Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint

By Paul J. Vanderwood

Book Overview

Paul J. Vanderwood offers a fascinating look at the events, beliefs, and circumstances that have motivated popular devotion to Juan Soldado, a Mexican folk saint. In his mortal incarnation, Juan Soldado was Juan Castillo Morales, a twenty-four-year-old soldier convicted of and quickly executed for the rape and murder of eight-year-old Olga Camacho in Tijuana in 1938. Immediately after Morales's death, many people began to doubt the evidence of his guilt, or at least the justice of his brutal execution. People reported seeing blood seeping from his grave and hearing his soul cry out protesting his innocence. Soon the "martyred" Morales was known as Juan Soldado, or John the Soldier. Believing that those who have died unjustly sit closest to God, people began visiting Morales's grave asking for favors. Within months of his death, the young soldier had become a popular saint. He is not recognized by the Catholic Church, yet thousands of people have made pilgrimages to his gravesite. While Juan Soldado is well known in Tijuana, southern California's Mexican American community, and beyond, this book is the first to situate his story within a broader exploration of how and why popular canonizations such as his take root and flourish.

In addition to conducting extensive archival research, Vanderwood interviewed central actors in the events of 1938, including Olga Camacho's mother, citizens who rioted to demand Morales's release to a lynch mob, those who witnessed his execution, and some of the earliest believers in his miraculous powers. Vanderwood also interviewed many present-day visitors to the shrine at Morales's grave. He describes them, their petitions-for favors such as health, a good marriage, or safe passage into the United States-and how they reconcile their belief in Juan Soldado with their Catholicism. Vanderwood puts the events of 1938 within the context of Depression-era Tijuana and he locates people's devotion, then and now, within the history of extra-institutional religious activity. In Juan Soldado, a gripping true-crime mystery opens up into a much larger and more elusive mystery of faith and belief.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822334151
• ISBN13: 9780822334156
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 332 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

a fascinating read on the border and religion

This is an extremely compelling book, especially for an academic monograph. Not only is the story of Juan Soldado and his followers a compelling one, but Vanderwood also paints a vivid picture of society along the US-Mexican border as well. Great for both the general reader and students and professors interested in Mexico, the border, and religiosity.

Belief Matters

Vanderwood's book provides a detailed, crackling narrative of a brutal murder-rape in Tijuana in 1938, but also an anatomy of how that famous border-town grew and experienced the agonies of social change during the early twentieth century. The young Mexican soldier executed for the crime is at the center of the story, of course, as are the processes of how he came to be venerated as a sort of folk-saint almost immediately after his death--unsanctified by the official church, but close to the lives and beliefs of Mexicans of many different social backgrounds. Indeed, in many ways the issue of popular religious belief--how it is established, how it flourishes, what it does for people--is at the core of the book. Some of the most moving parts of the story arise with the author's work on the current state of the Juan Soldado cult, his survey research at the site of the shrine in Tijuana, and his fascinating interviews with the present-day Mexicans he met there. The belief in the efficacy of Juan Soldado's intervention with divine forces on behalf of pilgrims to the shrine is quite striking, even if modern secular people themselves find some of the actual belief in miraculous occurrences puzzling. But as Vanderwood has shown, this is a practical, everyday belief-system that helps ordinary people deal with life's problems--love, illness, emigration, economic hardship--in ways that echo the still strong religiosity of Mexicans, no matter whether Juan Soldado was guilty or innocent of the horrendous crime for which his life was taken. This central paradox of the book--that people are not really overly concerned with Juan Soldado's guilt, but with their own consciences, and that they see the basis of the veneration as more a question of repentance and social justice--is what gives the story its power. This is a book well worth reading not only for people interested in the history of Mexico, but also for those who think about the nature of religious belief more generally.