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The dates and incidents of his life loosely coincide with the life of Jesus Juarez Mazo, but there is no confirmation that Mazo ever gave back to the poor or that he had the famous run-in with the Sinaloan governor.
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Nowhere have I been able to verify this story in any printed material I have come across while researching this topic.Īs mentioned before, there is little evidence that Jesus Malverde was even real. Later that blood-soaked dirt was put into small bottles and shrines throughout northern Mexico grew around the veneration of these relics. A woman then ran up to his body and dug up some of the dirt that was soaked in his blood. He wasn’t hanged, according to her, but shot by firing squad and left to lie in the dirt. She said that she was from Sinaloa and she knew family members who were alive when Jesus Malverde was killed. I want to mention briefly an alternate ending to the Jesus Malverde story that I heard from an older lady on one of my many adventures in Mexico. Later, a shrine popped up on the spot, and we will get back to that later. When his body fell to the ground, people placed stones and pebbles on top of it, in the sort of a fashion of a cairn, to give their popular bandit a more proper burial. He was just left to hang on the makeshift gallows the governor had set up. He was hanged outside the courthouse in Culiacan and was denied a proper burial. Incensed, the governor went back on his word and had the police hunt down Malverde to face justice.Īccording to popular lore, Jesus Malverde met his demise through hanging. Malverde slipped in and out of the governor’s home and left a note in place of the sword. In one of the more popular versions of the story, the wealthy governor of Sinaloa, Francisco Cañedo, challenged Jesus Malverde to steal the governor’s sword out of his hacienda, and promised to grant him a pardon if he was successful. He is called El Bandido Generoso, the Generous Bandit, because he gave away most of what he stole from the wealthy hacendados.
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Mazo’s parents either died of a curable disease or because they were just poor, according to legend, and instead of struggling to earn a living with his menial labor jobs, the man later known as Malverde turned to a life of robbing from the rich. This was the age of the Porfiriato, the reign of the Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz, and Sinaloa was ruled by an elite class of wealthy hacienda owners. He grew up extremely poor during a time of huge disparities in income in Mexico, and especially in Sinaloa. Mazo was born on Decemand died on May 3, 1909, killed by the authorities for his banditry. The legend is supposedly based on a man named Jesus Juarez Mazo, who was from a small town outside the city of Culiacan, the capital of the great state of Sinaloa on the Pacific coast of Mexico. There is very little in the historical record to support that Jesus Malverde even existed. He is known by several nicknames: Mexico’s Robin Hood, The Generous Bandit, The Angel of the Poor, The Drug Saint and The King of Sinaloa, but was he even real? And to whether or not he was real, does it matter? He has a following of hundreds of thousands of people in Mexico and the United States, mostly the dispossessed and the downtrodden, and to them he is very real. Malverde thus offers an empty signifier whose multiple interpretations yield a surplus of symbolic meanings and material production based on the circulation, negotiation, appropriation, and reinterpretation of those meanings.Today on Mexico Unexplained we will look into the Mexican folk saint known as Jesus Malverde. While the legend of Malverde may well have been invented, its negotiation has proven remarkably long-lived and powerful in shaping and reshaping the iconographic and material landscapes of social inclusion and exclusion. The border between the sacred and the profane is often a site of social struggle, and the case of Malverde is no exception. Malverde's appropriation by Sinaloa's narcotraffickers as their patron saint extends this symbolic and material claim to legitimacy to include those who exist outside the official boundaries. Contention over building a chapel to Malverde in Culiacán, the capital city of the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa, distils broader tensions over the Mexican state's persistent deferral of the poor from inclusion in the official landscape of the nation. The socially and economically marginal people who revered him in the nineteenth century adore him as a lay saint today. Jesús Malverde, a bandit who was assassinated in 1909, crystallizes the struggle for place - understood both literally and metaphorically - in northern Mexico.