This series of images, taken over the course of six months, documents the street altars dotted around Mexico’s dense, urbanized capital, home to over twenty-one million people. I first noticed the altars on my early morning commute. Walking to the Metrobús from my home in Colonia Escandón to travel to the south of the city, I was struck by the little flickering lights on street corners that pierced the darkness. After this I began to notice altars everywhere I went: on the sides of roads, in parks, markets, and shops, next to taxi stands, outside metro stations, by street food vendors, and on top of phone boxes. I discovered them in the affluent neighborhoods of La Condesa and San Ángel and, more commonly, in poorer areas of the city such as Doctores, Tláhuac, and Tepito.

The never-ending stream of people, traffic, and noise in big cities creates a sense of anonymity, especially for foreigners.  The sprawling, chaotic metropolis of Mexico City can create a feeling of invisibility. The street altars, existing as part of the urban landscape of the city, stand in contrast to this detachment. Although only on very seldom occasions have I seen people interact directly with the altars, they feel to me to be individual and deeply personal, each has its own distinct character. I have never seen a defaced or vandalized altar. On the contrary, the altars are beautifully maintained, decorated with fresh flowers, lit candles, electric lights, and tinsel. Little figurines, framed prints, or prayer cards of the Virgin of Guadalupe or San Judás Tadeo (Saint Judas Thaddaeus) are most commonly found inside the altars. Sometimes curtains made from velvet or netting hang in front of the altars. In some cases stars and flowers are painted on the walls behind them.

By talking to some altar tenders, I discovered the enormous pride taken in caring for them. In a mechanic shop on José Martí Avenue in Colonia Escandón (just south of La Condesa), Jacob described how he and the other workers care for the altar dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe that sits up high on the back wall of the large workspace (Fig. 1). They take turns cleaning the altar and buying fresh flowers for it every fifteen days. He tells me that the red nochebuenas (poinsettias) and the yellow crisantemos (chrysanthemums) that decorate the altar are a symbol of Mexico. For Jacob, Guadalupe symbolizes the mother. He loves and gives thanks to the altar of Guadalupe in the same way that he would to his mother, “bringing flowers, cleaning it, crossing myself in front of it is all about giving thanks."1

Further down José Martí Avenue, the men working in the Hidrosina gas station call over their colleague Judith Caballero who—along with two other workers—is responsible for taking care of the gas station’s altar (Fig.15). She tells us that every Tuesday one of the altar’s three tenders cleans it and buys flowers for it at the market. It is then that same person’s responsibility to take care of the altar for the week. Judith tells us that the altar used to sit in the office upstairs but she decided to bring it outside so that everyone could see it. Judith prays to Guadalupe every day, giving thanks for everything in her life and making requests to the Virgin, such as for her health or for good grades for her children. “She is my mother,” says Judith of Guadalupe, “mine and of all of the Mexican people.”2

***

Mexico is home to the second largest Catholic population in the world—ninety-six million Catholics live in Mexico, almost eighty-five percent of the country’s population.3 Mexican Catholicism is specific in that it encompasses and absorbs local practices and reflects Mexico’s particular history. Religious symbols, rituals, and meanings have been infused with influences of pre-Hispanic, Nahua culture. The legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe exemplifies the presence of older traditions in Mexican Catholicism. According to the legend, in 1531, the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego, a neophyte Indian, and spoke to him in Nahuatl on the hill of Tepeyec—the same place pilgrims came to worship Tonantzin, the Aztec goddess of fertility and nurturing. Images of the Virgin of Guadalupe also bear physical features that have been interpreted as non-European. Her brown skin has drawn similarities to Tonantzin, one of the many goddesses worshiped by the Aztec people. Today, Guadalupe is not just a religious icon but has become an important symbol of Mexican identity.4

Mexican Catholicism reflects not only Mexico’s past, but also the country’s current political and social context. Cults of devotion to saints and images of the Virgin or Christ are common forms of practice, from local or regional saints to ones venerated on a national level. After the Virgin of Guadalupe, the image most frequently found in the street altars is of the green-and-white-cloaked San Judas Tadeo (Saint Jude), known globally as the patron saint of lost causes. Since the 1980s, disenfranchised urban youth in Mexico City have adopted San Judas Tadeo as their own, often referring to him as the patron saint of “gangsters” or a “narco-saint.”5 Similarly, worship of La Santa Muerte, the folk saint of death, has surged in popularity in the last decade, especially amongst marginalized sectors of society. Devotion to La Santa Muerte is said to be the fastest growing new religious movement in the Americas.6 As Jennifer Scheper Hughes describes, the rise in popularity of these so-called “narco-saints” has occurred within a context of religious and social upheaval, including the institutional dismantling of liberation theology and the Mexican church’s turn to the right, as well as the country’s decade-long drug war, which has brought extraordinary violence to many communities in Mexico.7

***

These altars, which punctuate the urban landscape of the city, form part of Mexico’s rich, religious visual culture. On the one hand, they perform a traditional apotropaic function by protecting spaces from danger, both physical and supernatural. As María Ana Portal, professor of Anthropology at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico, describes, the altars are believed to prevent evil spirits from hurting people.8 I have also found altars to be particularly common in traditional places of “danger,” especially connected to transport, such as gas stations, mechanics, parking lots, bus stations, and on the sides of busy roads.

But their presence also reflects the fallout from rapid urabn development in the city in the past decades. According to María Ana Portal, the growth, inequality, and urbanization of the city, as well as the market liberalization of the economy over the last fifty years, have complicated traditional ideas of belonging. As a result, she argues, public altars are a way of appropriating—giving meaning to—the public sphere in a time of chaos, insecurity, and instability. Described by Portal as the “symbolic sacralization of the public sphere,” altars are not just symbols of communal memory—a connection between the past and present—but form boundaries and forge a sense of belonging in the modern, globalized world.9

In her Object Narrative about François Aubert’s iconic Carte-de-visite Photograph of Maximilian von Habsburg’s Execution Shirt, Eleanor Laughlin describes vividly both its intimate and its wide-reaching allures (Fig. 2). As she explains, the carte-de-visite had political and commemorative powers “offering the living both visual and tactile connections to the deceased.”10  And, even as an object of mourning, it offered a broad international public access to this major political event. But even more than this she writes, it also “functioned in the Mexican religious context as a relic or object of reverence.”11  In The Resolution of the Suspect (Fig. 1), photographer Miki Kratsman builds on the reliquary nature and the transitive qualities of the carte-de-visite, creating a diptych: the historic image on one page of the centerfold and his own photograph of the bloody garment of a single unnamed Palestinian martyr on the other.12 Kratsman asks if a “Christian reverence for relics” might interrupt the pervasive indifference to Palestinian suffering in the present.13  He asks why it is so difficult to call attention to the violence that is contemporary Palestinian life and death under Israeli occupation. Not only does he build on the indexical nature of photography and its relation both to mourning and commemoration, Kratsman taps into the promise of contemporary photography as reliquary.

As Laughlin explains, articles of clothing can absorb sacred presence, as in the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, transferred directly onto the cloak of Juan Diego, “saturating the cloth with the visible presence of the divine.”14  The carte-de-visite itself took on this reliquary function in remembrance of the executed emperor. The Resolution of the Suspect offers a range of haunting images about the horrors of Israeli occupation; as Kratsman’s collaborator and scholar of visual culture Ariella Azoulay explains in her introduction to Kratsman’s work, Kratsman’s photographs tell a terrible tale about “the drama of portrait-making in circumstances wherein certain people—an entire population of individuals—are doomed to appear under the resolution of the suspect.”15  Although Kratsman’s photographs include images of Palestinians marked for abuse and often death, the book centers on targeted subjects, shuhaded, martyrs whose stories can only be told, in some instances, through the soiled garments left behind.16

Kratsman’s diptych offers starkly contrasting images. The execution documented by the Aubert photograph was a major public event. It elicited responses from around the globe and resulted in significant consequences for the governance of Mexico. The photograph itself, as Laughlin points out, became part of this event and served as both a trophy and an object of mourning. By contrast, the Palestinians executed by Israelis often live and die in relative anonymity, commemorated only by their families and their communities through martyr posters.17  The global attitude towards Israeli aggression against Palestinians is largely one of apathy, and Palestinians themselves are disillusioned by the failure of so many images of suffering to garner international empathy, much less bring about change. Where Maximilian was a famous colonial emperor, the Palestinian referred to in Kratsman’s photograph, like all of those depicted in his book, are unknown, powerless over the fate of their lives and their homes.18

Kratsman’s color print appears at the center of the left side of the two-page spread.  It depicts a level of violence that the carte-de-visite does not. The historical shirt is hung neatly, stoically, in sepia tones against a simple backdrop; the contemporary garment is distended, the fabric pulled in opposite directions. The quiet solemnity of the carte-de-visite contrasts with the too-bright flash in the Kratsman photo. The angle of the composition is awry as if done in a hurry.19

Kratsman carefully placed the two photographs together within the pages of his sketchbook, and then added his English annotations in bright red marker, re-photographing the open double-page spread. He barely annotated his own photograph. Just above it he wrote in capital letters “Late Photography,” a reference to the concept of the “late photograph,” an idea developed over the past decades to describe photographs taken in the aftermath of tragic events, which furnish evidence of violence, but offer minimal commentary.20  Here too there is no commentary. Even Azoulay neglects to mention this diptych in her introduction. Instead, this late photograph simply suggests the fate of all the other Palestinians depicted in this book.

The carte-de-visite occupies the opposite page, carefully reproduced. Its sepia tones echo the aging blood that stained Maximilian’s once-white shirt a rusty brown. These colors contrast sharply with both the contemporary photograph and Kratsman’s fresh red annotations. This text runs not only above the image of Maximilian’s shirt but also along its side, disturbing what is otherwise a more formal composition. In capital letters, Kratsman wrote, “Although Aubert wasn’t allowed to photograph the actual execution, he at least managed to document the 'scene of the crime’ afterwards . . .”21  An additional text runs down the inside seam of the page. To read this text one must turn the book ninety degrees or twist one’s head to see the words clearly. There, in the same shaky handwriting, Kratsman wrote, “In the tradition of Christian reverence for relics, Aubert placed the Emperor’s shirt in the center of his composition.”22  And Kratsman, echoing Aubert, placed this diptych in the center of his book.

Although the notion of the contact relic articulated by Laughlin originates in a Christian legacy of the reverence for objects and their representation, the allure of relics is much more pervasive.23  Part of what made the carte-de-visite of Maximilian’s shirt so powerful was an abiding sense of the sacred nature of both clothing and its representation as holders of vital matter. In the case of the carte-de-visite, the “portrait-like representation of the shirt” itself suggests, as Laughlin makes clear, “a transfer of power from the actual shirt to its image.” Kratsman’s overt invocation of this reverence brings the late photograph into contact with this legacy.

Describing Aubert’s nineteenth-century photograph, art historian Graham Smith writes, “Pinned to the crossbeam of a window, the shirt is presented like the target it was, and forms a bleak, artless image whose main purpose seems to be to inventory the bullet holes.”24  And yet, it is much more than this. Smith himself draws connections between the carte-de-visite photograph and not only the Emperor’s own self-fashioning as a martyr but the Christian iconography of the photographer. Smith shows how Aubert’s image draws on seventeenth-century Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán’s famous depictions of saints. In reference to one of these paintings, The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion, Smith writes, “Because Serapion’s head and hands are almost completely hidden in shadow, the habit becomes a surrogate for the saint and represents his martyrdom in much the same way that Maximilian’s shirt signifies the emperor’s execution” (Fig. 3).

Kratsman’s explicit invocation of this Christian tradition serves as a connective tissue between the two portions of the diptych and his broader project. Together these conflicting images, an aging relic of an Emperor and the portrait of the jacket of a contemporary Palestinian shahid, ask us to reconsider this “reverence for relics.” What might it mean, Kratsman asks, to see this work in light of the Christian tradition of veneration that Laughlin and Smith each describe? By giving new life and new urgency to this legacy, Kratsman attempts to speak to a contemporary global audience about violence, vulnerability, and political power. His recirculation of the carte-de-visite challenges us to ask who gets to be a martyr and what a contemporary martyr looks like.

The author wishes to thank Emily Floyd for her deft editorial work on this essay. She is also grateful to Ruth Ost and the two anonymous readers for their suggestions and critical engagement.

In 1929, on her first visit to New Mexico, the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) observed the animate potential of the region’s religious material culture. While in Taos that summer, O’Keeffe occupied La Casa Rosita, the guesthouse at the compound of her friend and patron Mabel Dodge Luhan. From her room and studio O’Keeffe had a clear view north to Taos Mountain, as well as to the morada (meetinghouse) of the Hermanos de la Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno (also known as the “Penitentes”), which was situated between them.25 A contemporary photograph in Mabel Luhan’s papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Library shows one of the three crosses that stood beside the Penitente morada, with the undulating ridge of the Sangre de Cristo range visible in the distance (Fig. 2).26  Because Mabel’s husband, Tony Luhan, was Taos Puebloan, guests to the Luhan home experienced unique access to these and other sacred places, which were located on Pueblo lands and were otherwise typically off-limits to Anglo visitors. Exhilarated by these encounters and by automobile excursions further afield with Tony and her artist-friend Rebecca Salsbury James (then Rebecca Strand), O’Keeffe began at least twenty-three paintings during her four-month stay that summer, including four canvases of Penitente crosses erected at Taos and near Alcalde, New Mexico, as well as at Cameron, Arizona.27

These cross paintings are unique to O’Keeffe’s first summer in the Southwest. After 1929, she would never paint another Penitente cross, even as she returned to New Mexico (at first to visit and eventually to reside permanently) across the following six decades. Typically compared in the literature to her New York skyscraper pictures for their monumentality, stark angularity, and nocturnal tonality, the crosses fill her canvases to their extremities. For scholars, these “unitary artifacts” encapsulate a “spirit of place,” particularly the imposing religiosity of Southwestern Catholicism.28  “I saw the crosses so often—and often in unexpected places—like a thin dark veil of the Catholic Church spread over the New Mexico landscape,” recalled O’Keeffe, who was raised as a Catholic and remained sympathetic toward the religious communities of the Southwest throughout her lifetime.29

But O’Keeffe’s cross paintings also visually and conceptually register the latent power of these ritual objects. By conveying a strong sense of movement, these compositions align O’Keeffe’s physical encounters with crosses in the landscape that summer with the mobile properties of the crosses in their ceremonial contexts. “One evening,” O’Keeffe recalled of the night when she was inspired to paint her first two cross paintings, while staying at Mabel’s,

we walked back of the morada toward a cross in the hills. . . . The cross was large enough to crucify a man, with two small crosses—one on either side. It was in the late light and the cross stood out—dark against the evening sky. If I turned to the left, away from the cross, I saw the Taos mountain—a beautiful shape. I painted the cross against the mountain though I never saw it that way. I painted it with a red sky and I painted it with a blue sky and stars.30

In the two canvases that she painted following this twilight excursion, Black Cross with Stars and Blue (Fig. 1) and Black Cross with Red Sky (Fig. 3), O’Keeffe constructs an imagined, synthetic vision, combining the looming Penitente cross behind Mabel’s home and the peaks beyond. Indeed, as O’Keeffe notes, she did not see them in this specific arrangement. Monumentally inscribed against a saturated crepuscular sky, O’Keeffe’s crosses have moved (metaphorically speaking) across the landscape to stand before the sacred mountain, just as she herself turned from one spot on the land to another in mentally composing the picture.31  The “late light” of these two pictures also conveys the temporal dimension of O’Keeffe’s pair of pictures. Silhouetted first against a red, sundown sky and then a blue, starry one, O’Keeffe’s two crosses register the passage of nightfall, thus mapping the gradual unfolding, in time and space, of her walk about the cross that evening. When read sequentially, the slightly different standpoints of the two crosses also reiterate this passage of time: the cross in the red canvas approaches the crossroads in the foreground, while the cross in the blue canvas is nearly centered upon it.

It was, after all, the movement of these Penitente crosses across the landscape of New Mexico in local rituals that gave them their fullest spiritual meaning. Founded in the early 1800s by Christianized nontribal native peoples of slave ancestry and other exiled Pueblo Indians, the Penitentes were a lay Catholic brotherhood that emerged in the priestly vacuum created by the withdrawal of the Franciscan order from New Mexico in 1790. The Brotherhood’s rituals centered upon the remembrance of Christ’s Passion, and accordingly emphasized human submission to suffering through rituals of mortification, flagellation, cross-bearing, and reenacted crucifixions. As the Catholic Church began to reassert its presence in the region from the mid-1800s onward, the Penitentes would continue their Holy Week processions, but also sought the privacy of their moradas for their year-round devotions.32  The crosses erected outside the morada at Taos were processional crosses, just three of the multitude that dotted the region and were picked up from their bases and carried along on holy days, especially during Holy Week rituals.33  Created out of her own physical movements, O’Keeffe’s cross paintings reify that ceremonial context.

The extreme collapse of the foreground cross and background mountain here and in Black Cross, New Mexico (1929; Art Institute of Chicago, acc. no. 1943.95) further indexes a sense of movement through space, registering both O’Keeffe’s perambulations and the crosses’ processional movements in this landscape. As Robin Kelsey has written regarding Arthur Schott’s U.S.-Mexico boundary surveys from the 1850s, such compact renderings of the landscape, which eschew the full continuity of spatial recession by superimposing foreground elements directly upon background ones, accelerate the viewer’s own visual traversal of pictorial space. O’Keeffe’s black crosses are therefore experiential, physio-optical pictures. Her critics, upon first seeing them, recognized this transcendent quality. New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell praised how her crosses “pierce[d] through to sheer spiritual experience,” while a writer from the New York Sun declared, “A gallery is no place for [the ‘Crosses’]. [They] ought to be viewed in a church.”34  They exude this spiritual, experiential potency because, as Emily Ballew Neff notes, O’Keeffe’s paintings always depict the landscape through the lens of what has happened there.35  Indeed, O’Keeffe herself spoke of her endeavors to INSERT IGNORE INTO a picture “the life that has been lived in a place.”36  The viewer ought to see her black crosses, then, as marking off a world of human action and pious ceremony; as living, moving objects. As the foreground of Black Cross with Stars and Blue also indicates, this cross stands at a crossroads, a space characterized by the temporary halt and resumption of movement.

O’Keeffe’s black crosses exist, then, at the cusp of stillness and motion, having merely been paused in the artist’s mind’s-eye and silhouetted against Taos Mountain. Meanwhile, another of her crosses, Grey Cross with Blue (Fig. 4), towers above the horizon, its attenuated, penumbral form leaning forward as if into the viewer’s own space. Like a bowed, swaying cross in a related sketch (1929; Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, acc. no. 1997.06.31)—and unlike the more stationary format and stable viewing position of the black crosses—the Grey Cross looks as if it is being held aloft or even carried at the head of a procession. This may be the same wayside cross to which O’Keeffe referred in a note to Mabel on her return to New Mexico in 1930: “I painted a light cross that I often saw on the road near Alcalde. I looked for it recently but it is not there.”37  Perhaps the real grey cross had been picked up and carried off on some procession, resuming its peregrinations in the world.