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La Santa Muerte

In total contrast to the above feature by Chico Sanchez, this post is about La Santa Muerte; a growing cult in Mexico whose core is the worship of the Santa Muerte or Holy Death, a kind of female incarnation of the Grim Reaper. In this short movie clip. Ioan Grillo and Journalist Daniel Hernandez go deep into Santa Muerte's spiritual center in Tepito, an old market neighborhood in the heart of Mexico City, which has long been associated with the criminal underworld to learn more about this new religious movement gaining traction at the fringe of Mexican culture.

This is extremely interesting to me as Tepito is the rough neighborhood of Mexico City where a couple of my students from the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop and I spent time in, photographing at some of the shrines of La Santa Muerte. Alex Espinosa, Christine Sommers and I photographed the very church and priest shown in the movie clip...and it's a deja vu for me, as it will be to them. We almost got mugged, but that's another story...

My gallery of photographs of La Santa Muerte is here.