Things People Do To Hold The World Together
When I was about eight years old, I took a bad hop to the knee playing second base. A routine grounder turned traitor, bounced up, and slammed into my left knee. At first it was just pain, then swelling, then something stranger. A blood clot formed and hardened under the skin, turning deep purple and black. It became this weird body-object attached to me. I’d move it around with my fingers when I was bored, sliding it side to side under the skin like a secret only I knew I had.
Eventually my mom took me to the hospital. The doctor said I’d need surgery to remove it. He assured us it was benign, nothing to panic over, but it had to come out. My mom didn’t want to tell me. She wanted to protect me by pretending nothing serious was happening. So for months I played along. I pretended ignorance while knowing exactly what was coming.
It was surreal, almost comedic, because I understood English perfectly. I understood every medical phrase, every reassurance, every warning. But my mother needed a world where I didn’t know — where innocence could ward off danger, where denial might somehow soften fate. So I let her believe I didn’t understand, and together we pretended the future wasn’t already scheduled.
On a follow-up visit a few days before the operation, the doctor figured it out. He realized my mother was trying to hide the reality from me. He told her she shouldn’t do that. I stayed quiet. Maybe he assumed I didn’t fully grasp what was happening. So he turned to me and explained everything in slow, over-enunciated English, louder than necessary, performing clarity for the kid who supposedly didn’t understand. He even used his hands, miming cutting, pointing, gesturing toward my knee.
When he finished, I answered in clean, perfect English: I know.
He looked momentarily stunned. Then relieved. Then professional again. He walked us through what would happen the morning of the surgery, the pre-op, where I’d go, what they’d do. I was the one who explained it all to my mom later.
But my mother had already made another arrangement — not with medicine, but with God. She’d prayed to her hometown saint in Nío, Sinaloa: Santo Ignacio de Loyola. She promised that if everything went well, if I stayed healthy and could keep playing baseball — as good or better than before — she would bring an offering. She told me the plan. She’d buy a little gold leg on Olvera Street, and we’d take it back to Mexico. Something real. Something you could pin to devotion.
I thought she was a little crazy for thinking she’d actually find a golden leg in Los Angeles. Maybe she’d need to special-order one. But the first shop we walked into had everything: votives, milagros, little paintings, tiny gold arms, silver hearts, and yes — a little golden leg.
Faith validated by commerce.
The morning of the surgery I could tell my mom was terrified, so I tried my best to comfort her. My oldest sister taped a penny to the back of my hand for luck. A lucky penny. Suddenly we were thick with superstition. We waited. Eventually I was wheeled away. My mother cried. My oldest sister looked worried. My other sister just looked annoyed. My father too, though his version of concern always arrived wearing irritation.
It was quick. Mask. Counting backwards from ten. I remember reaching eight before dissolving into anesthesia’s warm fog. When I came to, I was in a hallway with my sisters hovering anxiously. Still woozy, I heard the nurse ask:
What’s your name?
Francisco Romero.
Do you recognize these two people?
I said: I’ve never seen them in my life.
My oldest sister panicked. My other sister, accustomed to my idiotic humor, just shook her head. Eventually I relented: Yes, they’re my sisters. My parents were off getting food.
That summer, my mother held firm to her promise. We took a long, hot bus ride to Mexico and stayed at my grandparents’ small ranch. My grandfather grew corn, beans, sometimes cotton — mostly for the family, and the small community around them. My grandfather was a stoic man, quiet and imposing in a way that commanded respect without ever asking for it. My grandmother was stoic too, but softened by kindness and faith, a devout presence who seemed to hold the house together by sheer steadiness.
The morning after we arrived, my mother and I walked through dust and heat to the church. Inside, her saint waited: patient, adorned, already covered in the soft debris of other people’s fear and gratitude. My mother prayed quietly. She rested her hand on the back of my head. Then she pinned the little golden leg to the saint’s black cloth cape. I saw others pinned there too — other body parts, other offerings, other promises that had been kept. Photos. Charms. Evidence that people had survived things.
The statue is carved from a single piece of stone. My grandfather used to credit any rain to Santo Ignacio’s benevolence. If the harvest looked uncertain, my grandmother would insist he bring a seedling to the church and ask for help. That was the understanding: you worked the land with your body, and you worked the unknown with faith. My grandfather wasn’t particularly devout, but he’d still do it. Faith, in its way, was part of the work.
That day there was no cinematic miracle glow, no heavenly chorus, no thunderbolt of transcendence. Just quiet. Shade. A deep coolness against the relentless Sinaloa heat. Then we walked back out into the sun.
And that was that. My mother kept her vow. My knee healed. I kept playing baseball.
And somewhere between a doctor’s certainty, a mother’s fear, a saint’s cape, and a small golden leg, I learned something about belief, the body, and the quiet rituals people invent to hold the world together. I didn’t think of it as faith or symbolism then. It was simply what people did when they loved you and didn’t know what else to do.
Context Document:
San Ignacio de Nío: Devotion, History, and Agrarian Faith in Northern Sinaloa
Nío is a historically significant village within the municipality of Guasave, Sinaloa, noted for its enduring Jesuit legacy and its role as a regional pilgrimage center. The site is marked by the remains of an unfinished Jesuit mission, abandoned following the expulsion of Jesuits from Spanish territories in 1767. The surviving architectural structures — foundations, partial walls, and incomplete stonework — register both the ambitions and abrupt interruption of colonial religious infrastructure in northern Mexico, functioning today as material evidence of a power that once intended permanence and instead left incompletion.
At the center of contemporary devotion stands the village’s most distinctive sacred object: a stone-carved image of Santo Ignacio de Loyola, sculpted from a single block of rock, weighing approximately three tons and standing roughly 1.5 meters in height. Local tradition attributes miraculous agency to the figure, particularly in relation to agricultural stability, rainfall, and harvest. The statue has become an axis of negotiation with uncertainty — a site where faith, land, labor, and survival are bound together through prayer, promise, and offering.
Each year on July 31, the feast day of Santo Ignacio de Loyola, Nío hosts a major regional celebration involving religious processions, music, and communal ritual. Among the most symbolically charged acts is the procession of the saint’s image to the nearby river, a gesture that binds agricultural life to spiritual practice, linking water, subsistence, and collective identity in a region historically shaped by both drought and devotion.
Within broader northern Sinaloa history, Nío is often regarded as the “true old town” of Guasave. Its significance lies not only in its colonial past, but in its continued existence as a living devotional landscape — where Jesuit heritage, Yoreme (Mayo) cultural continuity, agrarian labor, and everyday belief intersect. Nío is not simply a historical site; it is an active place of faith where communities continue to negotiate vulnerability, resilience, and hope.