Santa Muerte’s public Mexican expansion

Record summary

The public expansion of Santa Muerte devotion in Mexico during the 1990s and 2000s offers a major comparative case of an intermediary figure outside standard Catholic sainthood. Devotees seek protection, healing, justice and assistance through an iconography combining death, Marian forms and folk-Catholic practice. Researchers can compare prayers, altar manuals, testimony and clerical condemnation with accounts of angels or other mediators. The uncertain issue is chronology: clandestine and household devotion predates public shrines, while media attention after 2000 can make the movement appear newer than it was.