His golden wings gleam. His ruby robe glitters. He looks more like a doll than a dragon slayer.

But the saint is tougher than he seems.

He defeats evil. He grants prayers. With the raised sword fastened to his hand by a rubber band, San Miguel will protect a small remnant of an ancient tribe: a people who have lived here, unseen, for 12 years.

The long-lashed, fiberglass saint is a perfect copy of the one standing in a small church 2,400 miles away. San Miguel is the patron saint of Metlatónoc, a remote mountain town in southwestern Mexico where Richmond’s Mixteco people were born. They may never go home again, so they have brought their saint here, to Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Manchester.

In preparation for the saint’s arrival on this Saturday morning in late July, musicians strike up a song. Women arrive bearing bouquets of roses. A father makes the sign of the cross on his young daughter’s face with a white devotional candle, a veladora. He carries it to the front of the church, sets it in a metal stand and lights it. Other men join him, carrying candles, until the corner glows bright as a bonfire.

Around 10:30, nearly 200 people stand in the shade of a lop-limbed oak. The temperature’s already climbing toward 90 degrees. The Mixtecos sweat in their jeans and their suits and their skirts. The smell of incense mingles with perfume.

And then, it is time.

“Vamos aqui,” Jesuit Father Shay Auerbach says. Come here. Everyone crosses the street to stand outside the Sacred Heart Center, a former school that’s a nonprofit community center. Four men hoist a green canopy on poles to shade the saint. San Miguel appears in the doorway, wobbling on a white litter. Cell phone cameras are held aloft.

Auerbach asks God’s blessing on the saint. “The scripture teaches us that angels always accompany us,” he says first in Spanish, then in English. The statue will remind us, he says, that “the invisible angels guard us and protect us in our daily lives.”

The Mixtecos know what it feels like to be invisible.

There are more than 1,000 of them living in Richmond, clustered in houses off Jefferson Davis Highway. You’ve probably never noticed them. And that’s exactly the way they want it.

“They’re a world unto themselves,” Auerbach says.

The Mixteco are an ancient people. Their true name is the nuu maalsavi: the people of the rain. They bowed, but did not break, under Aztec and then Spanish rule, finding sanctuary in the mountainous regions of what is now south-central Mexico.

Approximately 500,000 Mixtecos live in Mexico and the United States, mostly in California. They speak more than 25 variants of their language, which is many thousands of years old. (Almost impossible to describe, the Mixtec language sounds nothing like Spanish. Subtle changes in tone, or the addition of an accented letter, can alter entirely the meaning of a word.) They make up the third largest native population in Mexico, where there are more than 10 million indigenous people.

The Mixtecos are one of several indigenous Hispanic groups in Richmond, says R. McKenna Brown, executive director of the Global Education Office at Virginia Commonwealth University. There are the Purepecha from the Michoacán region of Mexico, and multiple groups of Mayans. Just the other day, Brown found himself speaking Kaqchikel with a surprised Guatemalan Mayan in a CVS on Midlothian Turnpike. “We are more global and cosmopolitan here than some might imagine,” he says.

Mixteco immigrants have spread across California, Utah, the South and the Pacific Northwest, dispersed as widely as blown dandelions. But their family and town connections remain unbroken, says Arcenio J. Lopez, who is Mixteco and the associate director of the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project in Ventura County, Calif.

When they leave home, they go “hand by hand,” Lopez says. They tell their friends: “I know this place, let’s go over there. I know how to move, I know how to live over there.” And that’s how 1,000 Mixtecos from one tiny town in Guerrero end up in Richmond.

Rufino Leon was one of the very first to arrive. He came here with a handful of others in 1999, seeking the landscaping work he heard was available in Richmond. After that, “he talked with other people and they all began coming,” Auerbach says, translating for Leon.

Metlatonóc, the remote mountain home of Richmond’s Mixtecos, is one of the poorest places in Mexico. With his hand, Leon traces in the air a winding road, showing how difficult it is to get there. Everyone is devoutly Catholic. Many people speak only Mixteco, not Spanish, and can’t read or write. The houses are adobe and thatch, although in recent years, money sent home has allowed some to build with cinder blocks and concrete. Influenced by their American sisters, women have begun to wear pants.

Leon talks with his relatives by phone, but “no Facebook,” he says. There are no computers in Metlatonóc. “Es tranquilo, porque toda la gente son conocidos,” he says. It’s peaceful, because everyone knows each other.

Mixtecos are perceived by Americans and other Latinos as being secretive, even standoffish. But it’s not because the Mixtecos dislike outsiders.

“We’re coming from very specific rural communities,” Lopez explains. “The only thing we saw is our own people there, and our own life, closed there. So when we’re coming to big cities, and we’re coming to these new worlds for us, it makes us feel afraid. It’s a different culture.

“It makes us feel like, ‘How I’m going to say hello? How I’m going to saycómo estás in Spanish? If I don’t know how to say it, they’re going to start laughing at me.’”

These fears extend to their children. Translating for Leon, Auerbach says “they tell their kids really to stay among themselves, so that there won’t be problems. … You might play a little bit with [other kids], but that’s enough.”

The Mixtecos keep to their own small corner of Richmond. But on this Saturday, they’re stepping out.

To read the full feature, visit the Style Weekly’s website here: [Style Weekly]

“I’d just received a licentiate in liturgy and knew I would be going to a parish for two years,” he said.

The parish was St. Raphael’s in Raleigh, N.C., which had seen a recent increase in Hispanics.

“We need somebody to say Mass in Spanish. Can you read the Mass in Spanish?” Fr. Auerbach remembers the pastor asking him soon after his arrival.

“That began a whole new chapter in my life,” he recalls, adding that his stay of two years he began in 1999 ended up being six and a half years. The parish had 4,000 registered families.

At St. Raphael’s he helped establish the new Hispanic community.

“It had started a year before I got there,” Auerbach said. “By the time I left the parish would have 1,300 to 1,400 Hispanics for Mass on a weekend.”

Born in Honolulu, Auerbach was the son of a native Hawaiian mother of Chinese and Irish descent and a father of Irish, English and German descent. He grew up there and was educated at a private school known as Punahou, founded by Congregationalists.

“Its most famous alumnus is Barack Obama, who was two years ahead of me,” he said. “I certainly remember him.”

Early on, Auerbach had an interest in becoming a priest.

“I had thought about it as a kid, but I dismissed the idea, partly because it’s something Hawaiians never did,” Auerbach said.

After graduating from high school he went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. where he met the Jesuits.

“I was impressed by the fact that they were normal, real people,” he said. “I was impressed by their intellectual tradition and their value of other cultures and that they tried to learn from the cultures they worked with rather than simply impose their ideas.”

After graduating from Georgetown in 1985, Auerbach got a master’s degree in linguistics in 1987 and then entered the Jesuits in 1988 at Wernersville, Pa. where he spent two years. He then studied philosophy for two years at Fordham University.

“Then I taught for three years at St. Joe’s Prep and the Gesu School in North Philadelphia,” he said, pointing out that he taught religion and human sexuality at the Gesu and Spanish at St. Joseph’s Preparatory School.

After the previously mentioned assignment at St. Raphael’s in Raleigh, he went to Baltimore for a year where he lived at St. Ignatius in downtown Baltimore.

“I was a sacramental minister in two parishes — St. Joseph’s in Cockeysville. Md. and St. Gabriel’s in Woodlawn,” he said. “I also helped out as a resource for the Archdiocesan Office of Hispanic Ministry.”

From Baltimore, Auerbach went on to his final stage of formation at Puente Grande, Mexico. “That’s where I did tertianship,” he said, adding this period was seven months.

Auerbach arrived at his current assignment as pastor of Sacred Heart parish in Richmond, Va. in July 2007. The former parish school, which had closed in the mid-1980s, was converted into the Sacred Heart Center in 1990 when a three-man Jesuit presence came to the parish. At its beginning it served largely African Americans who lived in the neighborhood.

But interest in the neighborhood center waned after 2000. The neighborhood demographics had changed with people moving out and the housing stock diminished.

“In 1999 the city of Richmond opened a state-of-the-art community center just a few blocks south of us,” Auerbach said. “And right around the parish the neighborhood began to be gentrified.

“Now we’re refocusing and being very strategic,” he said of the Sacred Heart Center’s mission.

“We want to focus on people who are not being served effectively anywhere else,” he said.

He noted a Mexican-Indian community known as Mixtecos who live south of the center. They come from a remote mountainous area of Mexico. The newcomers are drawn to Richmond because there is a noodle factory in the town that has provided them employment and word of mouth has brought others.

“They are a very tight-knit and closed community,” Auerbach explained. “They live in almost destitute conditions.

He has been successful in drawing the Mixtecos to the Sacred Heart Center for sacramental preparation classes which are held each Sunday. With  an engaging personality and with smiles, good will and trying to reach them in their own language, Auerbach has encouraged them to come for religious education, which most of them lack, even though their culture is Catholic.

“They’re even isolated from the local Hispanic community. There are almost 2,000 of them and they are fiercely Catholic.

“They understand they are Catholic, but they’re not always sure what this entails,” he continued.

A lot should be done to help the Mixtecos, Auerbach feels. Although they are normally distrustful of outsiders, he reports they have “always been kind and welcoming to me and our evangelization teams.”

“We also want to find out what their needs are and plan programming through the center and help them face the challenges they have on a day-to-day basis,” he said.

Sacred Heart is developing a catechetical program for the Mixtecos so they can better claim their Catholic heritage. Most only have baptism, but have not received first Communion or Confirmation.

“We’re really excited about this program,” Auerbach said.

Regarding outreach to undocumented workers, he feels many are afraid to apply for help for fear of giving information which may later cause them to be deported. Many, he said, are disappointed by the lack of support for the DREAM Act which failed in Congress as recently as this past December. The DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) would provide conditional permanent residency to high school graduates who are in the U.S. illegally if they complete two years in the military or two years at a four year institution of higher learning.

“There is a high level of anxiety among those looking for help,” Auerbach said. “They can read the tea leaves. They know that if they are arrested for anything – even a traffic ticket – deportation is possible.”

He said he has not seen a large number of undocumented workers from Sacred Heart return to their homelands, but admits there are a few.

“The few I’ve see returning home find life too difficult here,” he explained. “They say ‘Forget it, I’m going back home’.”

“But the situation is so bad in their home countries, particularly in Mexico where there is increased violence and a lack of jobs, they’ll just stay put and wait it out.”

Those who get arrested and know they face a court hearing will sometimes opt to return home.

“They’ll just go home rather than face possible deportation, which to them is worse because they’ll be sent to a detention center and then get deported,” Auerbach said.

- Steve Neill is the editor of the Catholic Virginian newspaper of the Diocese of Richmon, Va.

Jesuit Father Shay Auerbach, pastor of Sacred Heart in Richmond, Va., with a 90 percent Hispanic population, is part of an effort to help Richmond area parishes increase the number of Hispanic students in local Catholic schools.

“With very few exceptions, Catholic schools in Latin America are almost exclusively for the wealthy,” he said, causing many Hispanics to think of Catholic schools as only for the elite.

“It doesn’t even enter into their mindset that Catholic schools are a possibility,” Fr. Auerbach said.

The Segura Initiative, named after Father Juan Baptista Segura, a Spanish Jesuit missionary priest who was martyred in Virginia in 1571, includes Auerbach and two other pastors from Richmond parishes with large Hispanic populations, as well as parishioners from each parish. They focus on three areas of concern: marketing and enrollment, fundraising and development, and cultural responsiveness.

Auerbach said he feels that Catholic schools face three challenges.

“One is to get the message out that we welcome Hispanic students,” he said. “Two, they’ve got to help Hispanics overcome the idea that Catholic schools are not for them, and three, financial assistance is needed.”

For more on Auerbach’s work with the initiative, read the full story at The Catholic Virginian.