This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mexican Folk Deities gathers three folk saints venerated in Mexico and among Mexican communities abroad, each sustained entirely by popular devotion rather than institutional sanction, and none of them a survival of any pre-Columbian tradition.
Santa Muerte is a skeletal female figure addressed as a saint by her devotees and petitioned for protection, healing, love and a good death. The devotion is large, growing and public, with home altars, street shrines and rosaries said in her name, drawing heavily on Catholic form while standing outside Catholic approval. She has never been canonized, no Catholic process has ever considered her, and the Catholic hierarchy in Mexico and at the Vatican has publicly condemned the devotion, both facts this atlas records without adjudicating between them.
Jesus Malverde is venerated chiefly in Sinaloa and increasingly beyond it, credited by devotees with granting favours, healing and protection to the poor, and known outside Mexico above all for his association with drug traffickers, who regard him as a patron figure despite the Church never having recognised him. Popular legend casts him as a bandit turned benefactor executed in the early twentieth century, a hagiography scholars treat as unverifiable. Juan Soldado is venerated especially around Tijuana, based on the historical figure of Juan Castillo Morales, a soldier executed in 1938 for a murder many devotees hold was a miscarriage of justice with the real culprit protected by rank. He is invoked today by migrants, the poor and those in trouble with the law, a devotion the Church has never recognized. All three devotions exist in tension with institutional Catholicism rather than descending from it.