Grisly Mexican 'saint' has fans on the shady side

By Reed Johnson
Los Angeles Times

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Her domain is a labyrinth of grimy streets lined with auto-body shops and humble mom-and-pop stores. From her perch behind a glass-encased altar adorned with candles, decayed flowers and shot glasses of tequila, she watches scruffy curs pick through garbage while a constant stream of pilgrims lays offerings at her feet.

To Roman Catholic Church officials, the skeletal woman in the long, flowing robes is an evil figure, a grisly embodiment of satanic purposes. But to the desperately poor and overlooked residents of Tepito she is a pop-folk idol and often a last, best hope for answering unanswered prayers.

She is La Santa Muerte, "Saint Death."

Her petitioners are prostitutes, drug dealers and murderers, as well as multitudes of ordinary housewives, taxi drivers and street vendors hoping to cure a sick child or pay the rent or simply make it through another day without getting robbed or shot.

Over the past 20 years, her following has grown so large that in some parts of Mexico she is becoming a rival in popular affection to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the manifestation of the Virgin Mary that is the reigning symbol of Mexican national identity.

"She is a Virgin of Guadalupe in negative: That which one can't ask of the Virgin, one can ask of her," says Homero Aridjis, a poet, novelist and former Mexican diplomat who recently published a short-story collection about La Santa Muerte's mysterious and firm grip on the Mexican soul.

"If ... today you are going to sell drugs or you are going to kidnap somebody, you ask her (La Santa Muerte) for help so you can commit crimes safely," author Aridjis says with a rueful laugh. "You see some very innocent people praying and making offerings, and some very tough people as well."

Although La Santa Muerte is disdained and barely recognized by the Catholic Church, she's one of a number of unofficial folk "saints" who've been taken to heart by the Mexican people in past centuries. And while La Santa Muerte embodies a certain fatalism about life's inevitable end, her all-too-human form makes ordinary Mexicans feel that, in some mysterious way, she is like one of them, that she feels their sufferings.

Children ask La Santa Muerte for help with schoolwork. Some mothers pray to the saint to protect their kids from crime, or from the predations of Mexico's notoriously corrupt police. Other parents plead with the saint to keep their children from joining gangs.

"Narcotraficantes," Mexico's powerful drug lords, may ask La Santa Muerte for aid in destroying their rivals. Aridjis says the cult is particularly extensive among Mexican prison inmates.
 
The Tepito neighborhood is a logical place to encounter La Santa Muerte. Bordered by sprawling market stalls where you can buy anything from guns and pirated Viagra to illegal exotic animals and bootleg DVDs of "The Passion of the Christ," the barrio has a long history of deprivation and neglect.

American writer Oscar Lewis based his classic study of Mexican poverty and social pathology, "Los Hijos de Sanchez" (The Children of Sanchez), on a Tepito family who lived less than a block from where the Santa Muerte altar now stands.

It wasn't until the mid-1960s, Aridjis says, that La Santa Muerte began emerging with a vengeance in Mexican society, first in the provinces and later in major urban centers. As Mexico City grew into a monster metropolis, crime surged and a hemispheric drug trade flourished, La Santa Muerte's stock rose swiftly.

Aridjis says he first encountered her 10 years ago while attending an all-night party thrown by a highly prominent Mexican businessman, who kept an image of the saint in a chapel in his home. "I began to learn more and more and more," he says. "It was like an invisible presence in our society."

And perhaps not just Mexican society anymore. Dona Queta says friends in Tijuana tell her they've seen images of La Santa Muerte along the "frontera." Some believe that the skeleton queen will soon be en route to Texas, Chicago, Los Angeles — if she's not already there.

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