Santa Muerte devotion and the expansion of a Mexican folk saint tradition

Record summary

Santa Muerte is a contemporary Mexican devotional figure represented as a skeletal female saint and invoked for protection, health, justice or other petitions. The tradition became a major subject of ethnography and religious-studies work during the 2010s, including R. Andrew Chesnut’s Devoted to Death and later studies. It is useful for comparing unofficial sainthood, criminalization narratives, gendered imagery and transnational circulation. Researchers should distinguish practitioners’ devotional meanings from media portrayals linking Santa Muerte inherently to organized crime or occultism.