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Borderlands Saints: Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture
Borderlands Saints: Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture
Borderlands Saints: Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture
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Borderlands Saints: Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture

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Winner of the 2014 Latina/o Studies Section - LASA Outstanding Book Award

In Borderlands Saints, Desirée A. Martín examines the rise and fall of popular saints and saint-like figures in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Focusing specifically on Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, César Chávez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Santa Muerte, she traces the intersections of these figures, their devotees, artistic representations, and dominant institutions with an eye for the ways in which such unofficial saints mirror traditional spiritual practices and serve specific cultural needs.

Popular spirituality of this kind engages the use and exchange of relics, faith healing, pilgrimages, and spirit possession, exemplifying the contradictions between high and popular culture, human and divine, and secular and sacred. Martín focuses upon a wide range of Mexican and Chicano/a cultural works drawn from the nineteenth century to the present, covering such diverse genres as the novel, the communiqué, drama, the essay or crónica, film, and contemporary digital media. She argues that spiritual practice is often represented as narrative, while narrative—whether literary, historical, visual, or oral—may modify or even function as devotional practice.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 19, 2013
ISBN9780813570587
Borderlands Saints: Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture

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    Borderlands Saints - Desirée A. Martín

    Borderlands Saints

    Latinidad

    Transnational Cultures in the United States

    This series publishes books that deepen and expand our knowledge and understanding of the various Latina/o populations in the United States in the context of their transnational relationships with cultures of the broader Americas. The focus is on the history and analysis of Latino cultural systems and practices in national and transnational spheres of influence from the nineteenth century to the present. The series is open to scholarship in political science, economics, anthropology, linguistics, history, cinema and television, literary and cultural studies, and popular culture and encourages interdisciplinary approaches, methods, and theories. The series grew out of discussions with faculty at the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University, where an interdisciplinary emphasis is being placed on transborder and transnational dynamics.

    Matthew Garcia, Series Editor, School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies; and Director of Comparative Border Studies

    Rodolfo F. Acuña, In the Trenches of Academe: The Making of Chicana/o Studies

    Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, Zapotecs on the Move: Cultural, Social, and Political Processes in Transnational Perspective

    Marivel T. Danielson, Homecoming Queers: Desire and Difference in Chicana Latina Cultural Production

    Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

    Lisa Jarvinen, The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking: Out from Hollywood’s Shadow, 1929–1939

    Regina M. Marchi, Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon

    Desirée A. Martín, Borderlands Saints: Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture

    Marci R. McMahon, Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art

    A. Gabriel Melendez, Hidden Chicano Cinema: Film Dramas in the Borderlands

    Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom

    Luis F. B. Plascencia, Disenchanting Citizenship: Mexican Migrants and the Boundaries of Belonging

    Maya Socolovsky, Troubling Nationhood in US Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging

    Borderlands Saints

    Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture

    Desirée A. Martín

    Rutgers University Press

    New Brunswick, New Jersey and London

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Martín, Desirée A., 1972–

    Borderlands saints : secular sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican culture / Desirée A. Martín, Rutgers University Press.

    pages cm. — (Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978–0–8135–6234–6 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6233–9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6235–3 (e-book)

    1. American literature—Mexican American authors—History and criticism. 2. Mexican American literature (Spanish)—History and criticism. 3. Mexican-American Border Region—Civilization. 4. Mexican literature—History and criticism. 5. Secularism in literature. 6. Holy, The, in literature. 7. Heroes in literature. I. Title.

    PQ7070.5.M37 2013

    810.9'868—dc23 2013000429

    A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

    Copyright © 2014 by Desirée A. Martín

    All rights reserved

    No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

    Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

    Para Santiago y Mateo: mi luz, mi esperanza

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction: The Secular Sanctity of Borderlands Saints

    1. Saint of Contradiction: Teresa Urrea, La Santa de Cabora

    2. The Remains of Pancho Villa

    3. Canonizing César Chávez

    4. Todos Somos Santos: Subcomandante Marcos and the EZLN

    5. Illegal Marginalizations: La Santísima Muerte

    Conclusion: Narrative Devotion

    Notes

    Works Cited

    Index

    Acknowledgments

    This book has been many years in the making. Over that time I have incurred many debts to family, friends, teachers, mentors, students, and colleagues. These relationships are formative, and I am humbled by the generosity that so many people have shown me. Before I acknowledge these debts, however, I want to express gratitude for the privilege of research and writing itself. While the process of writing this book has often been frustrating, it has also, quite unexpectedly, been a companion and a refuge for me through some very hard times. Looking back, I can say that writing this book has reinvigorated me for the work ahead even as it has taught me to embrace my time with loved ones, especially my children, all the more.

    I thank Walter Mignolo, Carolyn Porter, and Antonio Viego for guiding me through different stages of my academic journey. Special thanks go to Alberto Moreiras, Gabriela Nouzeilles, and Janice Radway, who saw the earliest incarnations of this project at Duke University and inspired me to embrace the borderlands condition in every sense. At UC Davis, I have been fortunate to work alongside brilliant and indomitable colleagues. I am especially grateful for the intellectual, professional, and moral support provided me by Emilio Bejel, Nathan Brown, Miroslava Chávez-García, Seeta Chaganti, Chen-Nee Chuah, Frances Dolan, Margaret Ferguson, Kathleen Frederickson, Elizabeth Freeman, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Danielle Heard, Hsuan Hsu, Mark Jerng, Michael Lazzara, David Lloyd, Christopher Loar, Colin Milburn, Elizabeth Miller, Ana Peluffo, Riché Richardson, Matthew Stratton, Julie Sze, Cecilia Tsu, Louis Warren, Claire Waters, and Michael Ziser. I must single out Scott Simmon for his support and friendship; he has been the best chair I could have hoped for during my tenure year. Lastly, I have learned much from the students I have taught and mentored at UC Davis, especially Sharada Balachandran-Orihuela, Emily Davidson, Isabel Porras, and Kaitlin Walker. I look forward to seeing their careers develop.

    I am deeply grateful to Leslie Mitchner and everyone at Rutgers University Press for their expert stewardship of my project, and to Pippa Letsky for her excellent editorial work. Special thanks go to the anonymous readers of my manuscript and tenure file for their incisive and helpful comments. Many other friends throughout the academy have been important interlocutors and have provided much needed support. Thanks to Aimee Bahng, Rafael Díaz, Ricardo Domínguez, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Laura G. Gutiérrez, Simon Hay, Javier Krauel, Jorge Marturano, Claudia Milian, Gabriela Nuñez, Catherine Ramírez, José David Saldívar, Alanna Thain, Christian Thorne, Virginia Tuma, and Maarten Van Delden for their inspirational friendship. Most of all, I thank mis hermanas del alma Amy Sara Carroll and Tabea Linhard, who have always been ready to listen and share their love with me through good times and bad. Finally, I am so blessed to be friends with Robert McKee Irwin (gracias por todo, querido) and Valeria La Saponara (grazie, bellissima).

    My family and oldest friends deserve special mention. Thank you to the Dobbins family: Maureen, Terry, and especially Greg, for the love and support they showed me over the years. Steve Otroshkin, thank you for always making me laugh when I need it most. To Jean Rebholz, hermana de otra madre, I hope that you know what you mean to me. Thank you for always being there. Nothing would have been possible without mi familia. I owe everything to the Coke family, especially Chris, Bill, Mike, and Apple; to toda la familia Clamont; to my brother, Eddie, my sister-in-law, Sylvia, my niece, Amelia, and my nephew, Elías; and most of all, to my late parents Frederick and María Elena Martín. Siempre están en mi corazón. My greatest blessing is my children, Santiago and Mateo. So much of this book was written while holding one of them inside or out there, in the world. Les dedico este libro por toda la luz y esperanza que me traen.

    Introduction

    The Secular Sanctity of Borderlands Saints

    To seek favor from La Santísima Muerte (Saint Death), folk saint and guardian of the dispossessed, devotees prepare candles and recite a novena, which may be repeated up to three times until the petition is answered. The novena consists of a prayer or invocation called a soneto (sonnet) followed by a short, fervent prayer or refrain called a jaculatoria, both of which are to be repeated daily for nine days. In addition, each of the nine days features a different prayer to recite after the sonnet. The refrain of the best-known novena to Santa Muerte reads: Beloved Death of my heart, do not abandon me, protect me, and do not allow [name] a single moment of peace, bother him constantly, torment him, worry him, worry him, so that he will think of me always. Amen (Gil Olmos 183).¹ This novena requests luck, happiness, and money as well as freedom from evil spells, danger, and sickness, but its primary desire is for the return of a lost or wayward lover (Gil Olmos 186).

    The intimacy of the novena is remarkable. Given Santa Muerte’s role as a specialist in affairs of the heart, personal appeals to the saint to restore or initiate love affairs are expected (Chesnut 121). However, the novena is more than a simple request or a promise to worship the saint from a passive devotee. Instead, the novena appeals not just for the lover’s return, but for total domination over him, imploring: I want him to fall before me prostrate, surrendered at my feet, to fulfill all of his promises, and I want you to make him beg me to forgive him, as docile as a lamb, faithful to his promises, that he may be loving and submissive for the rest of his life (Gil Olmos 184, 186). In a sense, the female supplicant asks Santa Muerte to transfer some of her formidable power onto her. The enduring control over the lover requested by the devotee (that he may be loving and submissive for the rest of his life) reflects the power she exercises as a result of her relationship of devotion and exchange with Santa Muerte.

    The novena reflects a circuit of intimacy between the saint, the devotee, and the lover. Through the power of the novena, Santa Muerte touches both the devotee and the lover, transforming their relationship by literally entering their lives to bother, torment, or worry them (in the case of the lover), or protect them (in the case of the devotee). The novena also portrays a mutually constructed relationship between the devotee and the saint. The supplicant pledges an intimate relationship of devotion with the saint that resembles the one she seeks with her lover. The devotee addresses Santa Muerte like a lover (Beloved Death of my heart) and, like a bride or groom, pledges utter, lifelong devotion to the saint in exchange for favors received. In this relationship, the devotee is not totally powerless and subservient, nor is the saint infallibly powerful. Undoubtedly, the devotee aims to assume a measure of the saint’s authority over the erstwhile lover.

    More importantly, however, the supplicant retains the power of negotiation with the saint. She pledges total allegiance to Santa Muerte, but such loyalty is possible only if the saint fulfills the request: make me believe in only you by granting me this miracle (Gil Olmos 185). Through this relationship of exchange, the devotee enters into the consciousness of Santa Muerte as much as the saint enters into that of the devotee. Many believers threaten their preferred saints with withholding their belief and favors, and it is common for devotees to shift allegiances between different saints. For example, in Sandra Cisneros’s story Little Miracles, Kept Promises, Ms. Barbara Ybañez of San Antonio, Texas, warns San Antonio de Padua that she will "turn your statue upside down until you send [a man who isn’t a pain in the nalgas (ass)]" (Woman Hollering Creek 117–118). Although some saints, like Santa Muerte, have a reputation for being more loyal than others, this constancy frequently comes at a price. Devotees accept that if they neglect the death saint or dare to stray from her fold, they will face sacred retribution.

    While the advantage in the relationship between devotee and saint may shift over time, popular devotional practices in the borderlands fundamentally emphasize the personal, intimate relationship between them. Popular rituals like spirit possession, the exchange of relics or sacred images, faith healing, and the recitation of prayers all shape relationships of exchange and identification. Since they do not require the presence of the clergy, popular rituals reorder and transcend ecclesiastical authority. The supplicants who recite novenas to Santa Muerte also appeal to Jesus Christ and recite the Lord’s Prayer as part of their petition, reflecting their willingness to blend popular and orthodox spirituality. The ecclesiastical status of these sacred figures—whether they are canonized saints, folk saints, manifestations of Christ or the Virgin Mary, mystics, or faith healers, or not even routinely considered saints at all—has little impact on the masses’ desire to worship on their own terms. Meanwhile, devotees incorporate a wide variety of cultural and spiritual traditions in their rituals, drawing upon various Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, indigenous, and African beliefs.² Indeed, the defining characteristic of spirituality in the borderlands is its flexibility. Popular religious belief and practices may still [serve] power as an ideological mechanism of social control, exploitation, and domination, yet there is tremendous appeal in creating one’s own narratives of faith, especially for marginalized peoples who may have no other recourse to challenge the authority of church and state (León, La Llorona’s 5).

    The ritual relationships of exchange and identification between saint and devotee highlight the intersection between human and divine. This intersection, which might seem to be a contradiction in terms, in fact embodies secular sanctity. Though there is no strict definition of secular sanctity, a secular saint may refer to someone who is venerated for their extraordinary actions or their contribution to a noble cause, but who is not recognized as a canonical saint by a religion. In her discussion of Che Guevara as secular saint, Phyllis Passariello indicates that the Argentine revolutionary’s life story and its propagation have helped to make him not only a hero, but also a secular saint, a sacred figure, someone to be revered, emulated and even beseeched (77). It is obvious that secular saints like Guevara are not orthodox figures, but they are not regularly considered popular saints in relation to traditional religious or spiritual practice either. Nevertheless, they are apprehended in ways similar to saints, for their images or words are frequently circulated or interpreted in a way that approximates the divine or even becomes it. Yet it is precisely because they are not traditional saints that secular saints so clearly reveal the contradiction between the human and the divine. Secular saints are defined by their human qualities—whether heroic or fallible—instead of by their canonization into a pantheon of divinities or even by popular religious belief. It is because they are accessible as fallible humans that secular saints are revered as divine mediators or as sacred figures in their own right. Although the union between secular and sacred is common to all saints, secular saints particularly foreground the simultaneity as well as the contradiction of human and divine.

    It is most common for devotees to turn to saints out of the desire to manage personal issues and crises. Different saints have distinct prayers and rituals dedicated to the pursuit of health, love, employment, and countless other needs. Yet devotees’ interactions with saints go beyond their individual or local desires to incorporate broader conceptions of space, temporality, memory, and identity. Spiritual beliefs and practices in the borderlands transcend both personal and ecclesiastical rituals to disrupt and destabilize the conventions of national borders and citizenship, regional space, and temporalities both secular and sacred. The saints are border crossers themselves, accompanying people from all walks of life on their travels—and especially migrants, who draw upon secular sanctity for help in deciphering their place as subjects who exceed traditional conceptions of citizenship. Yet the saints are not merely symbols of migration. Their devotees also construct national identities around them, and they also serve as markers of regional or local space. In this study I argue that secular saints such as Teresa Urrea (Santa Teresa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, César Chávez, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, and Santa Muerte produce and embody new forms of national, regional, and transnational identity for their devotees on both sides of the border. All of these secular saints are marginal figures in some way. While they all play an important role at the periphery of the nation-state, namely, the U.S. southern border and Mexico’s northern and southern borders, they also inhabit the margins in relation to their spiritual, political, social, cultural, and gender identities. As figures that assume a sacred aura, in part because of their secular roles as political, revolutionary, or cultural icons, these saints perform and embody the contradiction of human and divine reflected in secular sanctity. Some of these secular saints remain in the margins, others insert themselves into or are appropriated by the center, and some shift back and forth between center and periphery. All of them bring the margins to the forefront, particularly during historical and political moments of crisis that shape and challenge state formation and national identity. During periods of upheaval like indigenous rebellions, the Mexican Revolution, the Chicano Rights Movement, contemporary struggles for indigenous rights, and the drug wars, saints and their followers demonstrate a certain fluidity between nation, region, and border across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

    One recent example of the intersection between secular sanctity and national, regional, and transnational space is the erection—and subsequent destruction—of dozens of shrines dedicated to Santa Muerte along a triangle of freeways between the cities of Monterrey, Reynosa, and Nuevo Laredo (Osorno n.p.). This northern Mexican border region is one of the centers of the drug wars that have shaken the foundations of state and civil society in Mexico and are rapidly encroaching upon the U.S. side of the border. The border town of Nuevo Laredo is one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico, while the entire area that includes Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo is the locus of a violent dispute between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels for control of drug-smuggling routes into the United States (Santa Muerte n.p.). The public altars to La Santísima Muerte along the freeways began to spring up in 2007. While no group has been officially linked to the shrines, many of the sites have been the scenes of shootouts and executions, and it is generally understood that the warring drug cartels are behind the finance and construction of the altars (Santa Muerte n.p.).

    The association of Santa Muerte and her followers with the drug trade and organized crime is only one of her many attributes, but this is the main aspect highlighted in media reports (Chesnut 96). The shrines also serve as meeting places for everyday travelers, migrants, and border residents who want to worship privately or to commune with other devotees. Visitors to these shrines leave offerings of candles, fruit, flowers, liquor, and cigars and give thanks or request favors from the death saint through messages, prayer cards, and images. The presence of these shrines on the freeways in such close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border—one of the statues of Santa Muerte was located at the base of an international bridge linking Mexico and the United States—illuminates the nomadic, transient, or liminal nature of many of Santa Muerte’s devotees (Hernández, La Plaza blog: ‘Santa Muerte’). The freeway shrines themselves also remap border space, emphasizing that the borderlands are at once a crossing point, a destination, and a home that all constitute regional, national, and transnational space.

    In keeping with the liminality of the freeway shrines, Santa Muerte and her devotees challenge the limits of the sacred and the secular by demonstrating the intersection of holiness and evil. While Santa Muerte’s association with the drug wars evokes the betrayal of public safety, the collapse of civil society, and the threat of a failed state in Mexico, the cult of the death saint also reflects new forms of public works and autonomous communal activism. At these freeway shrines, a cult that has been roundly maligned and largely hidden for almost a century and a half is transformed and now acts, for travelers, migrants, and border residents, as a public site of solidarity and action against the hazards of everyday life (Chesnut 121). Regardless of whether these hazards are due to the border crossing, the frequently random violence of the drug wars, labor troubles, or affairs of the heart, the open-air shrines welcome everyone equally and without judgment.

    Perhaps as a result of the contradictory connotations of the death cult, those who frequent, live near, or pass by these shrines provide conflicting accounts of their relationship with Santa Muerte. Some devotees imply that their faith represents a pragmatic but potentially risky contract with the death saint, as they cite her miraculous powers and her willingness to grant difficult or even deadly favors. Others emphasize the ordinariness of their devotion, insisting that they worship Santa Muerte alongside orthodox figures like the Virgin of Guadalupe and San Judas Tadeo. Still others describe the shrines as foreboding sites where devils, presumably both mystical devils and the real-life devils of the drug trade, converge (Osorno n.p.). Throughout, the freeway shrines acknowledge and honor the mobility, flexibility, and transience of Santa Muerte’s devotees regardless of their social or legal status. In this manner, the shrines exemplify the contradiction and ambivalence of secular sanctity.

    Because the freeway shrines to Santa Muerte inexorably merge holy and evil, thereby disrupting church authority and national limits, it is no coincidence that over thirty of the shrines in Nuevo Laredo were destroyed in March 2009 by the Mexican military (Beaubien n.p.).³ Military officials have provided different reasons for the destruction of the shrines, relying upon both bureaucracy and fearmongering as they cite the lack of proper permits to build on federal land and identify the altars as narcoshrines that must be demolished as part of the Mexican government’s war on the drug cartels (Ramos Minor n.p.). The proximity of the shrines to the international border—indicating the spillover into the United States not only of drug violence but also of Santa Muerte’s often marginalized and implicitly illegal devotees—was probably too much for skittish officials to bear. Adding to the complexity of the situation, the cult to Santa Muerte among the police, soldiers, and prison guards that stand on the front lines of the Mexican government’s war against the cartels . . . seems as widespread as it is among the traffickers they are fighting (Chesnut 107). In other words, some of the soldiers ordered to demolish the freeway shrines were probably themselves devotees of the death saint, and some of them must have been terrified of her tremendous powers of vengeance (Chesnut 109).

    Santa Muerte’s devotees refused to accept the military’s explanations for the destruction of the shrines, and several hundred cult members took to the streets of Mexico City to protest what they viewed as religious persecution and intolerance (Tuckman n.p.).⁴ Indeed, probably the true threat to church and state is Santa Muerte’s escalating popularity, for she is currently the most popular devotional figure in Mexico after Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe. There were no large-scale protests in the borderlands, but the Santa Muerte cult is alive and well in the region. True to the fears of the officials who ordered the destruction of the border shrines, the Santa Muerte cult is growing by leaps and bounds in the borderlands and throughout the United States, especially in areas with large populations of Mexican migrants.

    Since La Santísima Muerte is so strongly associated with the profane (especially in relation to illegality or transgressivity) even as she is revered as a holy, blessed figure, she is a particularly extreme example of the collision between the secular and sacred. However, all of the figures I treat embody the dichotomy of secular sanctity, whether they are regarded as popular saints with devotional cults or they are defined primarily through their historical, political, or cultural roles. Political heroes like Pancho Villa and César Chávez function within a spectrum of secular sanctity that invests them with special status . . . [and] perhaps even special power, not primarily because of their divine perfection but because of their fallible human characteristics (Passariello 75). All these personages instantiate the contradiction between human and divine. At the same time, all the secular saints discussed here fuse spirituality, celebrity, iconicity, and politics both in practice and in representation. While all of them are cultural icons with different levels of celebrity, some are political or revolutionary leaders who have been sacralized. Meanwhile, devotees and dominant institutions alike appropriate these figures in order to negotiate various political, social, and cultural identities. The masses and dominant institutions like the state or the Catholic Church invoke these figures for a wide variety of interests, identities, and conditions, ranging from nation-building to sexual or racial difference to migrant melancholia.

    I begin this study with a focus on historical figures from the Mexican pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods who are associated with millenarianism, indigenous and peasant rebellion, and the Mexican Revolution. Whether they desired the role of saint or not, Teresa Urrea and Pancho Villa have to varying degrees been associated with sanctity and have consequently acquired devotional cults, both during their lives and after their deaths. Although with very different historical significance, the various representations of Urrea and Villa demonstrate the extent to which religious or spiritual rhetoric, celebrity, iconicity, and political dissent are intertwined in Mexico and in the borderlands. Meanwhile, later historical icons such as César Chávez and Subcomandante Marcos demonstrate the persistence of secular sanctity, even if they neither appeal to sanctity nor are always treated as traditional popular saints by their followers. While these explicitly secular figures (santones, as I call them, to indicate their function as simulacra of popular saints) are committed to social and political action, they nevertheless evoke the sacred, especially since they frequently draw upon the resources of the popular saint. Chávez frequently invoked the sacrificial practices of Catholicism in his role as leader of the United Farm Workers (UFW), while Marcos strives to invert the potentially messianic or mystical associations of the popular saint in the interest of decentralized indigenous collectivism. Like many secular saints, both Chávez and Marcos are susceptible to appropriation or control by the state. Nevertheless, political movements like the Chicano Rights Movement or indigenous rights have coalesced around them as figures both secular and sacred. Finally, the encounter between sacred and secular endures in the mystical figure of Santa Muerte. Like the other figures I discuss, whether saint or santón, Santa Muerte embodies both contradiction and ambivalence. Yet, unlike the others, the death saint has no physical manifestation within material history. This indicates the abstraction of the hopes and desires of the subaltern but also transcends the power of the state or church to rein her in and, by extension, to tame her unruly devotees.

    In this work I analyze representations of—and sometimes by—secular saints and santones that originate in, cross through, or are transformed by the borderlands. My aim is to trace the intersections among these figures, their devotees, various artists, and dominant institutions. These saints and their devotees do not simply utilize traditional spiritual practices to represent alternative spatial and temporal identities, they also construct such identities through forms of cultural production that may resemble or merge with devotional practices. Practices of popular spirituality such as the use and exchange of relics or favors, faith healing, pilgrimages, and spirit possession fuse with cultural production to exemplify the contradictions between high culture and popular culture, between the human and the divine, the secular and the sacred, that embody secular sanctity. For example, the representation and commodification of saints within cultural production sometimes resemble spirit possession in the drive to establish a personal connection or identification between saint and devotee. In turn, this personal connection signifies a variety of different possibilities concerning national, regional, transnational, racial, ethnic, religious, or gender identity. At the same time, the representation of secular sanctity often manifests in unexpected, even counterintuitive or uncanny ways in borderlands cultural production. Many of the texts and saints or santones treated here are not explicitly religious or spiritual. Even when they do reference sanctity, they often challenge received notions of the sacred. Although many of the characters, authors, and artists clearly identify with or appropriate the secular saints and santones they represent, they frequently reject or refuse them as well, in a process that José Esteban Muñoz calls disidentification, which adds to the contradiction of secular sanctity (Muñoz, Disidentifications 12).

    I focus upon a wide range of Mexican and Chicano/a texts from as early as the nineteenth century and covering diverse genres such as the novel, the communiqué, the play, the essay or crónica, film, and contemporary digital media.⁵ I contend that these cultural texts mediate spiritual folk practices by representing and enacting popular sanctity in ways similar to spirit possession, pilgrimages, or speaking in tongues. Indeed, I argue that spiritual practice is frequently represented as narrative—while narrative, whether literary, historical, visual, or oral, may modify or even function explicitly as devotional practice. I concentrate on literary texts, yet I also emphasize the representation and circulation of saints in popular culture such as film, internet sites, and communiqués. I accentuate the extent to which literary culture in its representation of secular sanctity is infused with the popular. The saints and santones studied here embody the contradiction inherent in secular sanctity, for they are modern and non-modern, secular and sacred, human and divine. The works I analyze both rearticulate and resist the contradictory characteristics of popular saints but ultimately emphasize the simultaneous rather than the antinomical nature of their contradictions. These texts embrace contradiction rather than resisting it, demonstrating that although such ambivalence is often difficult it is ultimately a valuable part of everyday life.

    Secular Sanctity and Contradiction

    Before proceeding further, it is crucial to examine the concept of sanctity—both official and popular—and its relationship to secular sanctity, especially in the context of the borderlands, Mexico, and migrant communities in the United States. Scholars agree that the saint is a familiar figure in all world religions, while many political leaders, performers, artists, royals, and cultural heroes, among others, are candidates for ‘sainthood’ treatment, thus blurring the lines between sanctity, iconicity, and celebrity (Woodward 16; Hopgood xi). Echoing this multiplicity, James F. Hopgood argues that it is difficult to distinguish the truly sacred from folk saints, near-saints, or saintlike personages in any context. He concludes that it is unnecessary to hold firm conceptual divides between the saint, folk saint, icon, and others (xii, xvii). Hopgood asserts, it is best to use concepts with few constraints in an exploration of human behavior in the area of the sacred and in religion (xvii). Indeed, he associates the icon with the secular saint, suggesting that any cultural figure that undergoes a process of popular canonization can be considered a secular saint, for he or she highlights the juxtaposition of sacred and profane (xvii).

    While such spiritual and conceptual variability is certainly the norm in the borderlands, it is conspicuously absent from Roman Catholic doctrine. The Catholic Church is the only one to feature a formal, continuous, and highly rationalized process for ‘making’ saints, a process that requires copious research to determine and prove the presence of holiness and miracles (Woodward 16). Yet even within official Catholic doctrine, sanctity is an inherently contradictory concept for it juxtaposes the human and the divine, the holy and the profane, the secular and the sacred. Jacques Douillet indicates that the Bible refers repeatedly to the simultaneous presence of elements both holy and profane, suggesting that one cannot exist without the other (10–11). In a sense, it follows that all sanctity is fundamentally secular, because it is always both holy and profane. Nevertheless, Douillet’s analysis of the duality between the holy and the profane is decidedly orthodox, for he insists that the two poles can never be equal. He asserts that things are holy because they are set apart from the profane world; just so, God is holy because he is not part of the world. [Although] the world is not separate from him . . . he is not a being among other beings. He surpasses them infinitely (13). While Catholic doctrine certainly supports Douillet’s assessment of the transcendence of the divine, devotional practices in the borderlands, for example, reveal much more ambivalent and flexible understandings of the duality of the human and the divine.

    Saints are clearly extraordinary figures, for within Catholic cosmology they are holy, frequently miraculous men and women who, rendered sacred, have ascended into heaven. As men and women, they are like the rest of us, inherently secular. Since they are both human and divine, saints are at once different from and similar to ordinary, flawed people on earth. Saints are not gods but, rather, mediators, benefactors, and protectors. From the perspective of the faithful, the status of saints as intermediaries between heaven and earth renders them preferable to gods who, by definition, are too distant and too unlike humans, so that most devotees find it difficult to form meaningful relationships easily with them. It is the human aspect of saints and santones that renders them fallible and accessible and points toward the possibility of reciprocal relationships of devotion and exchange. By straddling the divide between divine and mundane, saints both underscore the gulf between the two realms and paradoxically blur the line that separates them. The counterpoint between accentuating and erasing the boundary between human and divine reflects the ambivalent essence of secular sanctity. The contradiction goes beyond a simple juxtaposition of two seemingly opposed poles. In Theresa Delgadillo’s analysis of spiritual mestizaje, which she defines as the transformative renewal of one’s relationship to the sacred through a radical and sustained multimodal and self-reflexive critique of oppression in all its manifestations and a creative and engaged participation in shaping life that honors the sacred, secular sanctity reveals that the divine and the mundane are deeply intertwined in everyday life (1). In secular sanctity, as in spiritual mestizaje, life honors the sacred, while the sacred becomes a means through which to engage with secular society, signaling a way of being in the world (Delgadillo 4).

    Secular sanctity is necessarily ambivalent. Since saints are at once both completely accessible and absolutely inaccessible, they may inspire both desire and despair in the faithful, who also may simultaneously both resist and embrace sanctity. Secular sanctity manifests the simultaneous process of identification and rejection that José Esteban Muñoz terms disidentification. For Muñoz, disidentification is a contradictory mode that is liberatory and horrible and exhilarating and terrifying all at once (Disidentifications 18, 4). Like William Connolly, who posits that identity itself is inherently contradictory, for to confess to a particular identity is also to belong to difference, while identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty (Connolly xiv), Muñoz suggests that identification implies a perpetual dance between association and refusal (Disidentifications 64). Muñoz argues that identifying with an object, person, lifestyle, history, political ideology, religious orientation, and so on, means also simultaneously and partially counteridentifying, as well as only partially identifying, with different aspects of the social and psychic world (8). In this manner, disidentification is flexible. It provides subjects with the agency to manage their experience of identity and identification. It is a continually shifting process that can be understood as a way of shuffling back and forth between reception and production (Muñoz 25). Muñoz suggests that disidentification is about accepting contradiction rather than resisting it: To disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject. It is not to pick and choose what to take out of an identification. It is not to willfully evacuate the politically dubious or shameful components within an identificatory locus. Rather, it is the reworking of those energies that do not elide the ‘harmful’ or contradictory components of any identity (12).

    Disidentification perfectly captures the vexed yet intimate relationship between devotees and saints, who are intrinsically similar but also necessarily distant from each other. Devotees routinely approach their favored saints through the lens of disidentification, refusing to elide the harmful or contradictory components that might arise from

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