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210 ConClusion narrative devotion The narratives of secular sanctity in the borderlands are as ambivalent as they are contradictory. Through participation in rituals of exchange, identification, and disidentification with their favored secular saints and santones, devotees shape autonomous forms of civil society, challenge the authority of church and state, and articulate diverse identities as individuals and as collective groups. In many cases, these devotees approach secular saints not exclusively through traditional spiritual rituals, whether official or popular, but through narrative. Such narratives are certainly reflected in cultural production, but they also rearticulate devotional ritual, that is, while the cultural representation of secular saints and santones manifests devotional practices, it frequently becomes devotional practice in and of itself. Cultural production highlights and facilitates the personal relationship between devotee and saint just as much as traditional spiritual practices like prayer, spirit possession, or the exchange of relics or sacred images. The link between cultural production and devotional practice is especially salient in light of the fact that many secular saints and santones also create and perform their own narratives of secular sanctity, whether through images, writing, or speaking. Cultural production and devotional ritual alike reflect the intersection as well as the contradiction between human and divine enclosed in secular sanctity. At times, the link between traditional devotional ritual and cultural production has been translated literally. Certainly, many of César Chávez’s speeches or Subcomandante Marcos’s communiqués draw upon transcendent language and imagery to appeal to a blend of spiritual, political, and cultural traditions. Chávez specifically employed religious and spiritual practice in his speeches and manifestos , such as the “Sacramento March Letter, March 1966,” and the UFW’s Plan of Delano, which delineate the need for “pilgrimage, penance, and revolution” Conclusion 211 (Jensen and Hammerback 15). In Chávez’s eyes, social or political revolution is not possible without spiritual tribute, while devotion is a form of political praxis. Many of Chávez’s and Marcos’s writings also give homage to individual members of the UFW or EZLN, functioning as eulogies or elegies for the living and the dead. Ultimately, these writings—many of which are written in collaboration with or entirely by the UFW or EZLN as a whole—also pay tribute to the collective, linking these groups in solidarity to the oppressed and marginalized on a global scale. The connection between devotional ritual and cultural production is even more apparent in contemporary versions of religious iconography, echoing the medieval pictorial hagiographies or illustrated cycles of saints’ lives discussed by Barbara Abou-El-Haj (33). Some of these icons, such as the devotional candles or prayer cards dedicated to “Gran General Revolucionario Pancho Villa” or the “Spirit of Pancho Villa,” are no different from other forms of popular spiritual ritual . Others such as the religious portrait César Chávez de California by Br. Robert Lentz, OFM, the painting César Chávez by iconographer Mark Dukes, or the portrait Subcomandante Marcos as the Buddha by Erin Currier fuse devotional practice, cultural production, and the commodification of celebrity, rearticulating these figures as secular saints for the masses. Dukes’s painting César Chávez, created in collaboration with Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco under the auspices of All Saints Company, is an especially important example of the fusion of celebrity, icon, and saint. The painting is part of the Dancing Saints Icon, a three-thousand-square-foot fresco that wraps around the church rotunda. The icon features saints ranging from traditional figures such as Teresa of Ávila, Francis of Assisi, and King David to unorthodox and nonChristian figures like Anne Frank or Malcolm X. Because the icon is inside the church, it is firmly situated as an object of traditional religious devotion, yet because it portrays writers, artists, scientists, political activists, and heroes alongside orthodox canonized saints, it truly illuminates the union and contradiction of sacred and secular. Since the sacred and the secular are unified through the contradiction of human and divine, they inherently meld distance and presence, producing both joy and pain for devotees. Yet sometimes the contradiction between them may seem intolerable or untenable rather than productive and the pain may outweigh the pleasure. Indeed, for many devotees the sacred falls short in the face of the secular. The partial identification, counter-identification, and rejection that is part of the process of identifying with secular saints, who are both tantalizingly accessible and resolutely inaccessible to their devotees, is sometimes...

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