William A. Calvo-Quirós’s Undocumented Saints: The Politics of Migrating Devotions is a masterful examination of five popular (or vernacular) saints who exist within and across the “open wound” of the U.S.-Mexico Border. Using his expertise in the fields of Chicanx studies, religious studies, and industrial design, as well as his own personal experiences, Calvo-Quirós invites the reader into the processes by which people become saints, and by which saints respond to what their people most need. In an introduction and five chapters, the book canvasses the sanctification—and in one case canonization—of Jesús Malverde, Santa Olguita, Juan Soldado, Saint Toribio Romo, and La Santa Muerte. In each of these cases, the author provides a sociopolitical analysis of the saint’s origins, development, and present-day identities, including their relationship with conflicts like the Mexican Revolution, enforced land redistribution, the Cristero War, migration between the United States and Mexico, and the ongoing violence based on race and gender on both sides of the border. This book, like the santos contained within its pages, enacts repeated migrations across the epistemic and literal landscapes it describes, traveling between the sacred and the secular, the historical and the contemporary, the archival and the ethnographic, and the author’s perspectives as both observer and participant in the stories of these (un)documented saints.
Addressing the role of popular Catholicism and scholarship in responding to the ongoing crises experienced by immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico border, the book’s introduction proposes that saints act as a “social archive,” recording the lives, needs, and priorities of the people who seek their aid. Each saint thus possesses a “social body” that cannot be removed or fully controlled by official means and is thus indispensable for an analysis of popular religiosity. In the pursuit of understanding the liminality and continued migration of these saints as both archives and bodies, Calvo-Quirós offers an analysis of the “intra-state” pathways through which they travel (21). This term incorporates translocal and transnational movements of religion, faith, and resources. As the author explains, each saint’s identity necessitates different methodological and theoretical approaches that are reflected in their respective chapters. The introduction, finally, offers a clear outline of the process through which saints are or are not canonized by the Catholic Church and positions this study as an alternative attempt to document the unofficial processes by which people make saints—or certain aspects of saints—both migratory and holy.
Chapter 1 of the book challenges common narratives about one of the most well-known Mexican popular saints, Jesús Malverde, by contextualizing the pivotal moment in the history of Mexico when he emerged. While Malverde is often referred to in popular culture as a “Narco Saint,” Calvo-Quirós asserts that the story of a man pushed to the brink through forced labor and starvation and hanged for stealing from the wealthy, only for the general responsible for his death to suffer and die in turn, became popular in the wake of the Mexican Revolution as a way of expressing anxiety about modernization and the injustices involved in land redistribution. Calvo-Quirós’s analysis relies on interviews about and documentation of popular devotion to the saint in Culiacán, Sinaloa, where Malverde is said to have lived, including an illuminating examination of the structure housing his shrine. The author analyzes the creation of a “marketable” image for the saint and the highly racialized, nationalist, and gender-based typologies of his identity. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the work of Sinaloa native María Romero, whose performance art and interactive exhibits in both Mexico and the U.S. critique gender-based violence in Sinaloa as well as the racialized flattening of Malverde’s identity in the U.S. justice system.
In chapter 2, Calvo-Quirós deconstructs the devotion to another well-known popular saint, Juan Soldado, by juxtaposing his story with that of the girl whose life and death were subsumed in his favor, Santa Olguita. The chapter recounts the 1938 rape and murder of eight-year-old Olga Camacho and subsequent arrest and execution of soldier Juan Soldado in Tijuana, the immediate public demand to find and punish Olga’s killer, and the quick turnabout of erasing her story to rehabilitate the image of a man who may have been falsely accused. Calvo-Quirós argues that the reaction to these events was influenced by the ongoing labor unrest and protests in Tijuana. He also argues that in the decades since the original crime, Olga has repeatedly suffered a “second death” through the erasure of her assault and death from popular narratives that valorize Soldado, even to the extent of implying that her death was to some degree her own fault. A detailed description of the saints’ grave sites—one heavily adorned and the other abandoned—leads to a powerful indictment of the historical and contemporary mechanisms by which violence towards women and girls on the border is explained away. The chapter also recounts the more recent attempts to reclaim Olga Camacho as a feminist saint, Santa Olguita, as part of a broader social movement drawing attention to female victims of assault and murder who are made invisible, #niunamás.
Chapters 3 and 4 provide a study in contrasts: the only saint in the book who has been officially canonized, Saint Toribio Romo, and the one who has received the most direct opposition from the Catholic Church, La Santa Muerte. The author’s research into Toribio Romo, thanks to the meticulous records created and archived during the processes of beatification and canonization, offers a detailed exploration of the saint’s life and death and the surprising ways his identity has changed over time. A priest, Toribio Romo was killed in 1928 during Mexico’s Cristero War. The saint is often referred to as the “Holy Smuggler” and is said to have been killed by Mexican government soldiers opposed to the Catholic Church. His canonization was based on his martyrdom as well as on multiple miraculous appearances to migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Calvo-Quirós points out, however, that in life Toribio Romo was in fact opposed to immigration, and that Vatican records name his murderer as a member of the local militia group the Agraristas, not a government solider. Calvo-Quirós argues that while the Vatican may assert a particular identity for the saint, his “social body” continues to respond to the values and needs of the people who are devoted to him. This can have unexpected consequences, as when a congregation in Detroit rejected a commissioned art piece of the saint that differed from the white skin and blue eyes they expected, or when the story of a statue’s undocumented border-crossing strengthened faith in the saint for parishioners in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The persistence of unofficial forms of devotion to Saint Toribio Romo presages the author’s treatment of La Santa Muerte, Saint (or Holy) Death. This chapter is weighted towards more contemporary research, largely because the name of La Santa Muerte does not appear to have been in use until the 1950s, and widespread public awareness of the popular saint grew slowly. The first public shrine to La Santa Muerte was created in 2001 in Tepito, a neighborhood of Mexico City. While this chapter is less deeply historicized than the first three, Calvo-Quirós does recount several factors that preceded the emergence of this controversial saint, including Mesoamerican death deities, the popular skeleton symbol and character La Catrina, and the intimate and intergenerational experiences with death shared by many of her devotees. The author also addresses La Santa Muerte’s current popularity among the LGBTQ community in the U.S. and how her followers understand her relationship to the Virgin Mary and other saints. Finally, he notes the need for further research into the proliferation of devotion to La Santa Muerte in online spaces.
In the conclusion to the book, Calvo-Quirós references Gloria Anzaldúa’s characterization of the border as an open wound and argues that the literal and metaphorical borders experienced by migrants between the U.S. and Mexico can be understood as “modern stigmata: a constellation of constantly bleeding wounds that materialize the legacies of colonial violence and greed” (274). In response to this violence and based on the foregoing case studies, he presents fourteen observations about popular saints that are informational and—in some cases—hopeful, including a final assertion that “Saints are a call for action” (285).
This is a careful, thorough work, and deserves both the awards it has received and a place in the classroom or on private bookshelves for those interested in migration, popular or vernacular religion, and the relationship between social advocacy and the Catholic Church. Despite these well-deserved accolades, there are some small issues. Multiple typographic errors in the text introduce confusion, and the diversity of organizational strategies in the chapters could make a quick perusal of the material difficult for the casual reader. From a folkloristic perspective, the lack of distinction between the use of the terms popular, folk, and vernacular—in reference to religion and the saints—obscures established and useful theoretical distinctions. Ultimately, however, the borders that Calvo-Quirós crosses as an author are both necessary and valuable, and reveal key areas for further research within folkloristics, Chicanx and Latine studies, and in the study of ethnic and religious migration.
Work Cited
Gloria Anzaldúa. 1999. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza Consciousness. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
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[Review length: 1538 words * Review posted on February 2, 2026]