Popular Religion and the Use of Public Space in Mexico City

Abstract

Popular religions have their own ways of expression and appropriation of the public space; both are expressed in a self-build city, that means a urban context where the population, mainly rural migrants and indigenous people, has found a place to own. Throughout the analysis of a community within Iztapalapa, a peripheral borough, I want to show how in the expression of popular religions, such as popular Catholicism, Pentecostalism, La Luz del Mundo, and the cult to La Santa Muerte, there is a particular value of public spaces as places of expression, transmission of rituals and religious beliefs that cannot not be manifested in the middle class and high class communities. This analysis was made through a field research (2009-2011) to place the types of religiosity expressed in a specific religious territory. In this study, the city is observed as a space of racial and religious division, understood within social, economic, and cultural differences that make Mexico City a space of inequality, with different forms of religious and cultural expressions. These ways of manifestation re-enact the local celebrations of some of the migrants’ places of origin; this way they reinvent new ways of diffusion and religious experience by making their beliefs public and experiencing plural religious trajectories, they leave behind , partially or totally, catholic beliefs without abandoning cultural forms of religious expression. The importance of this discovery is that very few times an association is made between the racialization of space within the city and the religiosity in public space that comes from peripheral conditions of marginalization and poverty in order to understand better the particular religious phenomena.