A milagro, the word simply means miracle, is a votive charm usually no larger than a thumbnail, offered at a shrine to ask for help or to give thanks for it. The shapes form a vocabulary of need. Arms, legs, eyes, hearts, lungs and heads stand for the body part in question; a kneeling man or woman offers the whole person; animals stand for the livestock a family depends on; houses, trucks, ears of corn and tools carry the economics of rural life into the sanctuary. The petitioner buys the charm from a vendor at the church door, prays, and pins it to the garment of the saint's image, to a ribbon or a velvet board beside the altar, where it joins hundreds of others glittering in the candlelight.
Martha Egan's survey of the practice traces its double ancestry: the anatomical votives of the ancient Mediterranean and the promesas of Catholic Iberia, carried to the Americas with colonization and flourishing especially in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and the American Southwest. Materials range from gold and silver at wealthy shrines to stamped tin, lead and wax elsewhere. The charms have also become collectibles and folk-art commodities, sold by weight in market stalls far from any altar, and artisans now solder them onto crosses and jewelry for tourists. The devotional practice continues alongside the trade, at shrines where the boards fill, are cleared by the custodians, and fill again.