Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (review)

Paul Vanderwood's vivid and compelling Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint focuses on one of the most intriguing devotional movements in the US-Mexican borderlands. Part true crime, part social and cultural history, part sociology of religion, Juan Soldado tells the story of Juan Castillo Morales, a young Mexican soldier who was convicted of and executed for raping and murdering 8-year-old Olga Camacho in Tijuana in 1938. The authorities in Tijuana rushed through his arrest, confession, trial, and execution in response to intense public pressure to place blame and punishment on someone for such a heinous crime. He was shot in the cemetery only a few meters from where Olga was buried, and was interred practically where he fell.

Soon after, witnesses reported strange and mournful cries coming from the area of the grave and blood seeping through the pile of stones covering the dead man's body. Over time, devotion to Castillo, now known as Juan Soldado ("John the Soldier"), has spread from Tijuana all over the borderlands region. He is venerated in shrines and altars on both sides of the US-Mexico line; devotees usually see him as an innocent martyr who may have taken the blame for his military superior's offense. Like other Catholic folk saints in Mexico and elsewhere, he is the object of fervent personal supplication in the form of votive offerings and pleas ("milagros" and "ex-votos".)

Juan Soldado is divided into three parts: "The Crime," "Circumstances," and "Belief." "The Crime" described the little girl's disappearance on February 13, 1938, her discovery on the following morning and the turbulence of the days immediately following. The US-Mexican border was sealed and hundreds rioted in the streets, shouting, "Give us the killer or we'll burn more buildings!" Castillo was tried by a military court, court-martialed, and sentenced to execution on February 17, four days after the girl's disappearance. Hundreds attended Castillo's execution, held in the municipal cemetery, and watched as the firing squad mowed him down after he was ordered to run—a practice called the Ley Fuga (Law of Flight). Thus it was that Castillo was killed "while trying to escape," because he had been ordered to do so.

At the end of this first section of the book, Vanderwood shows us the first "inklings of grace," when a newspaper reporter known as "Abajo Frontera" reported in November 1938 that people had begun to pray at the grave of Juan Castillo, and that some had begun to say that "the crime was committed by another and that [Castillo] Morales, as a Christian act, decided to take the blame upon himself." (68). Here we see the first stage of the narrative process by which the crime is sacralized and its perpetrator made the object of devotion. The rest of the book attempts to account for this process through an analysis of the social context of religious practice on the US-Mexican border.

In "Circumstances," Vanderwood draws on archival research and oral histories with Olga Camacho's mothers and others to situate the Juan Soldado movement in the historical context of the Tijuana's development as a racy tourist destination, an image not always appreciated by its citizens. He points out that "Devotion such as that accorded to Juan Soldado often develops in small, out-of-the-way places, frequently locales with soiled reputations…and in areas dominated by the political brawn and economic weight of better-known, much-larger and more-important neighboring cities" (75). Tijuana certainly fits such a description: located across the border from and in the shadow of San Diego, a playground for American tourists and home of casinos, bordellos and racetracks, with, nevertheless, a large portion of the population with little connection to these pursuits. Perhaps a saint with a soiled reputation (maybe undeservedly so) is particularly attractive to Tijuanenses.

Vanderwood traces multiple influences on the development of Tijuana into a place where, by the 1930s, "everyday life was a churning mixture...