Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint

R. Andrew Chesnut is a scholar of Latin American religion, and this Oxford University Press book is his scholarly study of the cult of Santa Muerte, the folk saint of death venerated across Mexico and increasingly in the United States. Its strength is that Chesnut conducted direct fieldwork among devotees and situates the cult's rapid recent growth within Mexico's social and economic conditions, making the book the standard academic reference on the subject. Its limit is that Santa Muerte devotion continues to change quickly, so a claim about the cult's most current scale or practice should be checked against more recent reporting or scholarship alongside this still standard 2012 study.