Superstar-Saints and Wandering Souls: The Cemetery as a Cultural Hotspot in Latin American Cities

Abstract

This chapter engages with the meanings of death and the dead through a focus on urban cemetery cults, in which rural migrant populations in Latin American cities come to grips with a legacy of displacement and violence. The chapter explores two parallel cults: the veneration of folk saints and the communication with anonymous or forgotten dead, whose “restless souls” are deemed to be wandering in purgatory. The chapter claims, first, that the cults need to be understood as a reproduction of traditional rural beliefs within an urban context; and second, that the cults are a form of memory politics enacted by vulnerable populations dealing with disruptive violent pasts and forced displacements. While many capital cities in Latin America have developed formal places for the commemoration of violent episodes, everyday memorialization practices in cemeteries offer an alternative reading of those pasts, and of the position of known and unknown deadly victims therein. The two concurring explanations, I posit, support the idea that designated cemeteries are to be seen as urban cultural hotspots. The geographical focus of this essay is on Bogotá and Lima, two metropolises of comparable history and size. The sanctification and veneration cults in these cities testify in complementary ways to the relevance of the cemetery as a cultural hotspot for the urban masses. The richness and diversity of the stories, cults and practices centering on the dead body and its on-living soul is a valuable yet undervalued resource in contemporary urban life.