Hitchhiking in Mexico Part 5: The City of Dolls, Wrestlers, and Saints
Why is there a plastic doll on that tree?
Friends,
Welcome back to The Mundane Exotic, the (not-so) monthly newsletter of travel stories, essays, and explorations of the odd in the everyday.
Today’s post concludes the travel story of hitch-hiking in Mexico. In 2014, a friend1 and I raised our thumbs, took rides from strangers, and zig-zagged around the country for 1,800 miles or so. Along the way, we met some fantastic people, evaded some questionable people, and visited everything from a surreal sculpture garden in the jungle to a ghost town in the desert.
Below is part 5, the final part. Part 4 is here. I hope you enjoy 🇲🇽
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In the 1950s a young girl drowned in a canal near the house of Julian Santana Barrera. A few days later, Barrera spotted a doll floating in the exact spot in the water where the young girl just lost her life. For Barrera, that doll was the spirit of the dead girl.
He pulled the spirit doll from the canal, dried it off, and hung it up. As the weeks and months went by, he added more… some rescued by him, others donated by neighbors. Barrera placed these dolls around altars, on walls, and fastened some to trees.
By most accounts, Julian Barrera was a hermit of sorts, a loner content to live by himself on the island. In 2001 he died, allegedly drowning in the same canal, at the same spot, as the girl whose death changed his life over 50 years before.
Soon after his death, however, the visitors that he shunned in life came to see the shrine he left behind: La Isla de las Muñecas (The Island of Dolls).
The odd little island floats in the canals of Xochimilco in southern Mexico City. To reach it, you and S. rent one of the colorful trajineras that line the Xochimilco docks, meandering down the canal between clusters of water lilies, other boats, and the banks of small islands.
These “islands” were built by human hands over 1,000 years ago. Locals dug up glob-upon-glob of muddy earth and piled them into huge mounds that rose above the water. These “chinampas” provided food to the growing Aztec Empire.
Floating by now, you see cows graze, kids cackle, and the odd stalk of maize. As the boat driver pulls up to the dock of La Isla de las Muñecas, you also an unsettling amount of plastic dolls hanging from trees. Climbing out onto the macabre little island, you and S. spend the better part of an hour walking around and taking in their frozen expressions.
The painted walls are cracked and weathering, as if something’s trying to escape. According to local lore, the dolls move around the island at night.
You don’t wait around to see.
A few miles north of the canals lives another kind of venerated spirit: the folk saint Santa Muerte. In Tepito — a rough Mexican City neighborhood known for counterfeit goods and real robberies — the quesadilla saleswoman Doña Queta opened a shrine on All Saints Day in 2001.
Inside, she housed a life-sized statue of Santa Muerte. Also known as “Most Holy Death” or “The Bony Lady,” Santa Muerte is a mixture of European influences like the Grim Reaper and Aztec influences like Mictlantecuhtli.
Written records of Santa Muerte trace back to the 1790s when Spanish Inquisitors described their attempts to stamp her out, pushing her underground for the next 150 years or so.2
In the 1940s, however, Santa Muerte reappeared in the written record as a Love Saint. Wives and girlfriends who suspected their husbands and boyfriends of cheating would ask Santa Muerte for help. Lighting a red candle, they would say a prayer:
O Lord San La Muerte
I implore you that I won’t suffer because of love at any stage of my life.
I now ask you to bring [first and last name] to me so that I’m not unhappy.
Don’t let anything detain him or delay him from coming to my arms, his heart joined to mine.
Together [first and last name] and I can enjoy love and passion that never ends as long as we’re together. I put my deep faith in you to be able to live to the fullest with love and with You, my Lord of Death.3
Although lighting a red candle and saying a love prayer is one of the more popular ways to appeal to The Bony Lady, it’s far from the only. Alongside love, different candles and prayers promise devotees help with the law (green), business (gold), purity (white), healing (purple), or the protection of an international shipment of cocaine (black).
The last one, for obvious reasons, has led to notoriety. In the eyes of many, Santa Muerte is simply a “narco-saint,” and so in the early 2000s, Mexican authorities demolished dozens of shrines on the Texas-Mexico border.
Although there’s truth to it — the infamous kidnapper “Ear Chopper” brought a shrine of her to his prison cell — the truth is also a bit more complex. Death eventually comes for everyone, but she shows up a hell of a lot more for those in the brutal world of drug trafficking.
So, in a bid to survive another day, everyone from drug mules to street dealers to cartel heads pray to Santa Muerte for help. Lighting a black candle, they might down a shot of tequila (like Maximon, she’s a deity you can drink with), and say a prayer:
Most Holy Death knock my enemies down to my feet
Show them no mercy
Turn their worst fear into their nightmares
Because you protect me and take care of me4
Alongside narcos, Santa Muerte is open to hearing prayers from those shunned by polite society (drug addicts, sex workers) and those embraced by it (doctors, lawyers, students). As Dr. Cressida Stone said on a recent podcast, “we are all walking skeletons.”
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With a pocketful of pesos — “bring some mug money,” a fellow backpacker advised — you and S. take your walking skeletons to the Mexico City subway bound for Tepito.
As the subway doors open, you wind your way through a densely packed marketplace, walking past popcorn, clothes, tacos, a hell of a lot of counterfeit DVDs, and a whispered offer for cocaine.
“Santa Muerte?” a vendor asks after seeing you and S. on the edge of the street looking lost.
You nod. The vendor points.
Across the street from a tortilla shop with barred windows, you find Santa Muerte’s shrine. She stands behind a glass box wearing a green gown, her jet black hair falling down far past her shoulders. From her neck dangles a cross, and all around her lies an eclectic mix of toys, icons, skulls, grim reapers, necklaces, and champagne glasses. On a low altar before her is a few bottles of Cracken Rum, the rising smoke of incense, endless cigarettes, some eggplants, and the melted forms of burnt candles.
As you look around, you expect to see rough characters with gang tattoos. You don’t. Instead, you see a middle-aged woman wearing a t-shirt that reads “you will always be remembered” below the picture of a small boy. She holds a candle and grieves.
You keep that image in mind when walking back to the Tepito marketplace. You also remember to hop on the subway before nightfall when, as Dona Queta so eloquently put it, “all the fucking thieves and thugs” come around.
A few days later, you and S. see a kind of secular prayer to another folk deity: the Spandex Gods.
On a Tuesday night in Arena Mexico, luchadores (wrestlers) descend the grand staircase leading to the ring. Beneath a neon jumbotron blasting their greatest hits, the luchadores hype up or piss off the packed crowd before diving into the ring.
The fights begin.
Over next few hours, luchadores wearing Chewbacca furs, coiled pythons, gelled hair, and an array of evocative masks, slap, taunt, kick, and flip each other as the audience cheers and jeers.
Each luchador takes on a unique persona, a word tracing back to the Latin word for "mask". Fittingly enough, many of the luchadores wear actual masks and the much-feared "unmasking" that might happen if you lose a match can have devastating effects on their career or signal a shift into a new persona.
A luchador’s "real identity" becomes so merged with their wrestling persona that the most famous luchador of all time, El Santo, wore his mask in public. He died shortly after unmasking himself on TV.
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Although Lucha Libre wrestling is partly a cheesy, bread-and-circus distraction, it’s also more nuanced. When the luchadores take on their personas and battle each other — generally, the luchadores are divided into técnicos, or "the good ones" who follow rules, and rudos, or the "the evil ones" who break the rules — they provide a way for people to appreciate principles like Good vs Evil or Chaos vs Order in an entertaining way.
"Good" and "Evil" are very heady concepts, abstractions that don't exist in the "real world" but what does exist in the "real world" is a muscular badass with a python wrapped around his neck who slaps the referee. Through him, the crowd understands Evil.
Who will prevail?
For tonight’s match, it’s Máximo, an exótico luchador who wins the match shortly after kissing his archenemy rudo. The crowd roars with laughter as the rudo reels with disgust, swearing revenge. When the referee raises Máximo’s hand to announce victory, the crowd applauds and cheers for this unlikely winner.
The prayer and veneration of dolls, saints, and wrestlers might strike some as “weird.” Searching for the weird was what guided you and S. when you first started this 1,800-mile trip zigzagging across Mexico, from Palenque to Oaxaca to Veracruz to Guanajuato to Real de Catorce and back down to Mexico City.
Along the way you saw some certifiably weird things, such as Edward James’ sculpture park in the jungle. Yet when you look back on it, the weirdest thing was also the most ordinary — the fact that every day, you could stand on the side of the road, raise a thumb, and reasonably expect a collection of complete strangers to drive two dusty backpackers across a foreign land.
Although you ran into some trouble, 99% of people weren’t out to kidnap you. Instead, they were out to offer you a sandwich, tell you a story, or simply share space in a car on a journey a little further down the road.
In a country mired in extreme violence and exaggerated PR, that’s weird.
… also, the island full of dolls was pretty fuckin’ odd.
Andrew Chestnut, Devoted to Death
Andrew Chestnut, Devoted to Death
Andrew Chestnut, Devoted to Death
Great chapter - sounds a little eery almost!
Awesome story. What adventure!