Down and Delirious in Mexico City (20 page)

“I think it's unjust that whoever did this is eating and breathing, while they took away our Padrino, someone so valued, who did so much good in my life, in my family,” an old woman named Margarita tells me. “Look at what it's done for me,” Margarita insists, smiling broadly.

I look. She has dark, rough skin, eyes set close together, and fairly crooked teeth that protrude outward from her grin. Margarita tells me how she came to the Santa Muerte sanctuary in Tultitlán. She says she had been in the darkest point of her life when she saw the large Santa Muerte statue in passing. “One day it was raining, and I came in, and I saw a . . . beautiful man, white, who saw me, because I was crying and crying, and I said to him, ‘
Buenas noches,
is the prayer over?' ”

Margarita's eyes grow wide with wonder at the thought of her memory.

“ ‘
Señor,
can I come and see her?' He said yes. ‘Are you in a rush?' He said, ‘A little.' ”

“Who was it?” I ask.

“Blessed be God and my Holy Mother, it was my Padrino,” Margarita says. “He opened his doors. He let me pray. And once inside
the door, he listened to me. I told him everything that I had been through. How I had arrived here, destroyed, without family, without friends, without a house. I had been on the street for four days.”

Margarita is tearing up now.

“People think you're crazy, that you're not functioning right,” she goes on. “Yes, I consider myself crazy. Yes. I am crazy, but for love for my fellow citizens. When my Padrino listened, as you are listening to me now, he stretched his hand out to me.” Margarita reaches out for my own hand and holds it. “And he said to me, ‘You . . . are good.' ”

Margarita's eyes are aglow with the rapture of belief. She is literally channeling her faith through my recorder, and in her mind speaking to the universe. “Now, I am a fortified beauty, a beauty who believes in the love and mercy of our Mother.”

Her “Mother” is the Santa Muerte, Death itself. And then, at the height of the party, the clouds above part. It is sudden, as if on cue. The sun bears through the gray moisture in radiant light, catching new colors and textures before our eyes. El Pantera's followers are joined in wild applause and ecstatic cries. Margarita dances, shakes her hips, raises her arms to the sky, and weeps.

“You've witnessed it,” Constantine says into her microphone, fierce with devotion, her own mourning aside. “El Pantera is here with us. . . . He cannot be here in body, but he is here in soul.”

To understand the phenomenal growth of the cult of Santa Muerte in the last decade in Mexico City and across the Mexican diaspora in the United States, it's worth reminding yourself, first of all, that everyone dies. No matter your class, country, sex, or net worth, we all eventually face death. It is life's built-in defect, its greatest source of sadness. Looking to mitigate the banality of death, societies and
religions turn it into an existential mystery. Great significance is attached to what sort of circumstances in life affect what happens to the soul in the afterlife. Churches teach us that death carries a clean spiritual logic, one that virtually anyone can follow: Be godly in life as we dictate, ascend to heaven in death.

The Santa Muerte challenges that entire structure, which is why the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Mexico so violently despises the cult, calling it “satanic.” The Santa Muerte—the Little Skinny One, as she is sometimes called—violates the Church's order by bringing the omnipresence of death into direct contact with everyday life. Worshipping a Death figure amounts to worshipping the one sure thing that life offers, its end.

In criticizing the Santa Muerte church, authorities only feed fuel to its followers, who number between 2 and 5 million, according to some estimates. Pushing back is pointless. How could the Church compete against a readily accessible icon that offers the average mortal more agency and spiritual independence than any religion's doctrines? With prayers and offerings, people are learning to charm Death into doing their bidding in life. They ask her to find them jobs or spouses, to take away enemies, or to protect their own selves from her eternal embrace, for a time. Such options understandably draw the morally marginalized to her cult: drug traffickers, prostitutes, petty criminals, politicians.

The origin of the Santa Muerte is disputed. Some believe the image is a descendant from pre-Hispanic times, on the lineage of the Aztec god Mictlantecuhtli. Anthropologists maintain the Santa Muerte is a refashioning of San Pascual Rey, a Catholic saint with a long cult history in the Mayan lands of Chiapas and Guatemala, and whose traditional image is a frightening skeleton. Historian Claudio Lomnitz casts Santa Muerte's following in an economic light, arguing that it exploded after the onset of the North American
Free Trade Agreement, when the modern northern exodus of Mexican migrants across the border really took off. The argument is that the economic uncertainty defining Mexican society created an opening for a spiritual icon that could respond to deep social rifts and the widening distance between the government and the average citizen.

“The spread of this cult can be understood as a symptom of Mexico's second secular revolution—the nation's increasingly tenuous relationship to the state,” Lomnitz writes in his book
Death and the Idea of Mexico.
“She is, from the viewpoint of her devotees, for all intents and purposes, an independent agent.”

This hypothesis seems the most apt to me. As I witness in Tultitlán, worshippers of the Santa Muerte retain their national Catholicism without necessarily involving themselves in criminal or corrupting acts. But if nothing about the Santa Muerte cult is specifically criminal, I ask myself, why does so much passionate unease exist over its growth? In Tijuana, in the north, the government has gone out of its way to destroy Santa Muerte sanctuaries in a rampage that believers everywhere consider a direct assault on their religious freedom. Santa Muerte followers feel compelled to come out of the shadows. One day in April 2009, they march for their religious rights in the Zócalo, carrying their Santa Muerte right up to the gates of the Metropolitan Cathedral. It is a veritable confrontation of gods.

My work is ostensibly that of a dispassionate journalist, but I have to admit the truth. I am looking to see if I can assimilate the Santa Muerte into my spiritual diet. Her altars beckon to me from inside shops and on street corners. Her gaping cackle and hollow eyes, her scythe and globe, her colored gowns, her knobby fingers, calling out in witness behind a veil of cigar smoke or incense. She is in tattoo form on a man's arm or chest, in sticker form on the back
of a cab, in scapular form around a young person's neck. In Mexico City, where history is an epic parade of death and bloodshed, no religious icon is more rooted in the place's essential identity. A saint of death for the land of death.

For weeks I wander the major altars found in the center of Mexico City, meeting people who are otherwise “normal” in their lives but are somehow drawn to a cult considered “pagan” by Mexico's ecclesiastical leaders. I find myself returning to a basic idea.
There is nothing more certain in life than death. . . . There is nothing as certain in life as its finish.
The cult of the Santa Muerte is simply an elaborate acknowledgment of fact.

So why, I wonder, must I keep repeating this to myself?

The most famous Santa Muerte altar in Mexico City lies deep in the mythically “rough” barrio of Tepito, the most notorious neighborhood in all of Mexico. I have long tried to remain aware that a neighborhood's notoriety doesn't always correspond with its actual profile, but Tepito is a special case. It is the capital of pirates, the capital of gangsters, of those making do on their own. It is more or less off the grid, and it's been this way for centuries. The sidewalks are choked with vendors selling cheap pirated and stolen goods, tons upon tons, below long stretches of colored tarps that block out the sun, disorienting the senses. Street vending dominates the landscape in Tepito; there is street commerce, then everything else. So many stalls sell bootleg movies that they are sometimes divided up by genre, with pornography dominating over westerns, horror films, art-house and classic-Mexican cinema, and so on. If you know whom to ask, and how, you can get anything.
Anything
. Drugs, guns, animals. Anything for the right price. “In Tepito everything is for sale but dignity,” the maxim goes.

The neighborhood is Mexico's incubator of great boxers, great football players, legendary
pachucos
and
sonideros.
It also tends to operate as a slate upon which all kinds of theories are hung, on globalization, developing economies, criminality, the underworld, on Mexico. In films and books, Tepito is a muse. Carlos Monsiváis called it a “cemetery of ambitions, a congregation of thieves.” In Tepito, he wrote, “everything happens, everything fits.”

I dig regularly into the market. What draws me is that Tepito's primary purpose is shopping. The endless options, the prevalence of the idea that anything can be had, commerce above morals, laws, or codes. Today, some businesses in Tepito are kept by Korean immigrants, recent arrivals to the Tepito landscape. Most of the merchandise is said to be smuggled in from China—always a reliable bogeyman for Mexico's economic warts. But authorities also believe much of what is sold within Tepito is manufactured inside the walled-off
vecindades,
self-contained neighborhoods occupying whole city blocks where unofficial factories pump out CDs and DVDs, and caches of weapons and drugs are stored. Police officers are present but rarely enforce any laws. Whenever the government's “special forces” attempt to eradicate pirate manufacturing and drug distribution in Tepito with predawn raids, the incensed residents, women and children included, beat back the armed agents. The metro Tepito station symbol is a boxer's glove, a nod to the many fabled boxing champs who got their earliest training in Tepito's streets and gyms. But the symbol for the station could just as well be a silhouette of the Santa Muerte. This is where the cult first came out of the shadows.

Deep in the neighborhood on a street called Alfarería, the most popular public altar to Santa Muerte is watched over by a well-regarded woman known as Doña Queta. She passes the time cleaning and decorating the glass case in which the life-size Santa Muerte
figure stands, just outside her
vecindad
. She dresses her Death in extravagant gowns and tiaras, as if preparing her for a wedding or
quinceañera.
The display is always color-coordinated. If the Santa is dressed in green, candles and fabrics will be in green. Every Halloween at midnight Doña Queta's altar is the site of a Santa Muerte rosary ritual that draws so many adherents that, on the night I go, I am unable to get closer than two blocks away. Thousands of people as far as one can see face Doña Queta's door, reciting the Santa Muerte prayers, honoring their “Santita.” When I depart, the cabdriver tells me the local narco capos bring their automatic assault weapons to Doña Queta's on Halloween, so that the tools of their trade can be blessed by Death.

Jonathan Legaria's Santa Muerte sanctuary up in Tultitlán is a distant and unknown place for Doña Queta and the people who worship the Death figure on her doorstep. Weeks after Legaria's funeral, I visit Doña Queta in the daytime, hoping to clear up some questions. She is sitting on a stool before the altar. People approach to deliver flowers and fruit to the skeletal figure in the glass case. “We all respect one another here, each person to his own,” Doña Queta explains. “No one would attack you here.”

Doña Queta regards the image with an almost childlike affection, talking about the manner in which she dresses her, keeps her “pretty.” I ask her why the cult has grown so much. “It is the faith of the people, my child.”

I ask again, “But why now?”

“I already told you. Before, there were no altars on the street. I put this altar, and people came.”

So,
if you build it, they will come,
I think to myself.

A shock of white races through the old woman's black hair from the top of her forehead, like a crown. Doña Queta's eyes are fierce, intense, yet she exudes tranquillity. Doña Queta is at peace with
her life, her office. The Santa Muerte's caretaker. “Does the Santa Muerte protect you from death?” I ask.

Doña Queta is momentarily annoyed.
What a foolish question,
her expression says.

“You are born with a destiny, from the day you are born. This is separate. This is for asking that she protect you, that she accompany you.” Doña Queta shrugs, coming up with suitable examples. “That she might get a son out of jail, that she might find you a job, that she might stop you from losing your house. But your destiny is marked, my child.”

I have more questions. I bring up the allegation that cartel men pray to the Santa Muerte for help in the wars against their enemies. The papers always say that the Santita watches over assassins, I tell Doña Queta.

“And do you know a narco who has told you that?” she shoots back. “Well? That is just talk. I don't go there.”

People continue to stream past the altar. Some hold small children by the hand or carry babies in their arms. Some touch the front panel of the glass case so that the Santa Muerte's blessings might channel through at the touch. Doña Queta insists to me that nothing is too otherworldly about the Santa Muerte.

“She is inside of you just as she is inside of me,” Doña Queta says, lifting a pinch of skin on her forearm, her eyes ablaze. “Once you peel this . . .
you
are the Muerte. You already have her . . . in you.”

My pen stops. I feel myself pitch slightly backward. I feel Doña Queta's words sear right through my skin and envelop my skeleton. The idea is so powerful. The Santa Muerte, living inside of us all. The veracity of the image, my journalist's brain thinks, is now “provably true.” There isn't much more to discuss.