A long-haired skeleton bride shakes Mexican Catholicism.
Doña Queta’s dark eyes light with passion as she arranges flowers and little icons on an altar on a busy street corner. Two passing women cross themselves, light a cigarette and place it on the altar in a ritual gesture, as if it were a votive candle or a stick of incense.
Behind the glass is La Santa Muerte, or Saint Death – a female skeleton with long flowing hair, wearing a wedding dress. A tattoed young man stands beside them, puffs the smoke of his marijuana joint towards the skeleton and leaves an unfinished beer for her as an offering.
The guardian of the shrine, Doña Queta, wears a maid’s blue apron and slippers. She erected the altar more than 12 years ago in Tepito – one of Mexico City’s toughest neighbourhoods. Devotees of the Saint, also known as Niña Blanca (White Girl) or La Flaquita (Skinny Girl), show up in growing numbers every day. Most of the people who pay their re spects are among Mexico’s poor, living on the margins of society. Drug traffickers, kidnappers, prisoners, gays and prostitutes across Mexico all seek the protection of the Death saint.
After all, they look death in the eye every day and have reason to fear her, so they prefer to befriend her, giving her what they can: a few coins, fruit, tequila or cigarettes. They ask for favours in exchange. Protection from death and sickness, but she is also asked to grant luck and love, as she is known as a Doctor de Amor, a Love Doctor too.
A skeleton-like Aztec queen, Mictecacihuatl, who kept watch over the bones of the dead in the underworld, was already being worshipped before the arrival of the conquistadores. The first appearance of a Christian version of the female- skeleton saint dates back to 1793, when the Spanish Inquisition ordered the destruction of two temples dedicated to La Santa Muerte. She then virtually disappeared until 1940, when anthropologists found that Mexican women were worshipping her to get their unfaithful partners to return to them.
The Saint is still called upon to perform love ‘miracles’, but it’s the country’s drug cartels that seem to have chosen her as their guardian angel now. “The worship of Santa Muerte is Latin America’s fastest-growing new religious movement”, says Andrew Chesnut, Religious Studies Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of a recent book, ‘Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, The Skeleton Saint’.
According to estimates, some 10 million people across Mexico, Central America and the United States worship La Flaquita. She appears to meet a new demand for spirituality among the young and the lower echelons of society that the Church hasn’t been able to fulfil. Argelia García, 25, has a tattoo of a red skeleton holding a scythe on her calf. “La Flaquita is an outsider just like us”, she says, “That’s why we love her, because she doesn’t judge us for what we do.” Argelia says Santa Muerte helped her in past times of trouble. “Like when I got pregnant and thought my father would beat me to death, but he hugged me instead.”
Back at the shrine, Doña Queta becomes enthusiastic, flashing her gold teeth as the tiny skull charms on her necklace jangle. “There’s not a soul in the churches these days, but everybody is welcome here because we are all equal in the face of Death; she doesn’t discriminate.” And in a country as divided as Mexico – between the ultra-rich and the extreme poor, white and indigenous peoples – death’s levelling factor is very appealing to the masses.
Since the beginning of the drug war in 2006, Mexico has recorded 100,000 people who have either been murdered or have vanished. Signs of death are everywhere, photos of mutilated and beheaded bodies have become daily fodder for the media, and it’s not surprising that Death has become a Narco-Saint, as many call her. Icons and shrines of La Flaquita are often found in cartel safe-houses.
The authorities have started destroying some of the altars, as if the cult were becoming an enemy of the state or a form of heresy in what is a primarily Catholic country. The Church condemns the movement, which Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi has dubbed a blasphemous ‘anti-religion’. Beyond the theological arguments, competition is certainly an issue too. Mexico has the second largest Catholic population in the world after Brazil. Some 82 percent of Mexicans call themselves Catholics, a steep drop from the 96 percent recorded in 1970. “That’s why the Vatican has elected its first Latin American Pope”, observes Professor Chesnut, “to stem the haemorrhaging of Catholic faithful in the region and curb the rise of new movements”. In spite of its success, the Santa Muerte is a controversial cult.
In 2012, the authorities in a rural village arrested a entire family for sacrificing two young boys and a woman, who were bled to death as an offering for the Saint. Human sacrifices evoking ancient Aztec rituals are the exception rather than the rule, but many people view these rare macabre rituals and the supposed association with the Narcos as aberrations. In the meantime, exorcisms are reported to be on the rise as priests are called on to purge demons from killers’ souls: like the cartel assassin who turned into an informer and confessed to butchering people alive, and having relished doing it.
Apart from extreme cases, many don’t see any contradiction between being good Catholics and devotees of the Death Saint. They express their devotion with the same rituals you’d see during mass: prayers, rosaries and making the sign of the cross. They believe in one God, and in the Virgin of Guadalupe, a dark-skinned, mestizo version of the Virgin Mary.
Doña Queta emphasises, “God is our first love and our only saviour, and then comes Santa Muerte who can help us reach God – but not the Church. Priests are disgusting”, says the woman, referring to recent paedophilia scandals. When asked when she last went to church, she replies “I can’t remember”.
A long-haired skeleton bride shakes Mexican Catholicism.
