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Santa Muerte, Protection, and Desamparo: A View from a Mexico City Altar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Laura Roush
Laura Roush*
Affiliation:
El Colegio de Michoacán
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Abstract

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From the mid-1990s, devotion to Santa Muerte (Saint Death) became highly visible, not only in Mexico but also in the United States. Its evolution has coincided with the expansion of organized crime, creating the impression that the icon belongs to a coherent “narco-culture.” This article contextualizes ritual practices at a single altar in Tepito, a Mexico City neighborhood historically specialized in informal and illegal commerce. Its monthly prayer service, which dates to September 2001, now balances the needs of its congregation with a kind of response to accusations against devotees in the mass media. Ironically, the range of gestures that share Santa Muerte iconography encompasses laments and high-minded indignation over blanket attribution of violent intentions to a population, but also a language for making threats. The average devotee is always affected by the likelihood that new acts of violence will be styled as religious.

Resumo

Resumo

La devoción a la Santa Muerte, desde 1990, es crecientemente visible tanto en México como en los Estados Unidos. El impacto de la devoción y la multiplicación de sus sentidos corren de una manera paralela con la expansión del crimen organizado, generándose el prejuicio de que la devoción se inserta coherentemente en la “narcocultura”. Se contextualizan los ritos en un altar muy concurrido en Tepito, barrio de renombre en la Ciudad de México por su importancia en economías informales e ilegales. Desde el 2001 ofrece, en plena calle, un rosario mensual que se responde a las acusaciones de los medios masivos en contra de sus devotos, al atender las necesidades espirituales de una congregación anteriormente imprevista. Irónicamente el rango de prácticas etiquetadas como “culto a la Santa Muerte” mantiene una tensión entre el rechazo a la depredación y la permanente posibilidad de que nuevos actos de violencia se cometan invocando a su imagen.

Type
Part 3: Zones of Crisis
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 49 , Issue S1: Special Issue: Lived Religion and Lived Citizenship in Latin America's Zones of Crisis , 2014 , pp. 129 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

I thank Jeff Rubin, David Smilde, Paul Liffman, Rihan Yeh, and Gerardo Salcedo for helpful discussions of this text. For years of support in Tepito, I owe incalculable debts to the Centro de Estudios Tepiteños, the Hojalatero Social Alfonso Hernández, Rosario Gomez, the late Julian Ceballos Casco, and to Enriqueta Romero and her family.

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