Utah Hispanic-Latino Catholics celebrate their cultural traditions during Lent

Friday, Feb. 13, 2015

SALT LAKE CITY — This coming week is especially important for all Catholics.

With Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, they will celebrate the last feast before Ash Wednesday, on which Catholics take part in the ritual of the imposition of ashes. This marks the beginning of Lent’s six weeks of fasting, abstinence, penitence and prayer that lead up to Easter.

For Hispanic Catholics, Lent — the 40 weekdays and Saturdays before Easter — means practicing some rituals and customs from home blended with traditional practices from their adopted country.

For instance, Maria Gomez, parishioner of Saints Peter and Paul Parish in West Valley, remembers that in Huauchinango Puebla, her native town in Mexico, instead of getting the symbol of the cross on Ash Wednesday at church,  people would take the ashes home with them in small packages of tin foil “to bless themselves throughout Lent,” she said.

Another tradition for Mexican Catholics is to have home altars to celebrate the season, “kind of a small, mini-version of what you see at the parishes,” said Virginia Vega, a parishioner of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Salt Lake City who is from Veracuz, Mexico; she has lived in Utah for the past 20 years.

The end of the Lenten season is especially meaningful for Hispanic Catholics.

Holy Week, the final days before Easter, is called “Semana Santa” in Spanish, and Good Friday – when Christ died on the cross – in particular is a powerful day of mourning.

The Good Friday celebration includes  “El Pesame,” a “service in Spanish calling to offer condolences to the Blessed Mother,” said Vega, who  stills keeps that tradition alive in her home.

Another Good Friday Hispanic tradition calls for a dramatization of the Via Crucis, or Way of the Cross, in which participants reenact the various scenes leading up to Christ’s crucifixion. 

The Stations of the Cross in the Anglo culture  are often held inside a church, but the Via Crucis is performed outdoors. Several parishes in the Diocese of Salt Lake City  will have the Via Crucis this year. This tradition is also celebrated in the diocese’s missions, such as Holy Family Mission in Fillmore, where year after year they welcome some sisters from the order of Santa Ana, from Aguascalientes, Mexico to celebrate Holy Week with all the Catholics of the area.

“Sometimes women wear only black and cover their heads as a sign of the mourning during the Via Crucis,” said Virginia Casablanca, a Saints Peter and Paul parishioner who used to attend the Via Crucis in her hometown in Peru.

“We also had processions with candles, and sometimes we made carpets with flowers on the streets,” said Casablanca.

The silent procession is another tradition that is celebrated in parts of Mexico such as in San Luis Potosi. 

For this, hundreds gather to walk silently through the streets of the town, symbolizing Jesus’ encounter with Judas.

Easter in Mexico also has many traditions in common with the celebration in the United States, but with slight differences. For example, while Easter eggs are common in both countries, in Mexico the eggs are just shells painted and usually filled with confetti, compared to the U.S. custom of hard-boiled eggs with colored shells, or plastic eggs filled with candy of various kinds.

In Mexico, “when the kids or the grown-ups find the eggs, you break them on people’s heads,” said Minerva Videgaray, an Our Lady of Guadalupe parishioner.