The Patron Saint of Mexico’s Drug War Is Making Inroads in Canada

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

Cindy remembers the first time she saw Santa Muerte: The skeletal figure, better known as the patron saint of the drug war raging in Mexico, was tattooed on her boyfriend's back.

Santa Muerte had kept him safe from violence in his hometown of Monterrey, he told her, and ultimately helped him come to Canada, he believed. The tattoo was a gesture of his gratitude.

Though skeptical at first, Cindy found herself turning to Santa Muerte in her own personal time of need.

"I was in a really dark place for a while," said Cindy, a 32-year-old Toronto health-care worker who asked that her last name not be used for fear that exposure could affect her professional life. "I lost my job and couldn't find anything else. I was depressed—I didn't know what to do. I was desperate for the momentum to turn my life around."

Cindy considers herself part of a nascent community of non-Latino devotees in Canada who are drawn to Santa Muerte, otherwise known as Saint Death or Our Lady of the Holy Death. She's heard of public shrines in Montreal, although her own worshipping has been in the privacy of her own home, before votive candles purchased in Toronto's Kensington Market.

Santa Muerte, who is also worshipped by the poor and disenfranchised, has as many as 12 million devotees, and her cult is the fastest-growing in the world. When I came across my first shrine to Santa Muerte in Mexico City earlier this year, I was surprised that there were also non-Latinos there to offer prayers and light votive candles for the eerie skeleton-saint clad in a bride's dress and seated in a bed of flowers, figurines, and candles.

But Andrew Chesnut, a professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint, the first English-language book about the saint, has been able to trace Santa Muerte's cult as far as Australia. He wasn't surprised when I brought up non-Latino worshippers.

"One of the great new trends that have come out is her growth in the US among African Americans and Euro-Americans," said Chesnut.

He noted that about 90 percent of them are white Americans who hail from places like Ohio, Tennessee, and Georgia, who don't speak Spanish, and who have never been to Mexico or had much contact with Latino culture.

"Part of it is that she's kind of hip and cool, but she also has this reputation of being extremely efficacious and potent in delivering on petitions, prayers, and miracles that folks are asking for, so I think that's really important," said Chesnut, adding that Santa Muerte is more than a narco-saint.

"She's a multitasker," he said. "She's a huge love sorcerer and also a curandera, a folk healer."

Curious to understand how these new worshippers first become acquainted with the skeleton saint, I spoke to Steven Bragg, the first non-Latino devotee to set up a public shrine in New Orleans— the New Orleans Chapel of Santisima Muerte.

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Bragg was displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He took up residence near Boston in Massachusetts where he met Nick Arnoldi, a man who had lived in Mexico and become familiar with the worship of Holy Death.

"He started sharing his teachings with me and started piecing things together, and things got bigger and bigger," said Bragg. "She did some large favors for me, so I decided to repay her by building a shrine outside my house, which is a common thing you do in Mexico when any of the saints do something for you, to let the public know."

Three years ago he started holding monthly services inside his house, attracting between 15 to 20 devotees.

"The chapel services are typically non-Latino, but a lot of the people that bring offerings to the outside shrine are Latino," said Bragg.

He said that people that are attracted to his service mostly hear about it through word of mouth. One common thread amongst everyone is that they are all interested in alternative spirituality, though there are a few that come from traditional denominations and view Santa Muerte as just another saint.

Derrik Chinn, a writer and schoolteacher who has lived in Tijuana for the past eight years, was surprised by the growing trend, though he noted that many aspects of Mexican culture are slowly being appropriated north of the border.

"The trend behind it is people getting frustrated by the lack of connection to spirituality and wanting something real to believe in. Death is certain, the afterlife might not be," said Chinn. "It is a universal notion, the idea of worshiping Saint Death because it's something we have in common. It's the only thing we all have in common because we all will die."

Chinn worried that some people may just be attracted to the dark glamor of the skeleton saint.

"She's creepy and kind of dark. I wonder if people are getting the right message," said Chinn.

For Cindy, who was not raised to adhere to a particular religion by a Catholic mother and an Anglican father, the ritual of praying to Santa Muerte has helped her focus. Her first experience was private, in her own home.

"I lit a candle and prayed to her the way I assumed you're supposed to pray to a saint," said Cindy.

"It worked. I was desperate for it to," she said. "I know it may just be coincidental, I'm cognizant of that and of how crazy this sounds, but I believe in her anyway. I've felt it on my own skin. After I started doing this little ritual I became way more grounded and focused. I managed to go back to school and got into the profession I'm in now."

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