Yes, you read the headline correctly.
99-year-old Catarina Orduña Pérez (known as Doña Cata) had a dying wish: she wanted a giant penis statue atop her grave. And, her family honored her final wish, unveiling a 5 1/2 foot tall c*ck & b*lls, which weighs nearly 600 pounds, mounted on her tomb. at a cemetery in Mexico this past weekend as a “recognition of her love and joy for life.”
According to her grandson, Álvaro Mota Limón:
“She wanted to break the paradigm of everything Mexican, where things are sometimes hidden because of not having an open mind. She was always very avant-garde, very forward-thinking about things.”
The reason for the d*ck statue? Álvaro continues:
“She always said, in the Mexican sense, that we were vergas.”
Translated, verga isn't usually a nice thing to say about someone. It's closest direct translation is “c*ck”, however it can be used in a more positive/less vulgar way, to mean something is cool or badass. And Doña Cata used with colloquial pride, using it to mean that her family were "people of moral fortitude... with integrity, courage, passion, and at the same time, love and joy." Furthermore, Doña Cata believed her family "were vergas" and "could accomplish whatever they wanted".
And perhaps more literally, Doña Cata believed that penis metaphor symbolized a strength and fortitude within the family:
“One should not give up. When problems arose, you needed to face them head-on.”
Doña Cata passed away on January 20th, 2021 and a little over a year later, her family made her dying wish come true, contacting a local engineer Isidro Lavoignet to fashion the giant schlong. According to Lavoignet:
“At first I thought it was a joke. Because it’s not very common to see these kinds of sculptures or monuments, and even less so in the memory of someone who’s deceased.”
It took Lavoignet and a team of 12 people (including a carpenter, a sander, a sculptor, and a carver) nearly a month to build the statue. And when it came to the ballsack, there were some delays because it was disfigured. However, they ultimately crafted the perfectly shaped b*lls. The statue was erected on July 23rd.
To some of the community's chagrin. According to Álvaro, the reception of the statue has been mixed:
“Of every 10 people, I think that around seven see (the statue) positively, and if they don’t see it as a good thing, they at least respect (Doña Cata’s wishes). There’s others, who in their conservative values are very closed-minded, very square, who see it poorly.”
Regardless, the family is happy. And certainly made of of vergas.