Mexico’s Mix of Folklore and Faith

Juan Castillo Morales’ ascension to popular sainthood began when he faced a firing squad on a dusty hilltop in February 1938. The volley that ended his earthly life began his resurrection as Juan Soldado, or John Soldier, the unofficial patron saint and protector of illegal immigrants.

Martyrdom may seem a bizarre fate for a penniless soldier accused of the rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl. Castillo claimed he was framed by a superior who actually committed the crime.

For the modern pilgrims who venerate him, however, Juan Soldado is a reigning Everyman, an unjustly victimized underdog whose destiny was a living illustration of the Latin American saying that “the law is a snake that bites the barefoot.”

As Tijuana became a main gateway for illegal immigrants, Juan Soldado was somehow immortalized as their guardian angel, their guide through treacherous border badlands and the bewildering maze of American officialdom.

Juan Soldado is one of countless Latin American folk saints whose cults flourish without the benefit of Catholic Church recognition or approval. He shares the borderlands with a decidedly populist pantheon whose checkered careers blur conventional distinctions between sinner and saint.

There is the Santa de Cabora, who inspired Indian uprisings before the Mexican Revolution. And Jesus Malverde, a Robin Hood-style outlaw known as the patron saint of drug traffickers.

Their followings tap deeply into faith, folklore and modern sociology.

Throngs of Southern California immigrant families flocked to Juan Soldado’s shrine for his recent annual celebration. As strolling musicians filled the air with mariachi and Banda, supplicants--some on their knees--made their way down the stony cemetery path to his crypt, three blocks south of the U.S.-Mexico border.

They wound through the forest of tombstones to his cave-like sacred grotto, built into the hillside on his supposed execution site.

Demetrio Ochoa, an Anaheim factory worker and a devout Catholic, came in dress slacks, sunglasses and gold chains, bearing coolers of refreshments. In 1965, he said, when he was working illegally in Orange County, he called on Juan Soldado as he bolted from two Border Patrol agents. Hiding under a pile of garbage, Ochoa prayed to him silently. Later, when he filed for amnesty, he asked “Juanito” for divine intervention. His request was approved.

“I found a better life, and I owe it all to Juan Soldado,” said Ochoa.

He walked through the brick passageway to the tiny, kaleidoscopic chapel at Juan Soldado’s grave. As he prayed, candlelight flickered over weathered photocopies of green cards and approved amnesty requests, flowers and busts of Juan Soldado, letters pleading for a lifeline. One of the chiseled granite plaques bolted to his tomb summed up a leitmotif: “Thank you, Juan Soldado, for helping me with my immigration.”

Clergy members are clearly irritated by the unauthorized hagiography, but they try to be diplomatic.

“The church does not have a very high opinion of the cult of Juan Soldado,” said Father Salvador Cisneros, the soft-spoken rector of the Sacred Heart Seminary in downtown Tijuana. “The Church views it as something closer to a superstition, or a false gospel, than an authentic religious movement.”

Cisneros finds Juan Soldado’s beatification unthinkable. Candidates must demonstrate exemplary, saintly lives. Their miracles must be well-documented. Cisneros sighed.

“This is a saint whose main miracle is helping people cross into the United States without papers,” he said. “The church also doubts his innocence, though there is no real evidence either way. It’s all conjecture on the part of the people.”

But faith, by its very nature, is stubborn. Official disdain does little to dampen the adoration of people like 57-year-old Rosario de Baron. She endured 24 hours on the bus from La Paz, in Baja California Sur, to thank Juan Soldado for helping her son kick cocaine.

Elisa Peynado, 62, says she has made the annual 30-hour bus pilgrimage from Mazatlan for 25 years. Juan Soldado once got her son and the family car back from corrupt police.

Pablo Ochoa, 75, credits Juan Soldado with bringing 10 undocumented Ochoas to Anaheim and getting them all amnesty. “These saints are sent to help us,” he said, leaning against a tombstone to catch his breath. “We are faithful Catholics and we are devoted to him. How can the church oppose someone who has done so much for us?”

Sociologists say many new-wave Mexican immortals arose during the turbulent years after the 1910-17 revolution, a time when Catholic leaders--viewed as allies of the wealthy upper classes--were exiled, persecuted and bound by restrictive laws. Folk saints were cast as protagonists of highly secular existential dramas and were often very anti-establishment.

Jesus Malverde, the narcosanto, is a good compromise for those who find sinners more interesting than saints. Originally a turn-of-the century outlaw named Jesus Mazo, he supposedly robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Today, he has a shrine in the notorious drug trafficking capital of Culiacan, Sinaloa. His effigy adorns the small-town Sinaloa family chapel of Mexico’s most powerful drug lord, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who died earlier this month.

There is a more modest Jesus Malverde highway shrine a few miles from Tijuana. And downtown, outside of the city’s cathedral, vendors sell braided leather necklaces bearing Malverde’s stern visage along with pious images of Jesus Christ. “People say he is the patron of narcotics traffickers,” said Benito Avila, the vendor, sheepishly. “But they want him, so I stock him.”

The Santa de Cabora was born Teresa Urrea, the daughter of an unmarried farm girl and a landowner. At 16, historians say, she apparently fell into a brief trance. It was interpreted as a holy state by thousands of Christianized Indians who were being forced from ancestral lands under the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship. With no encouragement from Urrea, historians say, her name became the battle cry of these “Teresistas” in a string of pre-revolutionary uprisings, and was dubbed the Mexican Joan of Arc. Exiled, her legendary healing powers followed her to California and Arizona, where she died a cult figure in 1902.

“People feel close to these people, because they reflect their own human condition,” said Miguel Escobar, a novelist from the border state of Sonora, who is a Mexican diplomat in California.

Theologians say many recognized religious figures began as folk heroes.

“The history of Christianity has many instances of God making himself known through people who are uneducated, uninfluential--in other words, poor. God seems to speak to them,” said Father Allan Figueroa Deck, coordinator of Hispanic Pastoral Studies at the Jesuit Loyola Marymount University. “Jesus Christ came from a very marginal current of Galilean Jews, and most of his followers were fishermen and poor people.”

The Spanish clergy in Latin America, besieged by native American and African religions it never managed to completely eradicate, initially rejected nearly all popular religious figures. That may have converted some into symbols of New World nationalism. Mexican independence fighters hoisted banners of the most revered symbol of Mexican Catholicism, the Virgin of Guadalupe, as they rode into battle against Spanish troops. Many years later, her banner was raised by Latino farm workers in marches with Cesar Chavez.

“These folk saints are very subversive,” said Maria Herrera-Sobek, a professor of Chicano studies at UC Santa Barbara. “They become powerful symbols that can unite people.”

Some pre-Colombian religious traditions were incorporated into Christianity during the Spanish Conquest, modern Catholic Church scholars say.

During the Conquest, a ruthless campaign to impose Catholicism was waged. Churches were built atop the rubble of wrecked pyramids, sacred scrolls were burned and fertility goddesses were replaced with more circumspect Virgins. Many ancient deities survived, though, through their fusion with Christian traditions.

Many theologians say the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s universally revered 16th century apparition of a brown-skinned Virgin Mary, was probably rooted in an Aztec precursor. The hill of Tepeyac--in what is now Mexico City--where the Virgin was reportedly sighted, was originally the shrine of the Aztec mother of the gods, known as Tonantzin. Many Mexicans today call the Virgin of Guadalupe Tonantzin, which means “our mother.”

“It wasn’t destroying the Indians’ faith, but building on it,” said Humberto Ramos, the pastoral coordinator of the San Gabriel region of the Los Angeles archdiocese.

Other popular religious figures have also achieved recognition. There is Santa Rosa de Lima--a patron of South America. Yet San Martin de Porres, the first black saint in the Americas, was not officially canonized until 1962--hundreds of years after he was adopted as the patron of Peru’s sick and poor.

Others probably don’t have a prayer, like Argentine romantic revolutionary “Che” Guevara, enshrined as “San Ernesto de La Higuera” by some peasant farmers in the Bolivian village where he was executed 30 years ago.

Not all populist religious movements deserve serious consideration, clergy members say. Cautioned Father Deck of Loyola Marymount: “Some have more to do with mass hysteria and social psychology than God. They deserve to be scoffed at.”

Yet in an era of immigrant scapegoating and Proposition 187, it is easy to see why immigrants, especially illegal ones, might identify with Juan Soldado, he said.

“Like him, they feel they too are unjustly accused. There are important lessons to be learned in why people are so devoted to [Juan Soldado]. The people who believe in him are the church.”

And the people who believe in Juan Soldado also apparently have not heard of the handful of modern Catholic church patrons of immigrants who have been canonized or beatified this century, said Louis Velasquez, director of the Los Angeles archdiocese’s office of Hispanic ministry.

“Not many people would recognize their names,” Velasquez conceded. “There’s the institutional church and the street church. Sometimes the institutional saints don’t make it to the streets. Juan Soldado made it to the streets.”

What Juan Soldado symbolizes is far easier to pinpoint than the sketchy facts of his demise in 1938. Tijuana was still in its infancy, a border backwater of about 17,000. U.S. Prohibition had lifted and Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas had outlawed casino gambling, ending the city’s belle epoque as a Hollywood playground. Many lost jobs.

When the bloody body of Olga Consuela Camacho was dumped near Tijuana’s military base in mid-February, news of the heinous crime ignited the tense city.

How the young soldier from Jalisco was blamed is unclear. Some accounts say Juan Soldado was ordered to recover the body by a general or colonel who then pinned the crime on him. Juan Soldado’s wife supposedly testified against him.

A lynch mob grew. Authorities organized a hasty court-martial and firing squad. Modern lore has it that he was given a chance to run, and was shot trying to scramble out of Panteon No. 1, Tijuana’s first cemetery. Some say his dying words were salty curses for his executioners.

Defenders of Juan Soldado say the real killer was transferred to a Chihuahua base, where a number of child molestation cases soon were reported.

The little girl’s grave, down the street in Panteon No. 2, is seldom visited, cemetery workers say.

At Juan Soldado’s June 24 celebration, people lined up at Luis Iglesias’ stall to buy a raft of reliquaries: painted busts, statuettes, pinatas, candles, refrigerator magnets, portraits in pink-and-yellow clear-plastic frames, key chains and accordion-like prayer books that snap shut.

Tijuana television worked the crowd.

Juan Soldado scholars provided live spin.

“What he’s basically doing is telling the Border Patrol to stick it, and that’s what makes him so powerful,” said Albert Pulido, assistant professor of American Studies at Arizona State University West in Phoenix. Pulido has researched the phenomenon for several years.

Most revelers were devotees, whose families have taken their faith over borders and into urban America.

Mexican-born Vilma Gamarro, 37, of Montebello, says she has prayed at the Tijuana shrine since Juan Soldado cured her heart condition and alleviated her chronic asthma in 1985. “He helps all immigrants,” said Gamarro, who works at a Los Angeles party planning firm.

Historians say the legacy of Juan Soldado, however unauthorized, may prove as tenacious as illegal immigration itself.

“Juan Soldado is the martyr of everyone who feels scorned, unjustly blamed and victimized by their station in life,” said Antonio Padilla, staff researcher at Tijuana’s Center for Historic Research. “Who feels that more deeply than immigrants?”