Santa Muerte: Patron Saint of the Drug War

While many proud Mexicans assert that Santa Muerte is a thinly veiled reincarnation of Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec queen of the dead, and true devotees believe she is as old as Original Sin and Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut thinks that Santa Muerte's appearance is primarily of medieval Spanish origin. (A former history professor at the University of Houston, today Chesnut is the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint.)

"The Spanish had a female Grim Reaper figure called 'La Parca,' or 'the parched one,'" he says over the phone from his home in Richmond, Virginia. Mexican patriots have a cultural disposition to downplay their Spanish heritage, he continues. "Mexican nationalism posits that Aztec and Mayan culture is good and Spanish is bad," he says.

Courtesy of R. Andrew Chestnut

Officer "J.G." Garza of the Houston Police Department's Narcotics Division says he almost always finds a Santa Muerte altar inside the home of drug suspects. This photograph was taken in a cartel safe house in Houston.

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• Santa Muerte
• Gustavo Arellano
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Still, Spanish origins aside, Chesnut believes Santa Muerte is a purely Mexican creation, a fusion of medieval Spanish and traditions native to the New World. In Spain, La Parca was solely an object of dread and fear.

"The Grim Reaper would never fly in Mexico," says Gustavo Arellano, author of the syndicated "Ask a Mexican" column and editor of Houston Press sister paper OC Weekly. "Death is celebrated there as a part of life."

Once in Mexico, La Parca morphed over centuries from the mere harvester of souls of European lore to Santa Muerte, a powerful miracle-worker, equal to or even more potent in the minds of her faithful than any canonized saint. Some even equate her powers to those of God himself.

"You see bumper stickers that say, 'God guides me, Santa Muerte protects me,'" marvels Arellano. (Others bear the same slogan and substitute Our Lady of Guadalupe for God.)

Santa Muerte's powers have grown not just in effectiveness but also in scope. She's not just about death today. She's also about all aspects of life. Chesnut calls her "a complex multitasker."

"She's a love magician, an employment broker, a healer; she can help you find things that are lost," he says. "Even today, her most important task is love magic," Chesnut points out. "Stopping cheating and that kind of thing. For that you light a red candle."

Indeed, much of Santa Muerte's earliest media and scholarly attention came through her role as a defender of marital sanctity. Suspicious wives would invoke her fearsome powers to stop their men from straying, and if their men failed to heed Santa Muerte's commands, well, let's just say that scythe would be put to use, dramatically.

"Middle-aged women address her the same way as Our Lady of Guadalupe, but they might take petitions to Santa Muerte that they wouldn't take to Our Lady," Chesnut says.

That's a huge part of her appeal. You can ask the Bony One for favors other saints would not even consider. For example, gay men and lesbians can petition her for luck in love, whereas more traditional saints might only tell them to change their sinning ways or remain forever celibate.

Chesnut says that Santa Muerte's believers swear by her speed and potency in granting miracles. One long-jobless adherent told him that he had long been desperately praying to Saint Jude, patron of lost causes. After three years he turned to Santa Muerte, and got a job in three days.

While she is very popular among the poor in Mexico, to say that her veneration is theirs exclusively is an oversimplification, Chesnut says. "Most people in Mexico don't have anything more than a seventh-grade education. Half of Mexico is poor anyway."

Chesnut believes that it's more accurate to say that she has special appeal to Mexicans (and, increasingly, Central Americans and Mexican-Americans) who feel that death might be imminent: street prostitutes and cabbies out late at night and alone on mean streets; people who live in cartel war zones; even, on occasion, police officers and politicians, whose lives are often threatened by drug lords. (Cops and politicos tend to keep their veneration a secret.)

"I always dreamed about her," says Maria, a Houston Santa Muerte priestess. (After my visit to her botánica was frustrated by the language barrier, Press intern Norma Vasquez interviewed Maria and furnished us with the following translation.) "I used to be a person who feared death, who feared night," Maria continued. "Once night would arrive, I would start panicking. Scared knowing that I was going to die, and every day I would say I was going to die. One day [Santa Muerte] appeared and said that God wasn't picking me up yet, [and] I still had a lot to do on this earth and I had to continue striving. Since then, that idea and fear of death left me as well as the fear of night coming and me saying that I was going to die."

"Who better to ask for a few extra weeks or months of life than death herself?" Chesnut asks.

Maria is from Veracruz and said that she had been venerating Santa Muerte for ten years.