The guard asks us what happened and I explain that someone, possibly the girl with the bad yellow hair, has stolen my friend’s phone.
“Well, if you saw the acción, why didn’t you say anything?” he challenges.
“I did!” I say. I mean, I am. “She stole my friend’s phone! Where is she?”
“Let me go get her,” the guard says, and he goes back up to the bar.
Quetzal is nearby, pounding his feet in frustration, cursing her. I am still calling the cell phone, ears up, scanning the bodega’s rear storage room, below the joint upstairs. A huge bald man sits with a beer at a table pretending to be sending a text message on his phone, but I can see a curious bulge in his front pocket, and it is not his anatomy. Did the evil trans girl pass the phone over to this guy? Was he the getaway crook? Was that the system? Was I making up the scenario in the loose logic of intense anger?
I am a split second away from approaching the man, thinking about what I might say, when the girl with the bad yellow hair appears, pulled by the arm by the guard. And I am preparing for a confrontation because he places her right in front of me and says in between us, “He says you stole his friend’s phone.”
The girl is absolutely shocked, absolutely scandalized by the accusation. She speaks in rapid-fire, defensive chilango Spanish. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. . . . I came here to drink with my friends. . . . I don’t know who you are . . . I don’t need to steal!”
Her aggressively defensive attitude feeds my suspicions. “You took it,” I say slowly. “I saw you.” This was potentially going to get ugly. It is the start of the dance of violence, our faces only inches apart. Am I really about to get into a physical altercation with a trans girl at an illegal gay cantina in the Centro of D.F. over a friend’s lost “$900” BlackBerry? “You took it! You grabbed it, then brought it downstairs and gave it to someone!”
The guard steps in. “Then you should have said something.”
“I did,” I protest a bit unrealistically.
It is useless. The bald fat man in the back has disappeared. Quetzal’s cell phone is gone. The guard shrugs and looks at me as though we both know it would be pointless to make much more fuss. The girl keeps gabbing away, defending herself to no one in particular as we turn our backs and walk off.
Quetzal is drunk not with alcohol but with rage. I’m pretty much beside myself, too. Tired? Drunk? Mad as hell? Not sure what, exactly. In the span of a day Quetzal has gone from an intrepid guide and urban adventurer to a hapless victim in the risky games of the Mexico City streets. We play with the night, and this time, the night wins.
At El Internet, people inside and outside the bodega are watching us. Quetzal and I tumble out onto the street, walking down the middle of Doctor Mora. A couple of D.F. transit cops observe us with halfhearted attention. Quetzal is screaming, “Fucking trannie! Motherfucking trannie bitch! My phone!”
We begin walking away.
“She needs the money more than I do,” Quetzal bellows. “Whatever! IT’S MEXICO!”
10 | Negotiating Saints
Absorbing the beat at a sonidero in Tepito. (Photo by Livia Radwanski.)
It is an overcast Sunday afternoon in the bleak D.F. suburb of Tultitlán, where a few dozen people are gathered for the one-month anniversary rosary for Jonathan Legaria Vargas, the man they called El Padrino and El Pantera—or the Panther—now deceased. In the yard of Legaria’s unofficial outdoor church on a desolate industrial avenue next to a used-car lot, families with grandmothers and infants stand alongside tables offering tamales, fresh juices, and beef stew. With flowers, a mariachi band, and the recitation of the rosary, the ceremony has all the trappings of a traditional Mexican Catholic mourning ritual. Two elements, however, stand out: the altar before them, enclosed with a miniature skeleton dressed in a gleaming white robe and a tiara, bony jaw agape, eyes hollow; and an enormous seventy-two-foot-tall statue made of plywood and fiberglass that Legaria had erected to his chosen spiritual mother, the Santa Muerte. Death is in a black robe, her face shrouded by a hood, her skeletal arms outstretched, like something out of a theme-park ride, crazed and nightmarish. Glancing up at it every few seconds, I half expect the structure’s robe to mechanically split open and reveal the entrance to a hall of mirrors.
“O Most Divine and Most Precious Holy Death,” the mourners chant in unison, kneeling before the Santa Muerte altar. “Cure the jealous . . . guard the moribund . . . bless El Padrino . . .”
The prayer is led by Legaria’s widow, Constantine, a young woman with pale, freckled skin and furiously curly, lemon-colored hair. She wears jeans and a small, stylish jacket and holds a microphone. “O Most Holy Death . . . ,” she chants, curving the tone of her words from down to up, as if conducting a hypnosis. And the people repeat each line.
“In silence I remain here . . .” “In silence I remain here . . .”
“Waiting for the moment . . .” “Waiting for the moment . . .”
“That will take me to you . . .” “That will take me to you . . .”
After a while, I am mouthing the chants myself, letting them roll through my brain. I am treated cordially and warmly by the attending women, Constantine’s assistants. I have tamales, and when the prayers are over, after the mariachi sing “Amor Eterno,” the traditional ballad of farewell, each person places a white carnation before another large Santa Muerte figure dressed in a crimson gown, crossing himself or herself. Constantine then leads a procession of her dead husband’s followers along the avenue out front. They carry flowers and candles and banners and march behind a limousine that El Pantera had custom-painted with images of the Santa Muerte and the call letters of his Santa Muerte radio show. Throughout the afternoon, the mariachis play, the food and drink flow, and the children run happily around the huge Death statue and a small field of humanlike skulls spread out on patches of grass, in grids.
A month earlier, on the night of July 31, 2008, Jonathan Legaria had been shot more than a hundred times by high-powered assault weapons after a car-to-car chase on a busy boulevard in the neighboring suburb of Ecatepec. Police say the killing, spectacular and saturated in press coverage, had all the markings of a coordinated assassination, far from the peaceful passage befitting a revered spiritual leader. Legaria, just twenty-seven years old, was not an unknown figure in the red-note tabloids. He had verbally clashed in the press with the proprietor of another Santa Muerte sanctuary, in the central Colonia Morelos, and with the archbishop of Ecatepec, who labeled him a “charlatan.” He fought with the municipal authorities of Tultitlán when they attempted to prevent him from building his massive Santa Muerte statue. In life, the tabloids note, El Pantera had plenty of enemies.
With his piercing eyes, his eloquent and hypnotic manner of speaking, his neck and wrists covered in Santa Muerte scapulars and Santería-like beads, the self-anointed priest had developed an enthusiastic following in the northern suburbs of the city. Hundreds of people, including a fearsome biker gang, attend Legaria’s funeral.
After the Panther’s murder, his mother, Enriqueta Vargas Ortiz, determined to defend her son’s honor, announced a quarter-million-peso reward for any information leading to his killers. The local authorities declared themselves “incompetent” to lead the investigation and handed the case over to federal authorities. This was read as an automatic defeat. Given the “spiritual” ramifications of the case and the nature of Mexican law enforcement, Legaria’s murder will be forgotten and piled away with mountains of other unsolved killings, both high profile and not. From one day to the next, the press stopped visiting.
It occurs to me that the Panther’s towering Santa Muerte statue is perhaps the largest personification of Death any mortal has ever built. At Legaria’s “afterlife” party, we stand below it in a ritual of mourning, not minding the irony. I wander around the yard listening to people who swear that the Holy Death image and El Padrino have saved them and given their lives new meaning.
“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.
Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century Page 14