Wil G. Pansters’s edited volume, La Santa Muerte in Mexico: History, Devotion, and Society, opens a pivotal chapter in the study of the worship of La Santa Muerte in greater Latin America. This “Saint Death” or “Holy Death” appears in the guise of a robed skeletal figure and is referred to in the feminine. Her existence was first documented in Mexico City’s working-class Tepito neighborhood in the 1940s. Pansters describes the growth of La Santa Muerte’s popularity, from the women who dedicated private altars to the saint in the mid-twentieth century, to the Mexican prisoners who in the 1990s began tattooing her image on their bodies as a form of protection, to the veritable explosion of devotees since 2001, when Enriqueta Romero (better known as doña Queta) installed a shrine to a life-sized statue of the saint in front of her home in barrio Tepito. Pansters’s introduction provides a thorough overview of this brief history and reviews the nascent field’s existing literature and key debates. His introduction is followed by five chapters, penned by historians, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars, and an afterword by the noted anthropologist and Mexicanist Claudio Lomnitz. From the outset, Pansters captivates the folklorist’s attention by highlighting the “spectacular” growth of La Santa Muerte worship in the early years of the twenty-first century, arguing that the phenomenon “provides a fascinating laboratory for the study of a popular religion ‘in the making’” (4).
The book’s contributors urge caution when seeking to identify the historical and or iconographic roots of La Santa Muerte. Pansters sets the tone: “While it is erroneous to conceive the Day of the Dead, Posada’s skeletons, the Santa Muerte cult, and even more so pre-Columbian symbols of death as manifestations of some deep cultural motif, it is possible to observe meaningful and dynamic connections among these phenomena” (17). Building upon this claim, Juan Antonio Flores Martos argues that, in the worship of La Santa Muerte, we are “witnessing ‘bottom-up’ processes of cultural patrimonialization” (107) in which the saint’s guise and power resonate with figures like the well-dressed Catrina made famous by artist José Guadalupe Posada, or Mictlantecuhtli, the “pre-Hispanic Mexica god of the world of the dead” (94).
Without offering reductive notions of cause-and-effect, Flores Martos, Anne Huffschmid, and Pansters provide the political-economic context of La Santa Muerte’s fluorescence, from Mexico’s economic crisis of the 1990s, to the precipitous violence associated with narco-trafficking, and to the existential uncertainties of trans-border migration. These scholars note that the urban poor and middle classes alike are turning to La Santa Muerte, as they feel abandoned by a Catholic Church no longer committed to liberation theology and deserted by a State which has grown impotent in the face of organized crime. Benjamin Smith’s chapter echoes these contentions, demonstrating that worship of La Santa Muerte follows in a long line of Latin American revitalization movements that speak to the vulnerable in times of massive social change.
Smith’s work highlights a persistent thread that runs through Santa Muerte veneration: devotees engage in a culturally familiar practice of reciprocity, the making of mandas (vows) in exchange for favors of protection. He writes, “The central concepts of the liturgy, amparo and desamparo, protection and loss of protection, have their roots in the judicial world” (80), and that these references by La Santa Muerte’s adherents point to an “ineffective, and perhaps . . . unreadable justice system” (81). Flores Martos points out that La Santa Muerte’s “is, above all, a utilitarian cult” (92). Her followers are agentive followers of what Huffschmid calls “the culturally empowered skeleton” (112) who “embodies the end of recognizable human features . . . beyond domestication, even beyond sexuality” (118). As such, La Santa Muerte has the capacity to be a formidable ally, or a terrifying foe.
Several chapters in this volume focus on the vernacular, performative, and profoundly material nature of Santa Muerte veneration. Regnar Kristensen’s work on notions of exchange in the Santa Muerte religious system describes the ways in which supplicants’ actions echo popular Catholicism: they construct shrines; they dress and feed her image with great care; and they participate in pilgrimages, “climbing the last part of the journey to the street altars on their knees to show their gratitude for a favor received” (145). Pansters notes that such personalized care “opens up a space for closeness and intimacy” with the saint (22), and Kristensen reiterates this point, observing that some worshippers “speak to their santas as if they were family members or close friends” (147-148). In their chapter on bodily inscription, Judith Katia Perdigón Castañeda and Bernardo Robles Aguirre describe altars laden with La Santa Muerte’s favorites—tequila, tobacco, flowers, chocolates, and apples—and recall devotees who bedeck her image with jewelry or donate their own hair for her wigs. These scholars see tattoos as the ultimate offering, wherein the skin of the devotee becomes “a blank canvas upon which they display their gratitude” (160).
The veneration of La Santa Muerte is rejected as “blasphemous” by the Catholic Church; it has often been associated with criminality; and it is even assumed by some to be Satanic. The authors of this volume go to great lengths to interrogate unfounded stereotypes, arguing for a wholly different view of La Santa Muerte’s devotees. Kristensen describes how the saint is being re-domesticated, moving from the “church” of promoter David Romo back into family homes and everyday spiritual practice. Huffschmid’s resonant portrayal humanizes La Santa Muerte’s followers: she characterizes gatherings as “amazingly peaceful” (127), even festive. She documents a massive procession of family groups bearing their own statuettes of La Santa Muerte, to be put on display, shared, and blessed. And she assures the reader, “What we saw, lived, and recorded during these gatherings . . . in no way corresponded to the dominant media images of a frightening underground aesthetics” (125). First-hand accounts such as these make this volume revelatory, surprising, and hopeful.
Folklorists, anthropologists, historians, and religious studies scholars will find material of great interest in this work: historical and iconographic analyses, an overview of social practices and networks, and ethnographic depictions of performative engagement. The contributors connect large-scale structures of oppression, repression, and uncertainty with the smaller scale, deeply pragmatic responses that form the bedrock of Santa Muerte worship.
In his afterword, Lomnitz recalls Kristensen’s claim that supplicants often speak of paros—a “temporary form of help” (190)—rather than amparo (protection). Lomnitz makes the insightful, yet sobering observation that “‘amparo’ in a religious sense implies salvation. And this La Santa Muerte cannot provide” (190). He concludes, “Being wedded to La Santa Muerte appears to me to be an act of accepting a life with some possibilities for respite, but no redemption” (191). Pansters’s volume offers no easy answers. Rather, it provides a complexified, contextualized inquiry into a set of devotional practices that have achieved “‘spectacular’ visual presence” since 2001 (3). This is a faith without a formalized liturgy; nevertheless, it is one that has attracted countless devotees who find in La Santa Muerte a way to move forward in a world that seems to have forsaken them.
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[Review length: 1176 words • Review posted on April 16, 2020]