To the chagrin of the Church, Santa Muerte’s devotees have spread to the southwestern United States, coming north from Mexico where she has tens of millions of followers. Her power is associated with outlaws, the poor, LGBT folk, criminals—anyone cast out from the stern bosom of Catholicism.
We cannot single out Catholicism as the only belief system with a history of dismissing the agency of female devotees. Regardless of a woman’s more egalitarian place in modern Buddhism, the ancient scriptures tell of the Buddha encouraging his community of male monks to take trips to the charnel grounds to meditate on women’s rotting bodies. The motive of these “meditations on foulness” was to liberate a monk from his desire for women; they were, as scholar Liz Wilson calls them, “sensual stumbling blocks.” The hope was that charnel meditation would strip women of all their desirable qualities so men would realize they are merely flesh-sacks filled with blood, guts, and phlegm. The Buddha was explicit, claiming that a woman’s deception is not in her accessories, like makeup and gowns, but in her fraudulent garment of flesh, surreptitiously oozing grotesque liquids from its orifices.
Of course, these silent, decaying women of the charnel grounds were not permitted to have needs, desires, or spiritual journeys of their own to take. Wilson, again, explains that “in their role as teachers they do not utter a single word. What they have to teach is not what is on their minds but what is going on in their bodies.” The charnel corpses are mere objects, delusion-busters for men to meditate on and thus gain the status of “worthy.”
This was not the case at Do?a Ana’s, where women and their inner lives and problems were placed front and center. Nothing romantic, financial, or domestic was dismissed as a trivial issue. Her ?atitas were housed in a front room of her home, its walls covered from floor to ceiling in newspaper. Devotees had brought flowers and candles as offerings. Paul and I had brought white tapered candles, purchased from a roadside stall. I thought we would just hand over the candles as a gift, but one of Do?a Ana’s devotees insisted we light them as an offering. Squatting on the concrete floor, Paul and I burned each candle on the bottom, melting the wax to get them to stand vertical on metal plates. They kept falling over as we made a mess of this task, narrowly avoiding an inferno.
Since we had brought the offerings, I figured I had better talk to one of the ?atitas. I asked Nacho to influence the U.S. presidential election, which was being held the next day. I can only assume that either Nacho was not the right ?atita for American political matters or was rusty in his English.
A young woman sat among the ?atitas, with a small boy in her arms. “This is my first time here,” she admitted. “A friend told me it would help with university, and to keep my boy safe, so here I am.”
AT DINNER one night, Andres Bedoya, a friend of Paul’s and an artist from La Paz, warned me that I “should not make the mistake of thinking we are a homogenous culture here in Bolivia.” His latest works are burial shrouds, each taking five months to create, handcrafted of leather, nails, and thousands of golden disks. “The artisans of Bolivia are sometimes looked down on, as if what they produce is not ‘real’ art. It is art, of course, and I let that inspire me.”
Andres creates his shrouds for museums and galleries. In creating this “clothing for ghosts” he ritualizes his own grief, and the grief of others. He wouldn’t be opposed to actually burying someone in the shrouds, but has yet to do so. Bolivians may not be homogenous, but funeral customs around La Paz tend to follow prescribed patterns. A solemn, daylong wake is held in the home or funeral parlor. Families hire a local service to deliver a coffin, along with crosses and flowers that light up and glow neon purple (the Bolivian color of death). “Some people think the glowing purple is tacky or kitschy, but I love it,” Andres admitted. Burial happens the next day. The coffin is carried for a block behind the hearse before being loaded in and driven to the cemetery.
Andres’s mother died twenty-two years ago, and it was her wish to be cremated. Cremation in La Paz is growing in popularity, but until recently it was challenging to effectively cremate bodies there. At 12,000 feet, La Paz is the highest-altitude capital city in the world. The ovens “couldn’t get hot enough, there wasn’t enough oxygen,” Andres explained. Today’s machines achieve higher temperatures and thus can fully cremate a body.
Now that the technology is available, Andres considered exhuming his mother’s body to honor her desire to be cremated. Unfortunately, the cemetery would require that he come to identify her exhumed body in person. “Sure, I remember what she was wearing when we buried her, but I’d prefer not to have the memory of her bones. I don’t need to carry that with me,” he said.
It was his interest in death that led Andres to explore the culture of the ?atitas. November 8 is the Fiesta de las ?atitas, a chance for the owners of the ?atitas to bring out the skulls and display them. The party is not for the owners, but for the skulls themselves, making sure the ?atitas are esteemed and validated for the work they’ve done throughout the year. “One tends to be very romantic and say the whole festival should remain untouched. But if it were completely untouched, you or I wouldn’t be anywhere near it,” Andres said.
Though unknown in most of the world, “the festival has almost entered the pop culture realm here,” he explained. The General Cemetery, where the Fiesta de las ?atitas is held, was once the cemetery for the wealthy, but they have moved south. The city has made recent attempts at revitalizing the cemetery, commissioning murals by street artists on the sides of mausoleums and encouraging local tourism. On All Saints Day live theater is performed at night, and thousands of locals show up.