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U of A anthropologist helps bring Mexican death goddess to life on big screen Kate Kingsbury consulted for accurate depiction of Santa Muerte in upcoming Will Smith movie ‘Bad Boys for Life.’
U of A anthropologist helps bring Mexican death goddess to life on big screen
Kate Kingsbury consulted for accurate depiction of Santa Muerte in upcoming Will Smith movie ‘Bad Boys for Life.’
Anthropologist Kate Kingsbury displays some of her collection of Santa Muerte icons, along with offerings including votive candles, flowers and tequila. (Photo: Michael Brown)
By GEOFF McMASTER
When the third instalment of the hit Bad Boys movie franchise featuring Will Smith opens next January, there’s a good chance producers will get the details right when the plot turns to the veneration of Santa Muerte, the female Mexican deity of death.
That’s because the film’s production company, Overbrook Entertainment, consulted with University of Alberta anthropologist Kate Kingsbury, an expert on a badass female folk figure that has exploded in popularity across Mexico over the past decade.
In the film, Bad Boys for Life, a female villain played by Mexican film star Kate del Castillo escapes from prison to seek revenge on Will Smith’s detective character and his partner, played by Martin Lawrence, for perceived harm done to her son.
The Castillo character is a devotee of Santa Muerte, complete with a shrine in her home. She burns candles and recites an incantation urging the saint to assist in her vengeful plans.
Kingsbury told the film’s producers the set design for the shrine must include colours associated with revenge (black), magic (purple) and protection (white), which are essential to the saint’s iconography. She also submitted a revenge prayer used by devotees with just the right shades of rage and bellicosity.
“My interest in Santa Muerte is that her devotees are primarily female,” said Kingsbury, who does research on female deities around the world.
“The old deities or saints are just no longer relevant for women in our time. If you look at Mary, for example, she's a very meek and mild figure and role model. Mexican women now face so much hardship, violence and poverty, that I think this figure is a lot more empowering."
Kingsbury first discovered Santa Muerte when she taught a course two years ago on conceptions of death around the world. She found the only scholarly book on the death goddess, Devoted to Death by Andrew Chesnut of Virginia Commonwealth University, and invited him to talk to her students.
That meeting led to a fruitful research collaboration, resulting in several publications and a planned book. While on vacation in Mexico, Kingsbury tracked down a shrine to the goddess on the outskirts of a small town called Pochutla in the southern region of Oaxaca. She was so fascinated, she came back a year later just to do research.
"Everywhere I went, I kept asking about Santa Muerte. Some people are really afraid of her, because the Pope has decried her worship as heretical. Everybody knows who she is, and some will say, ‘Be careful, she's satanic and you don't want to get involved in that.’
“Virgil said men make God in their own image,” said Kingsbury. “The argument I want to make in my book is that women make goddesses in theirs … reflecting their realities on the ground. Whatever the devotee is, they will make her into a reflection of that."
A death goddess is born
According to Kingsbury, Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte, or Our Lady of Holy Death—also known as Skeleton Saint or Saint Death—first emerged after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in the 16th century. The Spanish imposed Catholicism on Mexico’s Indigenous population, prohibiting veneration of their own religious figures on pain of death.
Along with Catholic icons such as Jesus and Mary, the conquistadors also imported the grim reaper, or “La Parca,” who is female in Spanish mythology. It’s why Santa Muerte carries a scythe and wears a long cloak.
"The Mexican people saw the grim reapress and identified her with their own death deities, imagining her as a death goddess,” said Kingsbury. “But because (it was) punishable by death, all of this went underground."
Santa Muerte doesn’t emerge in the anthropological record until the 1940s, when women in Oaxaca are found worshipping her, mainly for favours of love, said Kingsbury.
“But they were vengeful favours, especially to bring back an errant lover or straying husband, to punish him and bring him back humbled on his knees,” she explained.
"Her iconography is incredible, because it's a mix of so many different things—Catholicism, Aztec pre-Hispanic belief, even Cuban or Afro-Cuban religious elements.”
Death and life
Yet while Santa Muerte certainly represents death on one level, her appearance often portending one’s demise, she’s also seen as a healer, affirming life or “the coincidence of opposites,” said Kingsbury.
"Venerating her allows you to accept death should it come to you, but there are also lots of miraculous stories about her saving people from death."
Proper veneration includes offerings of flowers, tequila, tobacco and marijuana.
“Some people pour a glass of tequila for her, or light a cigarette or spliff and blow smoke in her face,” said Kingsbury, adding that Santa Muerte doesn’t mind if you partake yourself.
"And if you hate someone, you inscribe their initials on a black candle and light it," she added.
Most importantly, Santa Muerte is non-judgmental, even amoral, whereas Catholicism can be seen as judgmental and exclusionary, said Kingsbury. That indifference to social identity is what makes her so popular in gay communities, she added.
"Whether you're rich or poor, gay or straight, black or white, everyone's going to die.”
Her amoral nature has also attracted criticism, however, since she is believed to answer the prayers of drug dealers.
"You see a lot in the press about her being venerated by drug dealers who ask her to get their methamphetamine shipments across the border.”
At the same time, her popularity among women demonstrates she is far more in line with 21st-century female autonomy and agency, embodying strength, tenacity and a good dollop of female rage: “She’s known sometimes as a cabrona or puta—a real bitch,” said Kingsbury.
And though she may have inherited some of the Virgin Mary’s more nurturing qualities, “If you do not respect her, she will come down on you" with the full force of her wrath, Kingsbury noted.
Beyond simply inspiring Mexican women with her “grit, vim and vigour,” Santa Muerte’s popularity has allowed them to profit from her image, setting up shrines and shops, soliciting donations and selling all manner of candles and effigies.
“Her social status has accrued, and because of these shrines, people are visiting from far and wide."
Las Tlayudas: Oaxacan Perfectionists Culinary Backstreets
| Las Tlayudas: Oaxacan Perfectionists
We'd say that Montes and Mateos have done just that – the Oaxacan food at Las Tlayudas, the duo's restaurant in Colonia del Valle, is pretty much ...
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lex Montes and his business partner, Askari Mateos, have spent years fussing over their recipes for tlayudas: large, thin corn tortillas topped with various ingredients. So what is the secret to a great tlayuda? Montes thinks for a moment. “The asiento [the unrefined pork lard that covers the tortilla],” he finally says, “and the beans, always with avocado leaf.”
“The great thing about a restaurant,” he continues, “[is that] you make the same dish over and over so you have endless chances to perfect it.”
We’d say that Montes and Mateos have done just that – the Oaxacan food at Las Tlayudas, the duo’s restaurant in Colonia del Valle, is pretty much perfect. While their massive, crunchy tlayudas covered in tasajo, a kind of salted beef, and quesillo cheese are irresistible, we are equally enamored with the whole bean soup served with avocado leaf and a dollop of cream, and the guacamole with roasted crickets. According to Montes, it’s the chepiche herb that makes the latter so good; all we know is that we can’t stop fantasizing about this guacamole.
It all began, however, with tlayudas, a traditional Oaxacan street snack that dates back to pre-Hispanic Mexico. Back then, says Montes, these large tortillas – think thicker than a taco, thinner than a tostada – were more likely thought of as edible plates. Cooked on equally massive round grills called comals, the tortillas are slathered with a little bit of asiento and beans (famously refried with avocado leaf), and topped with a combination of tomato, quesillo cheese, avocado, various types of proteins and sometimes lettuce or cabbage.
“You make the same dish over and over so you have endless chances to perfect it.”
Mateos, Montes’ partner, began making tlayudas four stories up, at a late-night, clandestine rooftop restaurant that he started operating in 2010; he was selling them along with beer, mezcal and horchata – a traditional Oaxacan non-alcoholic drink. Mateos’ family was from Oaxaca and he had spent much of his childhood there. Montes, who at the time was working as a freelance film director, was one of his many devoted clients, calling up from the street below to be let up for a midnight tlayuda.
When Mateos got shut down a year later (you can only run a speakeasy-style restaurant for so long), the two friends decided to open up a tiny place in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma, where they would sell what had already proven to be a hit: tlayudas, beer, mezcal and horchata.
When Las Tlayudas opened, it was a pretty low-key affair, but as Mateos and Montes added recipes to the menu – chilaquiles with bean sauce, sweet plantain molletes, that to-die-for guacamole – their fame started to spread. Their tiny locale in Roma was packed late into the evening and started bustling again by breakfast the next day.
Tragedy struck, however, in 2017. The massive 7.1 magnitude earthquake that smashed up Mexico City on September 19 destroyed Las Tlayudas as well.
“Thank god there were no customers at that moment and just two cooks that were able to get out,” Montes soberly recalls. “Me personally, I thought maybe it was a sign I should do something else with my life. Then the staff told me they would all wait until we opened another location, all 12 of them, and I realized that the restaurant had taken on a life of its own.”
It was difficult to start again from scratch, and rents in Roma, a neighborhood hit hard by the quake, soared as local businesses scrambled to find new digs. But the partners eventually secured a space – a former lamp showroom (a hodgepodge of lamps still hangs in the back patio) – in neighboring Colonia Del Valle, and Las Tlayudas was reborn, a little bigger but with the same Oaxacan soul.
“I was so happy to see all our old customers come and find us, and now of course we have new customers too,” says Montes.
Part of their mission at Las Tlayudas is preserving and promoting Oaxacan food and recipes. They work closely with a local family in Oaxaca to source almost all of their ingredients, including Oaxacan craft beer and mezcal, which are shipped in every third day or so. While many things at the restaurant have changed in the past few years, this close connection with Oaxaca is one constant.
Of all the delicacies on the menu, the tlayuda is still their top seller (the tasajo version being the most popular), but the ice-cold horchata with bits of melon and pecan floating in its creamy depths is a close second.
Oaxaca is perhaps most famous for its staggering variety of moles, but the food here goes far beyond that iconic dish. While Oaxacans living in Mexico City search out Las Tlayudas for a taste of home, the rest of us come for a delicious taste of (and insight into) the cuisine of southern Mexico – and a master class about what makes the perfect tlayuda.
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