Popular religiosities, subalternities, exclusions and new frontiers: about the Santet of Poblenou in Barcelona

Abstract

How and what precipitates the birth of a saint in an urban cemetery? What processes and factors are involved in its birth? What and who keeps it alive? Based on historical-ethnographic materials collected between 2017 and 2022, this article presents the case of the Santet del Poblenou, a saint canonised and raised to the altars at the popular request and outside the structures of normative and institutional faith, whose tomb is located on the island IV of the first department of the Poblenou Cemetery. We analyse the conditions of the emergence of this cult in Barcelona at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, as well as its consolidation as a popular devotion of the subaltern classes. Secondly, based on current ethnographic materials, we examine some of the practical and discursive continuities that have maintained this phenomenon up to the present day, always as a reference point for Barcelona's working classes. The aim is to show the importance of paying attention to religious practice as a sphere in which old and new forms of broader social exclusion are expressed, reflected in areas such as the economic, political, medical and family spheres; at the same time, however, it constitutes a space of resistance and an instrument to generate and inhabiting symbolic universes of its own. We aim at unraveling how the cemetery, and more particularly the popular canonization of a saint, provides the possibility to establish an urbanity that exceeds the limits of the ordinary and trascends norms and the gender, class, economic, political and urban frontiers that configure those vulnerabilities of which the main social groups practising these devotions are victims. Revealing that religion might be understood not just as an expression of resignation to real misery, but as a tool of resistance and emancipation.