Santa Muerte, Death the Protector

Abstract

The unofficial saint, Santa Muerte or Holy Death, another contemporary manifestation of a fierce liminal deity connected to marginality, inferiority, outsiderhood, and ritual powers, is worshipped in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and the “Greater Mexico” in the United States.³ This new devotion can be traced to the Tepito neighborhood in Mexico City’s marginal colonia Morelos, in mid-twentieth century, where it started as a personal cult that spread widely about 20 years ago and reached an unprecedented popularity in the past ten years. In this chapter, I examine the European, Native Mexican, and Colonial origins of the usage of death images and the reasons for the beginning and expansion of Santa Muerte devotion in Mexico and the US-Mexican borderlands, as well as its meaning and implications for individuals and society. Because of the novelty, immediacy, and sometimes clandestine character of this devotion, there is almost no scholarly literature published on this topic, and my sources are my own fieldwork, scarce books, articles, devotional manuals, and the Internet.

Oh Most Holy Death, I invoke you so through your image you may free me from all danger, material or from bewitchment and through this sacred flame you may purify my body from all disgrace and malediction and that in turn love and abundance may come. So be it.

—La Biblia de la Santa Muerte, n.d. 64

Dear Death of my heart, don’t forsake me from your protection.¹

I don’t know if God exists, but death yes … Death is stronger than life, as she puts an end to it. In view of a lack of meaning of life, there is an excess of meaning of death.²