Introduction

*A short version of this paper was published as a Chapter in 2019 by Springer Verlag.  New York. NY.  The citation follows:

González Velázquez, Eduardo, García-Villada, Eduardo, and Knepper, Timothy. (2019). The Cult of Santa Muerte: Migration, Marginalization, and Medicalization. Book Chapter for the Death and Dying : An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion (Vol. 2). pp. 63-76.  Springer Verlag.  New York. NY.

INTRODUCTION:

In Summer 2010, Mexico awaited with much anticipation two national celebrations: the centennial of the Revolution and the bicentennial of the Independence.  The Mexican President at that time was Felipe Calderón, in his fourth year of a six-year term as leader of the country.  Calderón had intensified the presence of security forces to curtail the increased violence that was plaguing the country as a result of illicit drug trafficking activities by powerful drug cartels.  I traveled to Mexico for an annual professional conference in Guadalajara, followed by a study trip to Mexico City to visit the Pyramids of Teotihuacán, the National Museum of Anthropology, and the Templo Mayor museum.

While in Mexico City, I had my first unexpected encounter with Santa Muerte.  On the corner of Emiliano Zapata and Jesús María streets in the heart of the city’s Historical Center, and a mere four blocks from the massive Metropolitan Cathedral and the National Palace, there stood a life-size statue of a skeleton.  It was dressed with a mantle, like any statue of the many Virgin Mary representations found in most Latin American Roman Catholic churches.  People in Mexico call such statues ‘bultos’ (bundles), and they are venerated in traditional Catholic churches throughout the country.  This dressed female skeleton was on top of a table, with a collection of offerings laid at the foot of the figure.  The ‘bulto’ was unattended.  No one besides me was paying attention to it at the time, and there wasn’t anyone nearby whom I could ask about the figure.  My reaction was one of shock.  I didn’t know what that dressed skeleton represented but, as a Latin American Catholic, the skeleton’s allusion to the Virgin Mary was unavoidable.  The image was creepy and somber, and my best guess was that the street presence of that ‘saint of death’ admitted the presence of an urban counter-culture that did not to me seem benign.  Was the statue a mockery of the fervor and belief that millions of devotees have of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico?  The vision was extremely unsettling.  I took a rushed photograph and quickly moved on.  Such was my first encounter with Santa Muerte.

For years, I had become familiar with and grown fond of the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico.  During that celebration, people build shrines and use candles, figurines, flowers, food offerings, and paper and sugar decorations to wait for the souls of the dead to visit and consume the food prepared for them.  The context in which I dealt with Day of the Dead was academic.  I had been integrating the celebration as an extracurricular activity for my Spanish language students to learn about the practice of the festivity.  After I encountered the Santa Muerte figure, I began reviewing the seemingly countless references to death in Mexico, such as the recently excavated Tzonpantli Altar of the Templo Mayor, adorned with endless skulls; the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, whose face is a deadly double snake and whose skirt is made of snakes and skulls, as depicted in the huge statue at the National Museum of Anthropology; Mesoamerican myths of the underworld written in codices and stones, and more.  Did a contemporary manifestation of death like the skeleton saint connect to this historic foundation?  Later, upon my return to the U.S., by chance I saw a report on Canal Once, a Spanish-speaking television channel, that identified the street figure of death as ‘Santa Muerte’.  In January 2014, when I traveled again to Guadalajara with a group of my university students, I arranged a visit to a Santa Muerte shrine in that city.  My journey had begun.

In this essay, I analyze a collection of prayers found at two Santa Muerte temples in Guadalajara, Mexico.  My analysis addresses three themes:  First, I trace the link between the pre-contact indigenous concepts of death, and the use of religious texts for praying in the European, Aztec, and Mayan cultures.  Then, I conduct a three-pronged analysis (trivium) of the sociolinguistic aspects of the Santa Muerte prayers (Joseph, 2002).  Some books and articles about Santa Muerte include selections or excerpts of prayers (Perdigón, 2008; Chesnut, 2012), but to date, there is no written record of a linguistic analysis of the prayers.  Finally, I offer an explanation of the theological aspects of the prayers, based on the social relations that the texts bring to the context of popular religion in contemporary urban Mexico.