Hart is a freelance writer and former director of the Mentors Writing Conference. In this essay, she looks at the protagonist, Loreto Maldonado, as metaphor for the oral tradition and its role in the Mexican-American culture as interpreted in Méndez's novel.

The word pilgrim has several different connotations. From the Latin root, peregrinus, the word means "foreigner." A more descriptive definition translates as "one who travels to a foreign or sacred place." When the word is extended to pilgrimage, it encompasses the journey itself; and at its most philosophical extension can refer to the actual journey through life on earth. Underlying all these various interpretations of the word is the sense of movement. Someone is moving somewhere for some consciously or unconsciously determined reason.

This movement, or pilgrimage, is a theme that runs through all the many stories in Méndez's Pilgrims in Aztl...