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Journal for Cultural Research

Formerly Cultural Values

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San La Muerte: The Non-Saint Saint. Identity, Ideology,

and Resistance
To cite this Article: , 'San La Muerte: The Non-Saint Saint. Identity, Ideology, and
Resistance', Journal for Cultural Research, 11:1, 75 - 95
xxxx:journal To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/14797580601149775
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797580601149775

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Taylor and Francis 2007

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JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH

VOLUME 11

NUMBER 1

(JANUARY 2007)

San La Muerte: The Non-Saint

Saint. Identity, Ideology, and
Resistance
Sebastin Carassai
carassai@indiana.edu
Journal
10.1080/14797580601149775
RCUV_A_214906.sgm
1479-7585
Original
Taylor
102007
11
SebastinCarassai
00000January
and
&
for
Article
Francis
(print)/1740-1666
Cultural
Francis
2007
Ltd
Research (online)

I analyze in this article the relationship between San La Muerte (a pagan saint
worshipped still today) and the official Catholic institution, the specific characteristics taken up by this devotion, and the way the belief in this saint is linked
with the social relations that worshippers establish among them. In the first
place, I intend to show that although San La Muerte represents an aborigine
tradition blended within Christianity, the cult has healthily survived and grown
out of the scope of any official control by the Catholic Church. Secondly, I believe
that the subjectivity of San La Muertes followers is strongly associated with their
identification with such ancestral belief, and that they contribute, at the same
time, to generate the specific characteristics attributed to the saint. Thirdly, I
propound that the worship and respect enjoyed by San La Muerte are reflected
in social relations whose terms and codes turn into an expressly blatant challenge
to the universal values consecrated by bourgeoisie morals.

Introduction
Let us start by the obvious: Latin America is a Catholic continent. Among the
most powerful weapons used by Spaniards and Portuguese to crush the aborigine people, evangelizing was one of the most skillfully manipulated. In the
mid-sixteenth century, the efforts made by Bartolom de las Casas to prove
that Indians had a soul were successful, and the task of converting them to
Catholicism took on a methodical and systematic practice. It was at that time
when the so-called missions of several religious orders started; among them,
those run by the Jesuits stood out. In many regions of the South American
continent, but especially those where the Tup and Guaran tribes lived
(currently, Northern Argentina, Southern Brazil, and Eastern Paraguay), the
Jesuits set up permanent reductions where the aborigines learnt not only the
divine Word of God but also the skills of craftsmanship. However, not everything was under the control of these Catholic orders. The aborigines beliefs
penetrated Jesuit art, the Cosmo vision of the Tupi-Guaran aborigines
ISSN 14797585 print/17401666 online/07/01007521
2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14797580601149775

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CARASSAI

reappeared under Christian forms, and the stories of magicians and wizards of
their traditions mingled with Jesus Christ. A clear expression of this syncretic
process is San La Muerte (Saint Death), pagan saint worshipped still today, in
the same area where the Jesuit reductions of the sixteenth and seventeenth
century were located.
It is my aim in this paper to analyze the relationship between this cultural artifact and the official Catholic institution, the specific characteristics taken up by
this devotion, and the way the belief in this saint is linked with the social relations that worshippers establish among them. In the first place, I intend to show
that although San La Muerte represents an aborigine tradition blended within
Christianity, the cult has healthily survived and grown out of the scope of any
official control by the Catholic Church. This has compelled Church representatives to tolerate it as a religious practice against which they can do very little.
Secondly, I believe that the subjectivity of San La Muertes followers is strongly
associated with their identification with such ancestral belief, and that they
contribute, at the same time, to generate the specific characteristics attributed
to the saint. Thirdly, I propound that the worship and respect enjoyed by San La
Muerte are reflected in social relations whose terms and codes turn into an
expressly blatant challenge to the universal values consecrated by bourgeoisie
morals. However, this challenge does not necessarily imply questioning the social
order in force or any kind of economic, sexual, or political exploitation, all of
which consequently proves that not all resistance is necessarily progressive or
socially liberating. Apart from specialized bibliography, I have used in this essay
interviews I carried out in the Argentine cities of Barranqueras, Mercedes, Corrientes, Resistencia, and Misiones, and in Asuncin (Paraguay), between 1998/
2001.1
Nowadays there is a variety of images of San La Muerte. Some of them represent him as an upright human skeleton, with a scythe in his hand; in others, the
skeleton appears sitting, holding his head with his hands. There are images where
he is depicted with a black cloak, naked and lying down. In the oldest of these
images, he is represented squatting, as a skeleton figure in fetal position, and
although the size varies, it is never larger than seven centimeters. The oldest
images of the saint that are presently kept date back to one century and a half
ago, and they belong to the folk healers and sanctuary guardians, who have
inherited them from their ancestors. The material also varies. There are images
carved in wood (especially, lignum vitae), metal, and bone. Those who practice
this cult assert that San La Muerte is much more powerful if it is carved in human
bone.
The anthropologists who have researched his origins agree that the most widespread images of this saint bear a striking resemblance to the European Christ of
Patience. Miguel Lpez Breard writes that his origin is preferably close to the
Figure 1.

Figuring of the oldest image of San La Muerte

1. All interviews were carried out by the author. In order to keep the interviewees identity
confidential, they are mentioned only by their first names. In those cases where they are locally
well known, the name given is fictitious.

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SAN LA MUERTE: THE NON-SAINT SAINT

Figure 1.

Figuring of the oldest image of San La Muerte

Christ of Humanity and Patience because we have seen that many images of this
skeleton-like representation are in the same position as the Jesuit carvings
(Lpez Breard 1973, p. 78). Flix Coluccio establishes a similar relationship when
he states that the rich calendar of Saints days of Corrientes [Province of Corrientes, Argentina], which includes San Ceomo and San La Muerte, emerged after
the Society of Jesus was expelled in 1767. The Jesuits, devout believers in the
sacred mysteries, found in the natives of Corrientes a remarkable artistic skill
coupled with an acceptable talent for craftsmanship; under the Jesuits guidance, the aborigines produced works depicting the main mysteries (Coluccio
1978, p. 43). Undoubtedly, San La Muerte was then possible as a religious symbol
from the moment that the Jesuits taught aborigines the art of working wood and
metal. However, Jesuits did not sanctify death, and, in general, Christian
symbols do not pay any reverence to skeletons. So then, where does this pagan
saint come from?
San La Muerte is not only the aborigine translation of the Christ of Patience
brought by the Jesuits. The anthropologist Miranda Borelli (1976) proved that
there were enough elements to link this cult with the Indian belief in the pay,
the witch doctor or shamn of the Tup-Guaran tribe. According to the

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CARASSAI

chronicles of several travelers, the tribes in that area believed that certain magicians (pays) were skilled in certain arts whereby they could cause death or
healing, cure, predict the future or remote events, attract rain, hail and storms
(Dobritzhoffer 1968, p. 224). The pay was, according to the aborigine Cosmo
vision, the one who healed all evils. The travelers of seventeenth and
eighteenth century recorded in their log books that the pays sat under a tree,
fasted for several days, lost weight until they were skin and bone, thus acquiring
that skeleton-like appearance, and attained the power of healing by imposing
their hands three times on the sick person. When Miranda Borelli noted that the
folk healers of Resistencia (Province of Chaco, Argentina) used the image of San
La Muerte and imposed their hands three times in the same way as those pays,
he proposed the link between the indigenous and Christian cultures: through oral
history passed on from generation to generation, the one who healed all illnesses
(the pay) was associated with Christ by the evangelized aborigines in the Jesuit
reductions. From the standpoint of evangelization, aborigines were taught that
Jesus healed all evils. Consequently, the aborigines synthesized in San La Muerte
the need imposed by evangelization of worshipping saints with their ancient
belief in the pays. Both these pays and Jesus healed all evils, both were
placed above death: the pays, according to the Indian tradition, overcame
death and illnesses through their healings; Jesus, according to Christian tradition, overcame death by reviving. Although it may seem surprising, San La
Muerte does not mean that death is sanctified; on the contrary, as I will intend
to demonstrate throughout this essay, it is more related to the belief that life
succeeds over death. When death is symbolized, when it is embodied, when it is
turned into an active agent (who to pray to, celebrate, praise, and make promises), death is turned into someone who disposes not only of death but also of
life.
My interest in studying San La Muerte responds, on the one hand, to this
peculiar origin, and, on the other, to his peculiar fate. Due to the characteristic
I will analyze in this paper, San La Muerte, as years went by turned into a most
adequate saint for the unprivileged in the social structure. Although I have found
believers in the middle sectors, the vast majority of worshippers belong to the
so-called popular sectors and part of them undoubtedly belongs to clearly
marginal sectors in the social spectrum such as prisoners, prostitutes, thieves,
etc. Other two characteristics turn San La Muerte into a peculiar case: his institutional orphanhood and his festive nature. As strange as it may sound, although
all his followers are Christian, no Christian Church has ever officially recognized
him in its calendar of Saints days. He is worshipped with celebrations, processions, and prayers, but everything is organized out of the scope of and sometimes
against ecclesiastic institutions. This may be the reason why he is worshipped not
so much through introspective prayer, as by important community festivals. Once
a year, believers from distant areas travel to the most representative places of
worship (home altars under the custody of guardians of the saint) and take part
in popular festivals where there is plentiful wine, music, dancing, and feasting.
San La Muerte is, for many his followers, an opportunity to meet and celebrate.

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80

Figures 2 and 2.1. Meal and holiday in honor to San La Muerte, Barranqueras, Province
of Chaco, Argentina

Figures 2 and 2.1.

A Question of Image: the Catholic Church and San La Muerte

Meal and holiday in honor to San La Muerte, Barranqueras, Province of Chaco, Argentina

After centuries of Christianity in Latin America, it is not surprising to find that

all worshippers of San La Muerte are Christians and, most of them, Catholics
(quantitatively, it is the most important Christian religion in the region). Some
of these followers even practice the Catholic religion: they are churchgoers,
they observe Catholic feast days (Easter, Christmas, the Immaculate Conception, etc.); they know and say prayers (Our Father, Hail Mary, etc.); they take
communion and request blessings from Catholic priests. However, Christian
churches do not acknowledge San La Muerte as a legitimate religious symbol;
conversely, at least at an official level, they consider him an amulet or a
fetish. On trying to fight the expansion of such cult, three decades ago, the
diocese of the Province of Corrientes (Argentina) decided to excommunicate
those Catholics who worshipped him. But the ban was fruitless. San La Muerte
remains in small sanctuaries built by his own worshippers, or in their homes at
their own expense, with many of those sanctuaries only a few blocks away
from Catholic churches. Several times a year, especially on 15 August, processions are held in some cities; in those processions, groups of worshippers carry

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SAN LA MUERTE: THE NON-SAINT SAINT

81

an image on portable platforms, pray in his honor and celebrate a popular

feast in his name.
The division performed by the Catholic Church between saints and fetishes,
holy and profane symbols, faith and superstition means nothing to San La
Muertes followers. The simultaneously pray to Christ and their little saintas
his followers call him. In San La Muertes sanctuaries, his image is not alone: the
Virgin Mary, St. Cajetan, St. Francis of Assisi, and others, are seen at his side.
Thus, Catholic symbols are present in the cult to San La Muerte. But the symbols
are not the institution; the relationship with it is tense. Doa Porota, owner of
one of the most popular sanctuaries in Barranqueras, explained the relationship
between San La Muertes followers and the Catholic Church as follows:
Interviewer:

Why do you say that you do not get along very well with some
priests?
Doa Porota: () Because priests should also be mobile with us
I:
What did you say they should be?
DP:
They should be kind. They should consider our ideas I have my
own ideas; they have theirs.

Doa Porota is a Paraguayan old lady, daughter and granddaughter of

Paraguayans who have lived in Barranqueras for several decades now. She learnt
from her great grandmother the task of guarding of the little saint, and, to
fulfill a promise, she built a sanctuary in the garden of her house. She admits
being a Catholic, she attends mass, but above all, she believes in San La Muerte,
her little saint. Faith, for Doa Porota, is not the mere devotion to a Decalogue
of absolute truths consecrated by an institution. Priests have their ideas; Doa
Porota has hers. However, the cult to San La Muerte is not equivalent to what we
could call a religion la carte. One of the characteristics of post-modernity in
the field of religion consists in the fact that beliefs have become hybrid and
dogmas and principles of faith have become relative. A great part of the Catholic
community (especially, the middle class) does not endorse the institutional
precepts en bloc anymore, as if they were to be accepted or rejected in their
entirety; on the contrary, the community selects the dogmas or principles it is
willing to honor, it includes others, and relaxes some of the traditional ones. This
kind of post-modern cult may be called a religion la carte because it represents an idea of a religious person who, out of a given religious menu, chooses
some beliefs and rules out others, and if necessary, also modifies them so as to
reconcile them with his own. Vis--vis this post-modern practice of faith, the cult
to San La Muerte represents its antithesis. For Doa Porota, for instance, it is not
a matter of taking from the Church what may be necessary or convenient for her;
much on the contrary, the position is that the Church should accept what constitutes her identity. From this standpoint, San La Muerte is a pre-modern cult
because his followers do not take from Catholicism what they please; conversely,
they confront the Institution with the intention to defend family traditions
observed for several decades without which they would not know who they are.
For the believers in San La Muerte, opposing the authority of Church is not a

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CARASSAI

question of convenience but of identity.2 Those who practice this cult form an
imagined community although not in the strict sense proposed by Benedict
Anderson,3 but as an ethical and religious community extended in space and
time. The followers identity is built up around the saint because through him
devotees are not only imaginarily linked with their relatives and friends at a
distance but also with their ancestors, who in many cases they have not met, but
they feel linked with through this cult.4
As already mentioned, San La Muertes followers are Christians (and mostly,
Catholics) so they thus claim the institutional blessing of what they consider holy
(it is a usual practice among Catholics to bless images, valued objects, pets, and
people). How do the Catholic believers in San La Muerte manage to have a priest
bless their copy of their banned little saint? They do so through the strategy,
not totally unknown to the Church itself, of concealing the image of San La
Muerte they want to have blessed. Doa Celia, the guardian of another sanctuary
of San La Muerte, revealed that worshippers are used to hiding their little
saint beneath a pad on which they place a cross or another symbol recognized
by the Church and get the priests blessing. When the priest is not watching us,
Doa Celia stated, we turn the pad and the little saint is thus blessed. But
the strategy is not fully concealed. Really (and some priests even admit it), the
Church ministers are well aware they are blessing San La Muerte. They are aware
of it because they know the people; because in small villages like Barranqueras,
Resistencia, Corrientes, or Mercedes, most people know each other and thus,
who the little saints followers are. This means that, before the cult to San La
Muerte, the Catholic Church adopts a dual position. On the one hand, it denies
its legitimacy and condemns the cult as a superstitious heresy; on the other, it
accepts the practice as one more expression of popular religious feelings. This
dialectic between the Catholic Church and the cult to San La Muerte is easier to
noticeas far as the Church is concernedat some of the lower levels of the
ecclesiastic hierarchy (priests) and the secular community than at higher institutional levels. Bishops do not tolerate the cult; however, laypeople and some
priests do.
Some of them were even born and brought up in the villages where the cult is
practiced and believe in San La Muerte. Actually, it is difficult to find people who
do not believe in him. Many of them, of course, do not worship or pray to him.
Figure 3.

Altar of San La Muerte in the house of Doa Porota, one of the guardian of the saint

2. I am taking this concept in the sense defined by Stuart Hall. I use the term identity, he
writes, to refer to the point of encounter, to the point of stitch between discourses and practices
that attempt to question us, say to us or put us in our place as social subjects with individual
discourses on the one hand, and on the other, the processes that produce subjectivities, that build
us up as subjects capable of saying to ourselves (Hall 1996, p. 7).
3. That is, as an imagined political communityand imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign (Anderson 2003, p. 6).
4. The processes of immigration in Argentina and emigration from Paraguay during the twentieth
century (directed mainly to the large Argentine urban centers) dismembered (in some cases,
forever) many families and groups of friends. Throughout many testimonies it is shown that devotees feel linked with their loved ones who are absent through their devotion to the saint in the
certainty that both parties keep their faith intact.

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SAN LA MUERTE: THE NON-SAINT SAINT

Figure 3.
saint

Altar of San La Muerte in the house of Doa Porota, one of the guardian of the

They know he exists, but they fear him. They do not praise him; they just make
great efforts to avoid him. But in no case do they mock at the belief or disrespect
his worshippers. In my interviews of priests, for instance, some of them declared
they would rather not speak about this topic. However, there is no need to speak
about something to believe in it. Mainly due to a question of image, the official
Church of those places does not legitimize the cult; it is not allowed to do so (it
would go against the rules of the very institution). However, it does not fight it
either. Priests are aware that they have to coexist with San La Muerte. Not only
because of the existence of the sanctuaries; San La Muerte is carried in wallets
and purses, in vehicles, tattooed on the skin, embedded in the body, printed
on clothes.
An important difference between the Catholic Church and the cult to San La
Muerte is that the first is based on men (priests, bishops, etc.), while the second
is led by women (female sanctuary guardians and folk healers). All of the traditional sanctuaries are managed by women. This phenomenon arises from the fact
that during the war of the Triple Alliance (186470), Paraguay lost a huge part of
the male population,5 and many roles performed by men or both men and women
5. According to data provided by the historian Rosa (1981), out of more than 100,000 members of
the army when the war started, only 409 survived. Afterwards, the war against Bolivia for the Gran
Chaco (192835) worsened this disproportion even more.

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started to be carried out almost exclusively by women.6 At present, some followers refer to San La Muerte also by the name of the sanctuary guardian (Doa
Porotas saint, Doa Celias saint), as if the saint were these ladies property.
This female monopoly of the management of San La Muertes sanctuaries clearly
contrasts with the male monopoly of ecclesiastic power. Anyway, the guardians
power is by far more limited than that of priests precisely because the female
guardians do not take an institutional lead. Their power is restricted to opening
their homes to those who make promises, receiving offerings, organizing community celebrations, and, in some cases, giving advice to the followers, like a mother
to her children, as to what they can ask the saint and what they can offer him.
Figure 4.

Letter of invitation to the party in honor to San La Muerte

A Saintly Respect
San La Muerte inspires deep respect7 not only among his followers and believers
but also among his timid critics. That respect takes on forms of worship and
wisdom in the first group, and fear and distrust in the second one. Praying,
making petitions, or promising something to San La Muerte is not the same as
doing so to any other saint. His worshippers do not conceive their prayers as an

Figure 4.

Letter of invitation to the party in honor to San La Muerte

6. The art of folk healing in the eighteenth century was an exclusive task of the wizard doctors of
the tup-guraran tribes.
7. Respect is one more element that links San La Muerte with the pay because Pai is a respectful word with which to call respectful people. Although presently the term pay sometimes designates a person and others, an object, a recipe or an illness, it is nevertheless in all cases used to
name something that should not be played with, something to which respect should be paid.

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85

act of routine, unconsciously repeated; on the contrary, each prayer is based on

a particular reason, each petition is destined to a specific person, and each
promise has a limited and feasible content. These three characteristics have a
common denominator; the three of them indicate that the relationship between
the saint and the devotees is always based on moderation. This is related to an
obligation that the believer in San La Muerte takes on seriously: you have to
keep your word to this saint. The guardian of one of the most important
sanctuaries in Resistencia, Doa Celia, phrased it this way:
People come here with a candle, for instance; they ask what they want and
leave their petition at the foot; what they want; they give him a term of nine
days or whatever; but I never allow them to offer an expensive promise because
it is a sensitive issue You just have to promise to bring a simple flower, a
doily, something you will be able to fulfill. And what you promise, you should
fulfill.

To what should this respect be attributed? What does this moderation in

prayers, petitions, and promisesabsent in the official Christian tradition
although present in San La Muertes Christian followerssignify? It arises from the
interviews that among the virtues attributed by the followers to their saint the
most relevant one is his strict sense of justice. Above all, San La Muerte is fair
(interview to Evaristo). Other sources confirm this core element. There is a
legend (told by some of the saints followers even today) that long ago there was
a king famous for administering justice who, upon leaving this world and encountering God, was vested with the duty of ruling life and death of human beings.8
That famous king was San La Muerte.9 Another popular story speaks about a poor
and underprivileged man who tried to find a godfather for his newborn son.
During his search, this man found Saint Peter and Saint John, but he ruled them
out because they were unfair. Saint Peter opened the doors of Heaven to some
souls, but closed them to others, and Saint John was very happy, but did not
give happiness to everyone because there were too many sad people in the
world. Finally, this man found a gentleman who introduced himself as San La
Muerte and said he is the fairest man in the world.10 The man decided this
saint would be his newborn sons godfather because his strict sense of justice
would turn the child into an honest man. Finally, it should be noted that one of
San La Muertes guardians (a Paraguayan lady who lives in Misiones, Argentina)
organizes the saints annual celebration on August 20th, because it is Saint
Jousts day, and San La Muerte is fair and necessary (interview to Doa Alicia).
8. This legend may be consulted more deeply in Arcadio (1997, pp. 4550).
9. Even today many believers refer to their saint as ancient king.
10. The quotations in this paragraph belong to version no. 7 transcribed in Miranda Borelli (1976,
pp. 656). This work describes around ten versions of the origins of San La Muerte revealed to the
author in interviews to sanctuary guardians and folk healers who healed with this symbol. Many of
these versions are incompatible among them, and others contradicting in themselves. However, it
should be noted that in many of them the fact of being fair is the main characteristic attributed to
San La Muerte.

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This attribute of being fair above any and all other traits is what moves his
followers to feel respect and non believers to feel fear. Not all believers know
the mentioned legends or stories; however, they know they cannot play with
San La Muerte. Those followers who bring other people to pray or make a
petition warn newcomers about the need to fulfill what they promise very
strictly:
Miriam: She (a guardian) told me what it was like; in other words, how he fulfills
the petitions you make; but you have to keep your word too. She always told me
that you shouldnt play with the saint. She told me it was dangerous, and that is
why I was afraid because you cant make any promises in vain.

The saints very name contains a component that arouses fear: the word
death. Although the petitions and promises made to the saint are not related
to death, the name (especially for those who do not worship him) bears a
specific weight of his own. To this we should add that most of the times his
representation consists of a skeleton. Finally, the idea that Death (or God
through it) claims disloyalties or unfaithfulness from human beings at some
stage is part of the Christian religion. The Old Testament is rich in threats and
revenge from a God enraged with his children; in the New Testament, Judas
pays his treason to Jesus with his own death. Thus, it is understandable that
the combination of these elements with the saints name and representation
on the one hand, and the tradition of the Bible on the other, make San La
Muertes followers to believe very naturally that their saintwho knows and
sees everything, just as God doeswill claim any failure if their promises are
not kept.

Justice or Revenge?
We have already seen that San La Muerte is, above all, fair for his devotees.
But, what does justice mean in the context of this devotion? It mainly means
that those who do not keep their word may or should be punished by San La
Muerte. One of the legends of San La Muerte narrates that one of his followers
decided to trap him in a bottle and bury him in a 30 meter deep hole out of the
fear he felt. Thirty years later, in a visit that the gravedigger-believer paid
every decade, San La Muerte came out of the bottle and stated: Its your turn
now.11 This vengeance or revenge taken by the saint on his devotee is
experienced by his followers as an act of justice. Moreover, several interviewees declare that San La Muerte does justice to those who do not keep their
promises not by means of any kind of revenge but by taking away the most
precious thing they have.

11. This narration is taken from version no. 2 transcribed in Miranda Borelli (1976, p. 67).

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87

Evarista: There are many people who dont listen to him; they dont even
want to hear talk about San La Muerte because they say he is an evildoer.
Because you have to keep your word with San La Muerte; because if you
dont, he takes away from you what you love the most. Thats why people are
afraid of him.

Devotees believe that San La Muerte takes revenge very fairly on the unfaithful. In this comparison between revenge and justice lies one of the clearest premodern aspects of this devotion. The famous difference between these actions
established by Hegel in his Elements of Philosophy of Right does not appear here.
For Hegel, revenge demands a claim or a restitution of a right that only exists in
itself. This is why he characterizes revenge as a particular restitution related to
an individual injury, although it is not fair in itself. It is the existence of law (a
material manifestation of such right in itself) what allows the qualitative leap
from revenge to justice, since once the abstract right takes on the form of law,
the universal infringement arises instead of a particular infringement. European
modernity found in this distinction the philosophical foundation of law, guaranteeing in this way that all injuries to an individual would constitute at the same
time a universal injury. In modernity, the one who acts against an individual
(protected by a universal right) at the same time acts against the law, and thus
the right of restitution does not refer to the individual right but to the social
right.
San La Muertes followers do not experience such a distinction. The revenge
for an unfulfilled promise amounts to justice; and justice can only be done by
exercising revenge. Many testimonies reveal that, even highly painful events,
such as the loss of a loved one, are fully justified when they are attributed to
revenge from San La Muerte for an unfulfilled promise:
ngela:

To my sister, the saint took away her husband. He took the most
precious thing she had
Interviewer: Did he die?
A:
Yes. And of a dreadful cancer. Lots of suffering But she didnt
keep her promise. I always keep my promises for my petitions. But
she didnt.

ngela kept her word; her sister did not. ngela attributes the cancer suffered
by her brother-in-law to such infringement. She does not even doubt about the
fairness of this revenge at any time. San La Muerte is fair because it is considered
that he neither forgets nor forgives, because he punishes and takes revenge.
However, this trait attributed to San La Muerte by his followers is also the way
they experience their relationship among people. One of the most popular
prayers reads as follows: Oh, Holy Spirit! Powerful skeleton / Stronger than
Samson / Unconjurable King of the times of danger and injustice / With your kind
Faith of Almighty God / I beg you to do what I have come to ask for: / make [the
name of the person to who revenge is addressed to is included here] repent and
suffer every minute after minute, hour, day, week, month, and year of his/her
life / Dont allow him/her to work in peace; make him/her think always in his/

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her injustice on me, / and let him/her be punished by me forever.12 In this

prayer, the one who prays requests San La Muertes assistance to take revenge
on someone, to punish the one who has offended through perpetual suffering
(every minute after minute, hour, day, week, month, and year of his life). In
this way, although San La Muertes followers accept and even approve of the
revenge taken by their saint on the offenders by taking away from them their
most precious thing when they have failed to keep a promise, they also feel they
have the right to punish those who have not kept their word with them (by
requesting their saints assistance). This second fact is a condition of the first
one. The relation or agreement of justice-revenge they establish with San La
Muerte is the religious translation of the social relation or agreement they experience in their community (family, neighborhood, society).
The respect-fear prompted by San La Muerte among his devotees may be
compared to what Lacan calls the quilting point, that major and primordial
signifier around which all discourse and all practice should be analyzed. In
Racines tragedy Athaliah, the example on which Lacan works, the fear of God
replaces and also remedies a world made up of manifold terrors [] To have
replaced these innumerable fears by the fear of a unique being who has no other
means of manifesting his power than through what is feared behind these innumerable fears, is quite an accomplishment (Lacan 1993, pp. 2667). In the world
full of threats where San La Muertes followers live, this respect-fear they feel
obeys to this sort of economy of fear described by Lacan, i.e., all fears of a multifariously threatening world are subsumed in just one: the respect-fear for San La
Muerte. The identity of the communities who worship the saint is constructed
around this signifier not because they stop fearing the threatening evils of the
world they live in but because they live those fears through this devotion.
In the world without lawyers or judges (or without a strong institutional presence of the State) where San La Muertes devotees live, the promise enacts an
ethical-social agreement in personal relationships. A word is kept, threats are
materialized, and revenge is fair. It is not a mere coincidence that a large
number of popular heroes of the region13 (some of them also worshippers of the
saint) are known as avengers. In the stage during which the Argentine NationState solidified, they took the law in their own hands, many times confronting
(or chased by) the legal institution. In many regions where the cult is practiced,
12. The prayers to San La Muerte may be consulted in Cerruti (1965). Most of the prayers imply
mentioning the person for whom a punishment or a favor is asked for. By mentioning the name of the
person to whom the prayer is addressed, the peculiarity of such prayer and the specific petition are
strengthened. In the prayers to San La Muerte there are no us sinners, now and in the hour of our
death, or faults are confessed by my fault, by my fault, by my great fault; in San La Muertes
prayers no beliefs are mentioned, such as the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the
pardon to our sins, the resurrection of flesh and eternal life; no punishments whatsoever are
mentioned either (the quotations belong to official prayers of Catholicism). The prayers to San La
Muerte materialize the most terrible and bare desires of human beings, expressed bluntly, without
taboos, bereft of universal moral imperatives, as they are usually presented when no institution
mediate.
13. Among the best known we find the gaucho Antonio Gil, the gaucho Lega, Mate Cocido, and
Francisco Lpez.

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justice as an institution exists only at a formal level. The Province of Corrientes

(Argentina), for instance, is a typical example of what is usually called a feudal
province, because economic and political power is vested in only a few traditional families. The demands for justice in this context, more than once have no
institutional channels through which to be directed. The issue is not that these
people do not believe in justice; on the contrary, they believe in justice, but
they associate it more to their saint and what he symbolizes than the judicial
machinery. In the latter, there are judges; however, San La Muerte is fair. At the
law courts, money is needed; San La Muerte only demands that the word given
should be kept. One of the most popular prayers to the saint reads as follows:
Both at gambling and in business / My best lawyer I appoint you / Make whoever
turns against me / A looser forever / Oh! San La Muerte, my Guardian Angel.
Amen (Cerruti 1965, p. 49). San La Muerte is the judge who judges them and,
at the same time, the lawyer who defends them. Manuel, a fifty-year-old
devotee, refers to this attribution of San La Muerte as follows:
For me, he is my lawyer. We were at court; the others went with three lawyers.
I took my sacred image of San La Muerte and I won.

An Amoral Saint or an Unsaintly Moral?

The fact that the cult to San La Muerte is not accepted by any institution implies
per se that it cannot be univocally controlled. If ideology is centrally (although
not exclusively) based on the ideological apparatuses of the State, as Althusser
believes, regulating or manipulating the religious ideology that goes beyond or
moves relatively outside of institutions proves to be difficult. In Ideology State
Apparatuses, Althusser considers the Christian religious ideology to be an
emblematic example of the operation of ideology. Christian ideology, Althusser
states, is addressed to individuals, it calls them by their first names (You are
Peter!), and tells them that God exists and that you are answerable to Him.
It orders them to observe morals and obedience: This is what you must do!, if
you observe the law of love you will be saved. When a Christian answers such
call, when he says Yes, it really is me!, he acts as Moses did, he recognizes
that he is a subject, a subject of God, a subject through the Subject and
subjected to the Subject (Althusser 1972, pp. 1789). Christian ideology thus
operates to the extent that it is able to make the subject it addresses accept the
existence of superior morals that should be respected, that there is a law of God
to be obeyed, and that only through this obedience may he belong to the retinue
that will deserve salvation.
But when the institution is absent or cannot control a religious phenomenon,
ideology takes on a more diffuse development. Individuals do not feel addressed
by a God who speaks through an institution (or vice versa). San La Muerte offers
an interesting example of a cult whose ideology has ample effects on the life of
his followers (to such an extent that the saint speaks through them or they are

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spoken to by the saint, as it could be analyzed in Althussers terms); however,

these effects cannot be controlled or administered by Christian ideology or its
institutions. Just the opposite to what Christian Churches demand from their
members, i.e. taking on a new life (baptism is, for Christianity, the second
birth), San La Muerte does not ask for credentials. In order to belong to the group
of followers there exist no abstract or a priori morals to be observed but specific
and social ethics, whose respect is exercised at a community level.14 This
becomes evident in the reasons in the prayers: San La Muerte is not asked for
eternal happiness but to turn those who are unfaithful in love to become losers
(Cerruti 1965, pp. 345). The difference between these prayers and those of any
Christian Church are evident. There are no prayers for love in general, but in
particular for Juana who has left or Juan who has not arrived. There are no prayers
to achieve the affection, attention, or love of a lover, but to drive him or her
crazy of love. It is not that the lover who has left should simply return as if his or
her only presence were enough; the petition is to make him or her return desperately, surrendered, subdued, crying.15 There are no prayers for general matters
(for the peace of the world or for poverty in abstract terms) but for a specific
situation of violence or an individual condition of poverty or unemployment.
Devotees do not feel that San La Muerte demands exemplary behaviors or altruistic attitudes; they do not feel they have to honor him with huge donations of
money (which most of them lack) or with excessive sacrifices. For his followers,
San La Muerte only demands that they fulfill their promise. Thus, devotees feel
that they feel accepted just how they are.
However, it is not pertinent to associate this cult with an individual or social
practice of resistance against exploitation or against the established social
order.16 The resistance present in this cult is not related to the war of positions, in a Gramscian style; it does not obey a counter-hegemony strategy
destined to dispute or obstruct economic domination. In this sense, this cult
represents a good example that resistance does not necessarily have a progressive shade or a horizon of social transformation but may be regressive or, as in
this case, indifferent to the change of the status quo on many occasions. If the
14. The difference I establish herein between moral and ethics refers to the Hegelian distinction.
For Hegel, the former is autonomous and individual, universally necessary but imprinted a priori in
human reason (it is Kants categorical imperative). The latter, however, is heteronomous and social,
contingent (it depends on a given community placed in space and time) and it is derived from
specific behaviors (Hegel 1993).
15. This may be clearly seen in the following prayer: Oh, powerful Lord of the good Death/ victor
of marriages and single people / dominate the invincible heart of [the lost lovers name is
mentioned here] / make him/her feel terribly desperate, make him/her come back to me / and
make him/her follow me lovingly up to making him/her crazy. / I pray you to take care of me and
help me / and to bring [the lovers name] crying back to me, totally subdued to me. Amen, quoted
in Coluccio (1978, p. 47).
16. I thank Vanesa Mancinelli who, when asking about the revolutionary possibilities of this devotion, helped me develop far better all the elements invalidating any such interpretation. As I intent
to show, the question of resistance could only be thought in terms of a resistance against a given
moral order but not a social order (since any horizon of political change is totally absent in this
cult).

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cult to San La Muerte represents resistance it does so with respect to a certain

scale of values.17
What the devotees of the cult to San La Muerte resist is to accept the idea,
established by bourgeois modernity, of impeccable and abstract morals, where
supreme values (love, forgiveness, peace, democracy, etc.) are universally
imposed over and above social relations. On the contrary, the ethics operating
around San La Muerte emerges from these relations. It is not imposed over or
above them; it is their outcome. The rewards that devotees consider having
received from their saint are not abstract. The prize received by the faithful
devotee is not eternity or heaven when he/she ends up his/her life on earth, but
the lovers love, here and now; it is bread for him/her and his/her family, here
and now; or it is punishment to his/her enemy, here and now.
In one of the interviews I conducted in Barranqueras, someone who had made
a promise told me how his life had undergone a radical change from the moment
he had met his saint. Before this, he declared, his wife was compelled to prostitute herself to feed the family, and their children had temporary jobs every now
and then that prevented them from attending school. As a whole, everything
went backwards; everything went wrong, extremely wrong in his life. A female
folk healer of Northern Argentina gave him a San La Muerte, and from then
onwards, he had his stroke of fortune: he [San La Muerte] pulled me out of the
depths, and he made everything change. In three years, I thank him for what I
have. What he has given me is impressing; not only what he gave me, but what
he made me do. Whatever I ask him, he fulfills it (interview to Carlos). With the
improvement of his situation, his wife had left the street and his children had
gone back to school. The narration was moving, and somehow or other, I
expected a Hollywood-like ending to the following question.
Figure 5.

Tattoo of San La Muerte

Interviewer: But, for instance, what did you do? Did you change jobs? Did you
look for a job? How did you achieve all that?
Carlos:
I changed. I changed. I committed myself, and I committed myself
in all senses.
I:
How did you commit yourself?
C:
By looking for women. By going out to look for women
I:
By going out to look for women?

17. The specific practice of this resistance may be compared to what Baudrillard (1993) refers to as
symbolic exchange. It is absolutely clear that San La Muertes current followers do not belong to
the primitivism analyzed by him; however, in their life given to death, they show some connection
with it through the restitution of the symbolic. In the cult of San La Muerte, the exchange does not
come to an end with life. GIVING, RETURNING, EXCHANGING (Baudrillard 1993, p. 139) are the
terms that govern this devotion. What would this government resist to?: to the way in which the
Western bourgeois culture deals with death and constructs an edifice of values there from. Our
whole culture is just one huge effort to dissociate life and death, to ward off the ambivalence of
death in the interests of life as value, and time as the general equivalent. The elimination of death
is our phantasm, and ramifies in every direction: for religion, the afterlife and immorality; for
science, truth; and for economics, productivity and accumulation (Baudrillard 1993, p. 147). To the
logic of equivalence, which is hegemonic in the so-called developed Western world, the cult of San
la Muerte poses an opposing logic of reciprocity.

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CARASSAI

Figure 5.

C:

I:
C:

I:
C:

Tattoo of San La Muerte

Women to open a night club. Then, I committed myself to the task

and I went out to look for them; I went to Crdoba, to Buenos Aires,
to Salta, and I spoke with the girls husbands. Then they sent me
five women from one place, five from another and I had around 30
women.
And did you open the night club?
A sort of night club, a kind of night club; not a real night club, but
a kind of night club It is called a casa de pase. And I opened a
casa de pase and I changed. And everything went alright, everything progressed, everything was ok.
And did your wife keep on working?
No, not any longer. She was already 30 years old and younger girls
appeared, around 17 and 18. So this was no longer for her. It is
unbelievable what happened to me. Everything improved. And
everything I asked for and I ask for he fulfills.

The situation of Carlos and his family improved, but they did not (essentially)
change. Just the opposite to Althussers example, where the subject acknowledged who he was from the moment he felt that God called him by his name and
he accepted the need to submit himself and, if necessary, to change his life (to
be born again, as in baptism), the cult to San La Muerte is compatible with any
kind of life or practical behavior, even with those rejected by Christian morals.
Devotees do no feel their little saint demands from them essential transformations. Their saint is not there to condemn them or indoctrinate them from a
moral standpoint but to protect them and, upon an unfulfilled promise, punish
them. A prostitute does not ask to be forgiven but prays for more clients; those

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who have participated in an armed confrontation, do not beg mercy for the death
they have caused but thank him for being alive; compulsive gamblers do not
make any petition to give up gambling, but to win; the thief does not commend
to the saint to access the world of law but not to be caught. Carlos, who
committed himself to take his wife away from the streets, did so at the
expense of driving other 30 women to prostitution. Maybe this is what may
explain the closeness between San La Muerte and his followers. They do not need
to change their lives to be accepted in his ranks.
Now then, this does not mean an absence of codes or lack of behavior
patterns; on the contrary, although few and simple, some strict behavior arises
from this cult. The accurate limits defining the favors to be asked for and their
moderation should be added to the value of the word given and keeping the
promises made. One thing is to pray for the lover that has left us to come
back, and something different is asking for women/men indiscriminately; one
thing is to pray for work, and something different is to ask for becoming a
millionaire. San La Muerte, his followers believe, awards what is necessary and
punishes the disproportionate promise makers. For example, Ernesto, a
follower who travels every year far more than one hundred miles to worship
his saint, explains:
Im going to tell you a story of my youth, of what my father said cha migo
we speak this waydont ask the saint for women or for money. You have to win
over womens hearts and you have to work to get money.

Both from this and other interviews and the behavior of devotees during the
celebrations and processions a kind of ethics of austerity may be inferred. The
ethical codes that join this saints followers are always related to questions of
form more than content. For San La Muertes devotees it is important to comply
with the word given and not to have disproportionate personal ambitions than to
be peaceful or violent, loyal to ones couple or an adulterer, law abiding or not.
In my interviews I spoke, for instance, with prostitutes, thieves, prisoners, and
youngsters addict to alcohol who never asked the saint to change what they were
or the content of what they were; they simply asked to be lucky in what they did.

Toward a Conclusion
If identity is, as stated by Hall, that point of encounter between discourses and
practices that attempt to question individuals on the one hand, and on the other,
the processes that produce subjectivities, the cult to San La Muerte should be
placed at the core of the question of identity of his devotees. Their subjectivity
has been produced by an ancestral belief transmitted from generation to generation to which, at the same time, they have contributed and still contribute to
produce the specific characteristics attributed to the saint. This becomes
evident in the prayers, which cover a variety as vast as the specific needs that
devotees express. Although the saints followers may call themselves Christians

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or Catholics, the institutional orphanhood of this cult allows its contents not to
be defined or manipulated by any Church. In the vast majority of San La Muertes
devotees there is a rank of beliefs; first of all, their saint; then, the remaining
religious symbols, and finally, the ministers of the Church. Remaining outside of
the institutional power, however, does not preclude the cult to San La Muerte
from having an ideology. As Eagleton states about all successful ideologies, this
cult works much less by explicit concepts or formulated doctrines than by
image, symbol, habit, ritual and mythology18 (Eagleton 1994, p. 23). My analysis
(compatible with Althussers theory, wherein ideologies are carried out in institutions, Althusser 1972, p. 184) intended to show that when religious ideologies
do not fall under the scope of an institution (or any organized group that may
replace it), practices that may challenge or contradict a certain order of things
are enabled and even promoted.
However, this does not mean that the challenge or contradiction should be
translated to questioning the prevailing social order or an economic, sexual, or
political exploitation. In this sense, my research confirmed the resistance that
this cult promotes is less social than moral and thus, not all resistance has a
horizon of radical transformation of society, not even progressist content.
Resistance, in this cult, means the possibility of making ones own life compatible with religious faith without the need of undergoing an essential change in
everyday practices or in the values that build up those practices. Prostitutes,
thieves, prisoners, corrupt police officers, drug traffickers, all of them have a
space there. Of course, also those who lead a life according to Christian morals
have a space too. But in this work it was my intention to emphasize the specific
elements of this cult. Quite different from the Lujn Virgin or the cult to
Christ the King, San La Muertes devotees go to him to improve the same life
they lead, not to change it.
San La Muerte, the non-saint saint, enjoys a holiness achieved not through the
Vatican but throughout centuries of being there, in the dangers and pleasures of
everyday life, together with those who suffer for love or those who fear their
enemy, side by side in their everyday anxiety and in community celebrations, in
the need to love or take revenge. If the tradition of the cult has survived for
centuries without sponsorship from any power whatsoever, it is because the
identity itself of the subjects questioned by San La Muerte is built up in such
devotion. It is for this reason that I have suggested that his devotees form an
imagined community not only in space but also in time, gathering not only friends
and relatives geographically apart, but also them with their ancestors. This cult
is inserted within the religious ideology of this region, a mixture of Christians and

18. However, conversely to what Eagleton states, religion is not always an extremely effective
form of ideological control (Eagleton 1994, p. 23) It is difficult to make this idea of religion as an
effective tool of ideological control compatible with the history of Christian religion in the second
half of the twentieth century in Latin America. In fact, during the 60s and 70s, the interpretation
that the theology of liberation made of the Gospels was turned into a nursery of revolutionary militants.

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indigenes. However, the Church cannot control every name of God. In this
region, San La Muerte is one of those names.

Acknowledgements
The fieldwork on which this study is based was performed within the framework
of the research project Symbols and fetishes in the construction of popular
subjectivity, led by Professor Rubn Dri, from the University of Buenos Aires. I
wish to thank Purnima Bose, Alfio Saitta, and Vanesa Mancinelli, from Indiana
University, for their readings of previous versions of this article. Many thanks
are due to Professor Jeffrey Gould and the Journal of Cultural Researchs anonymous reader for their suggestions and encouraging comments.

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