Death worship takes hold amid Mexican despair

D.E. Campbell writes in Foreign Policy:

Mictlantecuhtli in the Codex Borgia

The barrio of Tepito, where it's said that everything is for sale except dignity, has been one of Mexico City's roughest neighborhoods since Aztec times. Famous for its black market and its boxing champions, Tepito is a place where residents learn to fight early and fight hard. These days it has also become the epicenter of Mexico's fastest-growing faith: Santa Muerte, or Holy Death, a hybrid religion that merges Catholic symbolism with pre-Hispanic worship of the skeletal Mictlantecuhtli and Mictlancihuatl, Lord and Lady of the Dead.

I recently went there for an outdoor mass at one of Santa Muerte's first public shrines, founded eight years ago by a great-grandmother named Enriqueta Romero. When I visited in November, Romero placed a necklace with skull pendant around my neck as some 5,000 worshippers surged toward the glass-encased skeleton outside her house. Clad in a faded housedress, she told me that Mexico's Catholic churches stand empty while thousands of Holy Death shrines have spread across the country because "the church reprimands," but Santa Muerte never does. "She accepts everyone, with faults and without."