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Introduction
Over the last two decades, worship of La Santa Muerte ('Saint Death' in English) has attracted a remarkably large number of followers in Mexico. This skeleton saint, considered a sacred female personification of death by her devotees, has been the object of global curiosity since the cult first became public in 2001. Mexican and international journalists have been fascinated by the photogenic Santa Muerte, with the tangible result that most major broadcasters have shown scenes of devotees praying, deeply moved, in front of a skeleton figurine in Baroque dress. Several films (documentaries and fictional ones) have been produced about the saint and, in 2008, her main shrines (located in the notorious quarter of Tepito in Mexico City) found their way into Lonely Planet Mexico as major tourist sites.
Scholars have likewise been attracted to the study of the cult. I have followed the growth of the cult in Mexico City for the last ten years and have come across dozens of researchers at its main shrines. Most of them are anthropologists although sociologists, scholars of religious studies and history, psychologists and political scientists have also found them worth visiting. The vast majority are Master's students from local universities in Mexico City.1,2Despite this overwhelming interest, there has been little published on the subject, most likely due to its novelty but also perhaps because of the difficulty of studying the cult, given the lack of historical information available and the secrecy of the environment in which it developed.
Publications by scholars have focused mainly on Saint Death's genealogy and connection to the Mexican culture of death or the culture of popular Catholicism and Cuban Santería.3They discuss ideas of death and their multifaceted historical role in Mexican society from the time of the Conquest until the present day and tend to draw analogies between Baroque ideas of death in Mexico and those of this burgeoning cult. There is also scholarly interest in the inversion of cultural values that is embedded in the worship of this Baroque Virgin of Death, related to a more widespread and often animated debate on the criminal environment of some of her devotees, a discussion that virtually all scholars and journalists...