The Holy Death of Marxism: Santa Muerte and the New Consciousness of Mexico’s Abandoned Poor

SANTA MUERTE. FROM AZTEC DEATH GODDESS TO MAINSTREAM CHAMPION OF THE POOR.

Introduction

For more than a century, Latin America’s marginalized populations turned to leftist ideology—communism, socialism, and liberation theology—whenever the state and the Church failed them. The poor rallied behind Zapatista cells, campesino unions, Marxist universities, and revolutionary priests because these movements offered dignity and a promise of structural transformation.

But beginning in the late twentieth century, this pattern fractured. The Mexican underclass stopped seeking political salvation. Instead, millions began turning toward Santa Muerte, the “Holy Death,” an unsanctioned folk saint whose popularity has surged despite condemnation from the Catholic hierarchy.

The rise of Santa Muerte is neither a moral panic nor a marginal curiosity. It signals a structural transformation in Mexico’s religious, political, and cultural life—one rooted in disappointment with institutions and the search for immediate, culturally authentic power. As anthropologist Andrew Chesnut argues, Santa Muerte has become “the fastest-growing new religious movement in the Americas” (Chesnut 2017).

And most importantly: she is replacing what communism once was for the Latin American poor—a framework of hope, identity, and survival.

"To followers of Santa Muerte, death is not the enemy but the liberator. She frees the abused, the outcast, the forgotten"

I. The Slow Death of Institutional Catholicism

The Church’s Elite Alignment

From colonial times to the present, the Catholic Church has maintained a complex relationship with Mexico’s poor. Officially, it champions social doctrine. Practically, it often aligns with political elites, landowners, and middle-class bureaucratic interests. Sociologist Matthew Butler notes that the Church historically served as “an institution of order, not rebellion,” more invested in stability than in the lived realities of indigenous and mestizo communities (Butler 2014).

This structural bias became increasingly visible in the late twentieth century through:

1. Scandals and institutional mistrust

2. Perceptions of clerical aloofness

3. The Church’s inability to confront cartel violence

4. The Vatican’s migration rhetoric, which often appears disconnected from the suffering of Mexican families who face cartel extortion, human-smuggling networks, and intra-border kidnappings (Sullivan 2020)

When Pope Francis criticizes U.S. border enforcement while ignoring how criminal groups prey on migrants inside Mexico, many working-class Catholics interpret this as siding with elites, NGOs, and bureaucratic talking points—rather than with Mexican families.

“No priest may speak for Death; she walks with the sinner and saint alike.” Waldere Foodiens

The Church and the Poor: A Widening Gap

A 2019 Latinobarómetro study revealed a sharp decline in trust in the Catholic Church across Mexico, particularly among lower-income rural and urban populations (Latinobarómetro 2019). Among these groups, the Church is often viewed as:

• Moralizing

• Out of touch with street-level violence

• Politically cautious

• Insufficiently protective

• Culturally foreign

This legitimacy crisis opened a spiritual vacuum—and Santa Muerte rushed to fill it.

II. When the Church Failed, the Poor Once Turned Left

The Communist Century (1930–1990)

Throughout the twentieth century, Mexico’s underclasses frequently turned to leftist and Marxist movements when institutional Catholicism could not address their grievances. Historian Eric Van Young notes that for many rural mestizos and indigenous people, socialist or agrarian movements provided the “moral and communal solidarity the Church failed to deliver” (Van Young 2001).

Leftist movements offered:

• A critique of elite power

• A promise of redistribution

• A political home for the exploited

• A sense of historical agency

Communism, in essence, became a substitute religion—complete with martyrs, liturgies, and eschatology.

The Collapse of the Marxist Promise

By the 1990s and early 2000s, three forces weakened Marxism’s role as the spiritual surrogate of the poor:

1. The neoliberal co-optation of leftist parties

2. The bureaucratization of socialist movements

3. The failure of left-wing governments to reduce violence or corruption

As political scientist Jorge Castañeda argues, Latin American socialism transformed into “a managerial ideology of NGOs and elites” rather than a genuine voice for the lower classes (Castañeda 2006).

Communism ceased to be a revolutionary creed of the poor.It became another arm of institutional power.

III. Why the Poor No Longer Turn to Communism

Today’s Mexican underclass perceives leftist parties and NGOs as:

• Corrupt

• Technocratic

• Detached from local suffering

• Captured by university elites

• Obsessed with identity rhetoric but indifferent to rural violence

Migration politics is the clearest example. While elites frame migration as a humanitarian abstraction, the poor experience it as:

• Family separation

• Smuggling debts

• Cartel coercion

• Loss of sons and husbands

• Dangerous crossings

• Structural abandonment

Communism, once a philosophy of resistance, has become an ideology of elites.

As anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz observes, “the underclasses no longer believe in macro-political salvation” (Lomnitz 2018). They seek survival, not utopia.

IV. The Rise of Santa Muerte: A New Religious and Social Paradigm

Santa Muerte as the Saint of the Excluded

Santa Muerte’s following is strongest among:

• Migrants

• Sex workers

• Informal laborers

• Transport workers

• Street vendors

• Prison populations

• Cartel-adjacent communities

• The urban and rural poor

These are populations systematically excluded from the protections of the Church, the state, and leftist political movements.

Her devotion grew precisely because she belongs to no institution. She cannot be corrupted. She requires no moral purity. Her power is negotiated directly—candles, offerings, prayer, reciprocity.

As Chesnut writes, Santa Muerte offers “immediate benefits in a context of chronic insecurity” (Chesnut 2012).

Radical Acceptance and Spiritual Egalitarianism

Unlike Catholic saints or political ideologies, Santa Muerte accepts:

• the righteous and the sinful

• the poor and the criminal

• the migrant and the addict

• those living outside the law

• those working outside the formal economy

This radical inclusiveness is precisely what makes her so powerful among the oppressed.She provides something communism and Catholicism could not:

Dignity without condition.

V. Why Santa Muerte Succeeds Where Marxism Failed

1. Immediate Personal Power

Communism demands collective struggle for future justice.Santa Muerte offers protection today.

2. Cultural Authenticity

While communism is European and Catholicism is colonial, Santa Muerte is rooted in:

• Indigenous conceptions of death

• Mestizo identity

• Mexican folk Catholicism

• Urban street culture

Her imagery echoes Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec death goddess, and Día de los Muertos iconography.

3. Lack of Institutional Mediation

There is no hierarchy.No clergy with power over the poor.No Vatican bureaucracy.No tithing requirements.

Her temples are living rooms and street corners.

4. She Understands Violence

Political and religious institutions speak abstractly about violence.Santa Muerte is invoked directly against it.

In neighborhoods where police and priests do not enter, she is often the only authority figure present.

VI. A New Identity Outside Mexico’s Caste System

Scholars of Mexican race and class note the persistence of a porous but powerful caste logic—lighter-skinned, urban, European-coded identities at the top; darker-skinned, indigenous, and working-class identities at the bottom (González Martínez 2017).

Santa Muerte offers the underclass:

• A reclaimed indigenous lineage

• A spiritual icon not tied to whiteness or European heritage

• A symbol of mestizo authenticity

• A way to reject elite identity norms

She becomes a banner of cultural secession:a declaration that indigenous and working-class Mexicans will define themselves without Church or state.

VII. Santa Muerte as a Folk Revolution Without Politics

In the classical revolutionary model, the oppressed seek political power.In the Santa Muerte model, they seek spiritual autonomy.

Political revolutions require leaders; Santa Muerte’s revolution is leaderless.Political revolutions require ideology; Santa Muerte’s movement requires necessity.Political revolutions demand orthodoxy; Santa Muerte demands only reciprocity.

She represents:

• resistance without party

• identity without ideology

• justice without institutions

• empowerment without class rhetoric

This is why her rise marks a turning point in Mexican history.

Conclusion

Santa Muerte is not simply a folk saint—she is a cultural verdict on the failures of Church and state.

Where the poor once turned to communism for justice, they now turn to Santa Muerte for protection, dignity, and belonging. Her ascendance reflects:

• the collapse of institutional Catholic authority

• the exhaustion of leftist political alternatives

• the resurgence of indigenous cosmology

• the desperation created by cartel violence and economic abandonment

• the desire for an identity separate from Mexico’s caste hierarchy

Santa Muerte is the new voice of Mexico’s invisible nation.

And her rise may be the most important social and spiritual development in Mexico since the Cristero War.

REFERENCES

Butler, Matthew. Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Era. University of New Mexico Press, 2014.

Castañeda, Jorge. Latin America’s Left Turn. Foreign Affairs, 2006.

Chesnut, R. Andrew. Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Chesnut, Andrew. “Santa Muerte in Mexican and U.S. Popular Culture.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, Oxford University Press, 2017.

González Martínez, José Luis. “Race, Class, and Mestizaje in Modern Mexico.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2017.

Latinobarómetro. Informe 2019. Santiago de Chile: Corporación Latinobarómetro, 2019.

Lomnitz, Claudio. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón. Zone Books, 2018.

Sullivan, Mark. “Migration, Violence, and Catholicism in Contemporary Mexico.” Journal of Church and State 62, no. 4 (2020): 699–722.

Van Young, Eric. The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence. Stanford University Press, 2001.