Andrew Chesnut’s Devoted to Death

Record summary

Andrew Chesnut’s 2012 book Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint is a major English-language study of Santa Muerte devotion in Mexico. It examines the figure’s iconography, ritual petitions, altars, gendered and occupational associations, healing, protection, and relationship to Catholic practice and popular religion. The book is a useful documentary lead rather than evidence for supernatural intervention: it records religious meanings and social contexts. Researchers should compare its arguments with Mexican scholarship, later fieldwork, and the diversity of local devotional forms outside the best-known Mexico City shrines.