by Paul Theroux
Offering hope to the desperate (as well as to drug dealers, prostitutes, smugglers, and gangsters) and a spiritual shield from the authorities, Santa Muerte was now the fastest-growing faith in Mexico, with millions of believers. Enterprising cultists were setting up shrines all over the country, some grand edifices and many no more imposing than the shop front I had visited in El Llano del Lobo, south of Matehuala.
The problem with our discussion was that no one was quite sure where the chapel was located. No one had been there.
“But you’ve been to Ethiopia,” I said to Diego.
“Compared to this, Ethiopia might be safer. I think we should have someone meet us and guide us.”
Adán was on the phone. He said, “Hola! Santa Muerte!” Then he made a face. The person at the other end hung up.
“Maybe forget it,” Julieta said. “Could be trouble.”
“Just a look,” I said. “To see what it’s like.”
“Where is it?” Adán asked.
“A taxi driver will know,” Diego said.
“I used to live near the Plaza de la Soledad,” Valerie said. “I think it’s somewhere around there.” She added that one of the features of the plaza, which was next to the venerable church of Santa Cruz y Soledad, was that at night along with the teenage prostitutes were many prostitutes of advanced age, ladies in their sixties and seventies. “And they attract some customers, too.”
All this speculation fueled their curiosity, and they could see that I was eager to visit the shrine—theirs, in a way: this occult oddity, somewhere in their city—and they did not want to let me down. After all, as a cronista, I needed to see it for my chronicles.
“I’ve got someone,” Diego said, his phone at his ear. He spoke, he listened, he scribbled an address. When he hung up, he said, “Morelos.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought,” Valerie said.
“A small street—Nicolás Bravo,” Diego said.
“Must be very small.”
“Near San Antonio Tomatlán,” Diego said.
“The church or the street? It’s a long street.”
“The taxi driver will know,” Diego said.
When we found a taxi—my four friends clawing for balance in the back, me sprawled in the front—the driver pulled out a thick road atlas, which he examined whenever we stopped at a traffic light. As the print was very small and faded, he used a magnifying glass, the bulky book on his lap, jammed against the steering wheel.
“Morelos,” he said, wagging the magnifying glass.
“I thought so,” Valerie said.
“I think I know,” the driver said. “But I have never been there.”
Morelos, so my friends said, is acknowledged to be one of the three most dangerous districts in Mexico City, the others being Central de Abasto in Iztapalapa, a drug trafficking center, and Olivar del Conde, because of its labyrinthine layout of alleys, walkways, and dead-end streets, which contributed to confrontation, theft, and no easy escape routes.
Morelos looked to me like Bombay, just as dense and disordered. We drove for half an hour in the usual heavy, jolting, contending Mexico City traffic and entered the busy lanes of Morelos. Markets, shop fronts, and stalls crowded the main street, Circonvalación, which was thick with pushcarts and awnings and goods piled high—dresses, shoes, T-shirts, hats, wind-blown racks of brassieres and panties flying like pennants, next to pots and pans, skillets, and rice cookers. The place teemed with shoppers who darted in and out of traffic, an air of anarchy and improvisation, loud music, and the sizzle of frying food.
“Have any of you been to Bombay?” I asked.
None of them had.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “This is Bombay.”
Stalled in traffic, the driver was rotating his magnifying glass over a page of streets in his atlas.
“Ah,” he said, and shoved the atlas aside. He turned sharply into a narrow street, and then a crossroads, where a church stood, the bricks of its twin steeples glowing in the afternoon sun.
“Santa Muerte?” I asked.
Adán squirmed free of the others in the back and hurried into the high arched doorway of the church entrance. He was back within two minutes, saying, “No, but I have directions.” He spoke to the driver, who set off again, looking confident. “That was the church of San Antonio Tomatlán.”
This was Saint Anthony of Padua, known to all Bostonians in the North End for the procession on his feast day in August, his statue fluttering with pinned-on dollar bills, in thanks for his help, as the saint you pray to when you’ve lost something—money, your keys, a friend, anything.
“Nicolás Bravo,” Diego said, reading a road sign. “It’s here.”
The Unico National Shrine of the Holy Death was a small, whitewashed, flat-fronted building with a square window facing the street, and in that window a statue, a large robed skeleton, with a smaller spidery skeleton just behind her. A deep doorway—more a gateway than a door—was cut into the thick wall. The street was bleak, empty of people, which made the jangling music from the market three streets away somewhat surrealistic. As for the window, nothing in a skeleton’s stark bony demeanor or toothy grin spoke of welcome or offered solace.
We lingered, lurked a little, hesitated, then went through the gateway, through a tunnel-like lobby painted with skulls that gave it a garish, ghost-train, haunted-house carnival atmosphere, into the chapel itself, which was cavernous, lit by flaming candles, and filled with skeletons. The rows of wooden pews were empty except for one woman in a dark shawl, her hands wrapped in its folds, her gray etiolated face turned toward the altar and the smoking candles and blackened lamps.
The altar was set like a stage, scattered with the paraphernalia of death—skulls, bones, coffins, and wilted flowers—and a six-foot skeleton of Santa Muerte in a bright white wedding dress and tangled veil, holding her scythe in one hand and a globe in the other. A black wig was tipped sideways on her skull, and at her back a pair of four-foot wings, the Angel of Death dressed as a ghoulish bride. But there were portraits of Jesus on the altar, too, and crucifixes, along with more skeletons of different sizes.
“There’s another Santa Muerte shrine in Tepito, not far away,” Diego whispered. He had been making inquiries. “But they call this the national sanctuary—they had a service this morning.”
I had been hearing children giggling but could not see them. Then I saw them, two boys rolling on the floor in a passageway to the right of the altar, near a stall hung with beads and trinkets where an old woman was dangling a Santa Muerte skeleton before the reverential face of a potential customer. The children were playing and teasing under a forbidding figure of Santa Muerte, this one in a purple prom gown.
A skeleton dressed in cloudy satin was labeled LA NIñA BLANCA, votive candles of various colors flickering around her, each one representing a particular wish. And plastic spiders, many of them, purple and black, long-legged, clinging to wispy strands hung behind the altar and at the center of wheel-like webs. Another skeleton at the corner of the altar, and a painted image of an ordinary Mexican man in a blue shirt. “A portrait of the founder, maybe,” Valerie said, possibly a man named David Romo Guillén, a former Catholic priest and self-anointed bishop of the cult, who’d recently been arrested for kidnapping and money laundering.
On the shadowy walls of the chapel, plaster images of Saint Peter and wooden crucifixes were set next to other portraits, one of them Jesús Malverde, the narco saint from Culiacán—seated as always—wearing cowboy boots, a white shirt and string tie, and holding wads of money.
“La Santa Trinca,” Julieta read as she gazed at a portrait of Mexico’s holy trinity, Saint Jude, Jesús Malverde, and Santa Muerte—bearded apostle, bandit, and skeleton.
No one had questioned our being there, nor had anyone stopped Valerie from snapping pictures with her cell phone. We walked around, whispering, looking closely at the relics and images. At the stall, it was possible to buy prayer cards that were formulated
to be effective. I chose one for someone who was desperate to be rid of an oppressive person.
“Protector de la Santísima Muerte,” it began. “Blessed Death Protector, I come before you, broken, beaten, lost on my path of life and love. I ask you, my Mother, to please hear my request [insert request here: “A member of my family is driving me crazy,” I whispered], to help me at this truly troubling time. I am being punished unfairly at the hands of a noncommunicator. They are aware that their behavior is painful and tormenting and yet proceed to do so anyway . . .”
And when I began to examine the trinkets at the stall, the woman behind the counter—mother of the playful boys rolling on the floor—asked whether I wanted something special.
“Something lucky,” I said. “To keep me safe while I drive.”
“Try this.”
She unhooked a string of beads on which a three-inch silver image of Santa Muerte dangled.
“This will help you. This is good for protection.”
I paid the equivalent of $3.
“But wait,” she said, and uncorked a small bottle, pouring an aromatic liquid over the beads, saying, “Balm [bálsamo], to clean it, from all the other people who’ve touched it.”
“It’s the worship of death,” Diego said as we left the chapel.
“I wonder.”
It seemed to me that death worship was not the point here. Santa Muerte was not the image of someone who was once living, but rather a representation of death, and her most appealing aspect was that she turned no one away, certainly not sinners, whom she welcomed, forgiving everyone, especially the wickedest among us. Just as crucial, Santa Muerte did not demand repentance and reform; on the contrary, she embraced the sinner and the sins. People came here for indulgence, and for miracles. She represented acceptance—“Keep on sinning!” was the subtext of her theology—and she granted miracles to those who lit the right candle, offered a piece of jewelry or some pesos, or begged to be helped.
Mexico’s other important saint, Jude, promised assistance to the desperate, but to seize Saint Jude’s attention, it helped to be in a state of grace, having made a good confession and embraced holiness.
Santa Muerte did not require any holiness or atonement, only sincere belief, perhaps demonstrated (as some adherents did) by crawling on all fours to the shrine and praying on bloody knees. It was easy to understand La Flaca (the Skinny One), Doña Flaquita (Little Skinny Woman), La Huesuda (the Bony One), but there were sixty others listed by Claudio Lomnitz in his exhaustive book on the subject, Death and the Idea of Mexico, including La Parca (End of Life), La Grulla (the Crane), La Pepenadora (the Scavenger), La Llorona (the Ghost), La Jodida (the Busted One), La Apestosa (the Stinking One), La Araña Pachona (the Sanctimonious Spider), the vulgar La Chingada or La Chifosca (the Screwed One), and more. These variations spoke to the Mexican who felt flawed, hunted, lawless, hopeless, doomed. Indeed, as the embodiment of death, Santa Muerte is the Idol of Doom.
Veneration had never been greater than at this moment, the popularity soaring to something like twenty million in the past ten or fifteen years, while at the same time such veneration had been condemned by the Vatican in 2013 as sacrilegious. It was well known that Santa Muerte appealed to those who made their money in illegal, criminal, or shadowy trades—picking pockets, trafficking drugs, killing for hire, and prostitution. But in promising protection, and perhaps a miracle, instead of heaven, death worship was the perfect faith for Mexico, where half the people lived in poverty.
“What do you think?” I asked as we headed to the waiting taxi.
I laughed, hearing the Mexico City reply: “Vamos a comer.” Let’s eat.
Detour to the Border
Mexico City had once, not long ago, been regarded as the City of Dreadful Night, with a villainous reputation for abductions and muggings, for crime and chaos. (“So this gringo gets into a taxi and thinks he’s going to his hotel, but instead he’s driven to a slum and robbed.”) Yet once I settled into the day-to-day of teaching and eating and visiting the sights, the capital appeared to me prosperous and lively, a great multilayered city with billionaires on the top layer and poor slum dwellers on the bottom, and the only wickedness I saw was from the bad-tempered policemen. Away from the districts that were acknowledged to be risky, it seemed as safe as any other city of twenty-three million people.
As time went on, I fribbled the days away as a flaneur, became lazy and presumptuous in the manner of a city dweller, and developed the big-city vices of procrastination, eating late, sleeping longer, yakking in cafés, and pretending to be busy. My excuse was that I had a teaching job, but even when my workshop ended, I continued socializing with my new friends—wonderful friends—telling myself that it was part of my Mexican journey. Mexicans, so stigmatized and stereotyped, respond with affection—as good people do—when they are perceived as individuals. I loved being in their company. I began to slip into the urban routine, not a traveler anymore but living the life of an idle chilango and telling myself it was travel. It was easy to see how so many foreigners visiting Mexico City decided to spend the rest of their lives here, while dishonestly complaining it was a shark tank or Luciferian.
The worst big-city vice is forgetting that the hinterland exists—the unglamorous reality of the country. When I got a message from Peg Bowden in Nogales that, for the first time ever, the US Border Patrol had agreed to meet some groups of activists in Tucson, I decided to drop everything and go. “You might want to be there,” Peg said.
Leaving my car in a secure parking lot in the Roma district, I flew to Tucson, arriving on a hot Arizona morning of blinding glare and scorched, unbreathable air. I promised myself that I would return to Mexico by bus.
The event was billed as a “Community Forum” and held at a small Episcopal church on a residential street of the city. The pews were half filled with activists, well over a hundred of them, and five Border Patrol agents in green uniforms sat on a raised platform before the altar. One of those men in green was the newly appointed sector chief for Tucson, Rodolfo Karisch, a man with a cold smile and small hard eyes set deep in his fleshy face. The activists in the pews were all sorts: fierce white-haired grandmothers, skeptical Tohono O’odham elders—lean and long-haired, indignant old men in sandals—a delegation from the border humanitarian group No More Deaths, a sorority of Catholic nuns from the border town of Douglas, led by a well-known activist, the diminutive but iron-willed Sister Judy Bourg, as well as quite a number of young men and women who could have been college students, all of them aiming a fixed and furious gaze at the bulky Border Patrol officers.
A note at the bottom of the “Forum Outline” leaflet promised, “No press will be present at this forum,” so I did not advertise my interest or say my piece; instead I listened, kept my head down, and made notes. Various groups took turns speaking for five or ten minutes, introducing themselves and voicing their concerns, and then Chief Karisch—the theme of his introduction was “We are policing a war zone”—invited comments from the floor.
With passion tempered by precision, the activists stood and expressed their frustrations.
“Do you have a policy—a standard operating procedure—with regard to dealing with humanitarian aid workers?” a young woman asked. “There was recently a Border Patrol raid on a No More Deaths camp. This is illegal under international humanitarian law.”
“We follow the law,” Chief Karisch began, perhaps oblivious of the implications of the law the woman was referring to, which is a set of specific rules that, in the words of the International Committee of the Red Cross, “seek, for humanitarian reasons, to limit the effects of armed conflict. It protects persons who are not or are no longer participating in the hostilities and restricts the means and methods of warfare. International humanitarian law is also known as the law of war or the law of armed conflict”—but the woman was still speaking.
“The Border Patrol agent threatened us. He said, ‘No More Deaths will regret this.’”
“Are you willing to find out if training exists on the topic of not destroying water bottles?”
Yes, the chief was willing.
“And what disciplinary measures will you take if you find someone responsible?” the man went on. “If you have officer misconduct, how do you deal with it?”
“Reprimand to termination,” the chief said tersely, while soliciting another speaker, a tall man in a leather vest, string tie, and wide-brimmed hat.
“There is a humanitarian crisis in Mexico,” the man said. “Do you recognize that we need to have a humanitarian response in the Tucson sector?”
In the Tucson sector in 2017, the bodies of 128 people had been found, including 57 in the thickets of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and the desert near Ajo, where No More Deaths had been leaving water bottles. This put me in mind of the horrors described by Luis Alberto Urrea in The Devil’s Highway, where he recounted the ordeal of migrants in that very sector.
