I bought this statue from a man who used to live in Mexico City and make these there, but he moved to Chihuahua City and is now in the same business. Note the eyelashes, which are real hair. These are exquisitely fashioned and hand painted with great care, by a true artisan. I have a whole lot of these.

The Santo Niño de Atocha is one of the most important saints in Mexico. He has several interesting stories and traditions associated with him. He is best known for his two shrines in the Mexican state of Zacatecas: Fresnillo, the home of the “Blue Santo Niño”, and Plateros, the home of the “Pink Santo Niño”. People pray to the Santo Niño for healing, mainly of children, and they bring children’s shoes to his shrines when they make pilgrimages there. This is because they believe that he wears them out at night when he goes walking about on healing missions, secretly visiting sick children while they are asleep in order to heal them. The famous shrine in Chimayo, New Mexico is a Santo Niño shrine, and pilgrims leave baby shoes there.

In Fresnillo there is a story that a cave in occurred at a mine there, and the Indians who were miners prayed to the Santo Niño to save them and he appeared to them and told them not to worry, that they would be rescued. This is the principal story told of the Santo Niño in Mexico. The original Santo Niño de Atocha comes from the town of Atocha, Spain, during the Spanish Crusades, when the Christians were attempting to wrest control of the peninsula from the Moors, and Atocha had fallen to the Moslem armies. The Christians were locked up in the local prison for sedition, and they were poorly fed and on the verge of starvation. The local caliph had decreed that they should receive no visitors except for children, when a child arrived in the garb of a pilgrim - hence the sandals, staff, and wide brim hat which are the symbols of a pilgrim in religious art of the period. He had a drinking gourd and basket of food, and he performed sort of a latter day miracle of the loaves - all of the prisoners were fed their fill and drank their fill, and yet the basket remained full and the gourd full also.

This work represents the “Blue Santo Niño of Atocha” of Fresnillos, Zacatecas.