San Martin de Porres Velasquez , was born in the neighborhood of San Sebastián, in Lima, on November 11, 1579. At that time Francisco de Toledo ruled Peru, Felipe II being king of Spain and having Pope Gregory XIII as head of the Church. He was the son of Juan de Porres, an impoverished hidalgo, and Ana Velásquez, a free black native of Panama. He was baptized by the priest Juan Antonio Polanco, in the church of San Sebastián , being his godparents Juan de Bribiesca and Ana de Escarcena. He lived the first years of his life in the street of the Holy Spirit, but little is known about his childhood, which apparently was spent under the care of his mother. Martín had a sister named Juana, with whom he would be taken from his mother's bed by his father and taken to Santiago de Guayaquil, when he was barely seven years old. In said city, Juan de Porres went to his relative Diego Marcos de Miranda, in order to leave his children there; Juana was welcomed, but Martín had to return to his father. Upon his return from Guayaquil in 1590, Martín was taken by his father to Malambo and entrusted to Isabel García Michel, an honest and good Christian woman.
Entrance to the convent of San Martín de Porres
San Martín de Porres then entered the service of Mateo Pastor and learned the trade of barber. At that time he also learned to read and write, and around 1586 he is already found as a bell ringer at dawn in the tower of the Dominican church in Lima, whose convent he had entered as a "donate" and where he would spend the rest of his life. . In 1591 he received confirmation from the Archbishop of Lima Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo in the cathedral church .
In the Dominican convent San Martín de Porres he worked as a barber, a blood-bleeder, a tooth-puller and even a nurse. He led a life of abstinence and it is said that in the cell he occupied he slept on a bench for barely three hours a day. In an era full of mysticism and penitential rigor, Martin was no exception and, like other saints, he punished himself corporally, even wearing hair shirts. On June 2, 1603 he made his vows of obedience, poverty and chastity . Among the miraculous faculties attributed to him are prophecy, ubiquity, levitation and the gift of tongues. He had a special devotion to the Virgen del Rosario, protector of the mulattoes. Towards the age of forty he was affected by an incurable disease that filled him with ailments until his death, which occurred on November 3, 1639 . His burial was attended by the viceroy, the hearers and the archbishop, in addition to a crowd that witnessed that the body of the donated mulatto exhaled "a fragrance so great that it enthralled those who approached." Although his worship was sustained over the centuries by popular devotion, it was only in 1837 that he was beatified. In 1945 he was proclaimed by Pius XII as patron saint of social justice and received canonization from John XXIII in 1962 .