Jaime Roque follows the life of a familiar image across LA, beginning with the 2001 backlash to Alma López’s digital artwork Our Lady.
What looked like a small museum fight opens a bigger story about who gets to remake a figure many people call sacred—and why that matters in everyday neighborhoods, not just in galleries.
Jaime meets the people keeping the image alive in different ways. In downtown, Manuel treats the classic print like family and warns against changing it. In Boyle Heights, artist Nico Aviña rolls out a seven-foot plywood Guadalupe holding an eviction notice, a moving reminder of how families and their stories are being pushed out. Online, Oscar Rodríguez—known as @lavirgencita—photographs and maps murals before they’re painted over, building a simple record so the glow doesn’t disappear. Even at a ball game, a tiny pin on a cap feels like a small altar, proof that the image still travels with us.
The episode also looks back to the figure’s early roots on Tepeyac Hill—a mix of Indigenous and Spanish worlds that helps explain why she carries both faith and culture. Through these voices and places, Jaime and his guests ask straight questions with real stakes: Who gets to redraw her? When is it devotion, and when is it pride or protest? Recurrent lands in that middle space—where street corners, shop walls, and phone screens can teach, comfort, and push back all at once—inviting listeners to see how a shared picture can hold a community together even as the city changes.
This episode was inspired by the Visualizing the Virgin Mary exhibition.
Special thanks to Alma Lopez, Nico Avina, Oscar Rodriguez, Melissa Casas, and Alejandro Jaramillo. Additional music provided by Splice. Rights and Clearances by Gina White.
