La Milagrosa

Refran: "I take of the lost ones, when they are wounded, and with my light, I guide them"

Card Description: For my Loteria Card I wanted to share my thoughts on la Virgen de Guadalupe and how she has made an impact on my family and many other families around the world making miracles happen. I chose cultural as a subject matter because I love talking about my cultural and how amazing it is. The colors in my art piece represent the different color shades similarly to stain glass window from what most churches have. For me personally, this card represents my cultural in believes and how faithful we are towards La Virgen de Guadalupe. Most of us have a picture frame of la Virgen de Guadalupe in our house or just near us at all times, as we all say she is taking care of us. But I want the audience to see how beautiful my cultural can be and the different believes that are out there for people to learn more about.

Student Biography: My name is Lorena Pacheco De La Cruz, and I am 17 years old, a senior at Santa Maria High School. I live in Santa Maria, California with my dad Javier, my mom Jovita, and my 3 brothers, the oldest is Oscar, second oldest is Javier and my little brother Kevin. My family is from Mexico from a state name Guerrero.         What inspired me to draw my Loteria card was my family has always believed and have faith in La Virgen de Gudalupe. A personal story I will be telling today will be about my baby brother Kevin, he is currently seven years old, he goes to school at Liberty Elementary, he is in second grade, something special about Kevin is he has an extra chromosome, meaning he has a condition called Down Syndrome. This story takes place when he was just in the womb, my mom went to get her ultrasound. Doctors then found out he had Down Syndrome, this meant doctors were going to check on my mom more often to take extra precautions. When doctors found out he had down syndrome they knew he could have more risks than normal babies, as he kept growing. There came a time when my mom went for a regular checkup and the doctors discovered something unbelievable. They had found out he had a hole in his heart, and he had more liquid than a normal baby should have in their brain. This news caused a lot of stress, worried, and scary emotions to my family, all we could think of is he going to make it. All we were able to do was pray and pray to Our Lady of Guadalupe, to be able to cure my little brother. The last checkup my mom had, doctors were surprised to see the x ray showed nothing unnormal, we were all confused, the doctors didn’t know how to explain to us what had occurred. All they told us that day was that a miracle just happened because we can no longer see the hole in his heart on the new X ray they took. This made me feel more connected towards La Virgen de Guadalupe and my faith towards her grew a lot more.          What I am trying to show from this project and my personal story is that culture is something I cherish a lot and would like for more people to know about. The artistic process was great from the beginning when we wrote down what were some of our ideas, to start creating a sketch that I thought wouldn’t come out good. I started painting my canvas and all I thought was how great it would be to show off something I created with my own hands with some paint and paintbrushes. Mixing and creating the different color tones did make me realize to have a lot more patience when it comes to painting, especially when it is something meaningful to you. Life after high school for me will be left questionable because I still do not know what I want to do, later in my life. All I know is that whatever the future holds for me will be just amazing as it already is.