“Santísima Muerte, Vístete de Negro, Santísima Muerte, Vístete de Blanco”: La Santa Muerte’s Illegal Marginalizations
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2017, Vol 8, Issue 3
Abstract
La Santísima Muerte, the death saint patron of the marginalized and dispossessed in Mexico, the United States, and beyond, is especially favored by devotees who identify with her duality between dark and light, and good and evil. Most of Santa Muerte’s devotees understand that good and evil coexist in her, and they often simultaneously appeal to both. At the same time, illegality and marginalization, which are generally associated with the saint’s “dark” or “evil” sides, take on multiple, diverse forms, encompassing criminalized activity such as narcotrafficking, religious transgressions that reflect unorthodox spiritual practices such as witchcraft, and most contentiously of all, the very conditions of poverty and racialization in Mexico. Nevertheless, cultural representations of Santa Muerte often resist such diversity and persist in opposing her dark and light sides. Films such as Eva Aridjis’s La Santa Muerte and Pável Valenzuela Arámburo’s La Santísima Muerte aim to represent all Santa Muerte in all of her multiplicity and to correct stereotypical representations of the death saint in general. But perhaps inadvertently, Aridjis’s film reinforces the contrast, rather than the intersections, between “light” and “dark”. However, in La Santísima Muerte, Valenzuela Arámburo deliberately embraces the saint’s contradictory duality to provide a different perspective on illegality and criminality, simultaneously accepting such illegality as a dark menace in the vein of Santa Muerte’s typical detractors, and rearticulating it as a necessary aspect of the saint’s holy works. Valenzuela Arámburo’s film not only emphasizes that the very same devotees invoke Santa Muerte for her powers of “good” as well as for those of “evil”, it demonstrates that these devotees incorporate the saint’s dark side as they see fit not as a consequence of their marginalized status, but as a means to resist it. Thus, while both films underscore that marginalized populations are just as nuanced and contradictory as their patroness of death is, Valenzuela Arámburo’s film grounds itself in Santa Muerte’s duality in order to demonstrate how her seemingly contradictory aspects construct and shape each other. As such, the film combats the representation of marginalization and criminality in Mexico and beyond, highlighting the extent to which her devotees appeal to both her dark and light sides precisely because they are simultaneously victims of marginalization and agents of resistance.
Authors and Affiliations
Desirée A. Martín
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25689
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8030036
- Views 328
- Downloads 7
Future Perfect: Tolstoy and the Structures of Agrarian-Buddhist Utopianism in Taisho Japan
This study focuses on the role played by the work of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) in shaping socialism and agrarian-Buddhist utopianism in Japan. As Japanese translations of Tolstoy’s fiction and philosophy, and accounts of...
Intergenerational Transmission of Religious Giving: Instilling Giving Habits across the Life Course
This paper investigates the research question: How do religious youth learn to give? While it is likely that youth learn religious financial giving from a variety of different sources, this investigation focuses primar...
Confidence in Government and Attitudes toward Bribery: A Country-Cluster Analysis of Demographic and Religiosity Perspectives
In this study, we try to classify the countries by the levels of confidence in government and attitudes toward accepting bribery by using the data of the sixth wave (2010–2014) of the World Values Survey (WVS). We are...
Augustine and Autobiography: Confessions as a Roadmap for Self-Reflection
In this article, I explore a pedagogical strategy for teaching Augustine’s Confessions to undergraduate students, which involves a final essay assignment. In the assignment, students compose their own “confessions” at...
Constituting Canon and Community in Eleventh Century Tibet: The Extant Writings of Rongzom and His Charter of Mantrins (sngags pa’i bca’ yig)
This paper explores some of the work of Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo (hereafter Rongzom) and attempts to situate his pedagogical influence within the “Old School” or Nyingma (rnying ma) tradition of Tibetan Buddhism1. A surve...