Gamboa was a strong supporter of Porfirio Díaz, the famous Mexican dictator whose decades-long reign was at its zenith in 1900. Díaz was a liberal dictator, meaning that he postponed the introduction of democracy on the theory that average Mexicans would require decades of tutelage before they could govern themselves. Gamboa, on the other hand, was a true conservative in that he abhorred the very idea of democracy. He preferred a monarchy or, in its absence, a dictatorship. Gamboa supported Díaz partly because of this preference for law-and-order authoritarianism and partly because of personal loyalty to someone who was a friend of his family. But Gamboa was out of step with the Europhile, positivist ideological tilt of the Díaz regime. Gamboa was an outspoken opponent of the Científicos, the technocratic advisers who surrounded Díaz. In Santa, Gamboa adopted a nostalgic, traditionalist view, skeptical about the power of science and the benefits of untrammeled Progress.

Catholicism is at the heart of that traditionalist view. Gamboa's religious attitudes make him a highly atypical naturalist novelist and suggest comparisons to Tolstoy, whose novel Resurrection (1899) Gamboa read just as he was about to begin work on Santa. The church seldom enters the story and, when it does, in a negative light. Religious language pervades the book, however, providing many of Gamboa's favorite metaphors. Furthermore, the structure of the plot—with Santa's fall from grace, judgment, penitence, and redemption through suffering—is strongly Christian. Most naturalist novels are bleaker than Santa, offering no hope of redemption.

Gamboa ran unsuccessfully for president of Mexico as the candidate for the Catholic Party in 1913, and during the 1920s he sided with followers of the “Cristero” insurrection, a religious reaction against the Mexican Revolution. Being politically pro-Catholic was part and parcel of Gamboa's larger conservatism, his nostalgic, pro-Spanish attitude toward Mexico's colonial heritage. Santa was written during the U.S. occupation of Cuba, which occurred in the wake of the 1898 war on that island, and Gamboa became one of the prominent Latin American intellectuals waving pro-Spanish banners and standing against Anglo-Saxon materialism and aggression. Spain's trouncing by the United States awakened traditionalist feelings of cultural kinship from Mexico to Argentina. For example, Santa gives loving attention to bullfighting, a tradition powerfully emblematic of Spain. (By way of contrast, one could point out that by 1903 Cubans, whose bid for independence distanced them from Spanish traditionalism, already preferred baseball to bullfighting.) In addition, most of the novel's secondary characters are Spanish, including almost all the women other than Santa herself.

Naturalist authors tended to write with a didactic purpose. What lessons did Gamboa want to teach in Santa? A Christian lesson about sin and personal salvation, clearly, but beyond that, what message about Mexico? How does the political order called the Porfiriato appear from the perspective of the street in 1900? What is Gamboa signaling about Mexico's incorporation into what was already, by that time, a process of rapid globalization? And what on earth is Gamboa saying about women in this story? Can he really be defending the traditional honor ethic that turns Santa's sexual “slip” into her inevitable doom? (Gamboa's men, by the way, resemble nothing so much as a pack of baying hounds, and this is clearly self-critical on the author's part. After all, as a young man he had been just like the novel's fashionable clubmen who flock around Santa in her heyday as “queen of the night.”) And where, oh where, in this novel, is race? Racial descriptions are not applied at all, aside from a few glowing references to Santa's soft brown skin. Finally, if one reads Santa's story as a metaphor for Mexican history, as Gamboa probably intended, what is the lost paradise, what the perdition, and what the redemption? Questions to ponder.