The farther one travels from home, the closer one feels to La Virgen de Guadalupe, say those who gather to celebrate her birthday -- December 12 -- in Los Angeles. She transcends borders, as do her faithful. PNS editor Ruben Martinez, author of "The Other Side," is a writer and performance artist who lives in Los Angeles and Mexico City.

LOS ANGELES -- For Mexicans the most important religious holiday is not Christmas but the birthday of la Virgen de Guadalupe -- December 12. Last year I spent the day in Mexico, on the very hill where she is said to have appeared before the humble Indian Juan Diego nearly 500 years ago. This year I joined the faithful at Our Lady Queen of Angels in downtown Los Angeles. I hardly missed Mexico. La Virgen de Guadalupe knows no borders, and neither do her faithful.

The birthday celebration begins just past midnight and lasts until sunrise. Everything I'd seen in Mexico is duplicated here. The mariachis sing with their dramatic vibratos and hand gestures. People kneel and pray or simply stare in reverential silence before her image, which is everywhere. There's a portrait hanging in the church, one on a makeshift stage in the courtyard, another at an old altar said to be the site of holy apparitions. The glow from the flames of hundreds of votive candles wavers over the faces of the faithful.

And there she is again, on the necklaces, 1996 calendars, t-shirts, sweatshirts, baseball caps hawked by dozens of vendors. Here she stands at the kitschy makeshift photo studios where you can take your picture next to her framed by red roses and blinking lights. A few take the picture standing alone, but mostly it's families that gather for the memento: the grandmother with the long braids and shawl, the red-eyed parents who'll have to go off to work in an hour or so, the hyper kids scampering around in a world of both magical colors and religious solemnity.

Tacos, tamales, hot dogs, sweet pan dulce bread, hot champurrado and ponche drinks -- nothing costs more than a dollar. The Virgen, above all, is Mother to the Working Poor. As the pastor's voice booms over the loudspeakers recounting the tale of Juan Diego's encounter with la Virgen, the perfume of hundreds of red roses wafts over the courtyard, a reminder of the miracle centuries ago: the skeptical bishop had asked Juan Diego for proof that he had indeed witnessed a miraculous apparition, and she obliged by presenting him with dozens of beautiful flowers in the dead of winter. Who could doubt the miracle?

This was another tough year in Mexico and Latinos would be hard-pressed to say things were much better in anti-immigrant California. The faithful here are almost all recently arrived, many of them undocumented. In traditional mandas, offerings to the Virgen in exchange for requests for her help, they tell of their hardships and hopes.

Antonio Huanetlcoatl, the father of an Indian family from the high sierra of Puebla, asks the Virgen to bless this City of the Angeles, prays that she brings "food to the hungry, health to the sick, peace to lands torn by war." His 22 year old son Luis, meanwhile, begs her to be with his young wife in her pregnancy, that a healthy son or daughter may join their family.

Griselda Facio of Jalisco prays for a change in the government back home in Mexico, an end to the crisis and chaos in her homeland.

Meanwhile Doris Sanchez, a young Honduran woman, prays for peace right here in Los Angeles, for an end to the urban warfare between rival gangs in her neighborhood.

This gathering in L.A. might not be as monumental as the yearly Virgen festival in Mexico City, attended by upwards of four million people. But there is an intensity here that matches or even surpasses the devotion back home. Perhaps it's the yearning to remain rooted in a rootless time when one's address changes with each twist of fate like the falling peso or the border patrol.

Leonor Cervantes, a native of Guanajuato who gathered up her three sons, two daughters, mother and a sister to be here this morning, says she feels the holiday for the Virgen might be more important to Mexicans here than back home. "The farther you are from home, the more she pulls at you," says Cervantes. " It's something so magnificent that she brings us together in whatever place we happen to be ... She follows us everywhere."

Rafael Torres looks the typical American teenager in his backwards baseball cap and baggy jeans, except that his face is just like Juan Diego's, Indian features unchanged five hundred years after the Conquest. He's made it safely to Los Angeles from his home town of Puebla, due in no small part to the Virgen's guidance.

"Before the immigrants come North," he says, "they go to the church right there in Mexico, to get la Virgen's blessing. Everybody does it. They ask her to let them come to this country, to cross the border without any problems."

Call her the undocumented Virgen.