In general, though, it was considered a good idea to have a little statue of La Loca in your kitchen and to give one as a good luck gift to new brides and progressive grooms.