Being a santero means many things in many places, which Francisco discovered when having a conversation with Little Chico about his tío Pedro one night while they shared a joint and waited to be killed if they didn’t kill first. “Hey, no kidding?” Little Chico laughed. “My uncle in Carolina, Puerto Rico, is a santero, too!” But no, as Francisco discovered when they got into it more, that Little Chico’s santero tío practiced a very distinct variation of the Catholic influence on the New World—a Yorubic adaptation of the names of European and Hebrew saints to African gods.

The Caribbean santeros maintained a kind of secret membership, just as the penitente brothers of Francisco’s land did. However, theirs included women as much as men and were not based on medieval Catholic rituals seeking absolution through penance and mortification, but on ancient African rites, with drums and frenzied dance and much more, in which the santero himself contained the power to answer prayers, perform miracles, and cast out demons from the possessed.

No, Francisco, explained, a santero in Nuevo Méjico was a simple man, often given to solitude, who worked alone. Sometimes a woman succumbed to the vocation, but this was rare. The santero, in and of himself, had no divine powers except during the time he was preparing a bulto, a wooden sculpture of a saint. His expert hand was not guided by the aesthetic objectives of artists, but by the saint himself in heaven, as permitted by God, because that wood-turned-bulto would become the saint’s own representation on earth to aid those who were devoted to him.

The santero used the artistic talent granted to him humbly as a creative individual, and with the same deftness which he applied to his fields, to the care of his animals, and perhaps even to the love he had for his woman, he prepared the materials for his bulto. Not every man or just any man who decided to produce such holy icons for his church and community had the stamina to make it his life’s vocation. And while a santero received a certain amount of respect for his work, it was nothing in comparison to that recognition that artists have aspired to since the Renaissance when all work—secular and sacred—began to be signed with the illustrious name of the individual who designed it.

El tío Pedro never expected no one in his own family to follow his path because although times changed slowly for him, he knew the world around him was transforming beyond comprehension. But when his nephew came back from the war in Vietnam and visited with him so many times and finally asked to try his hand at a bulto he considered that perhaps it was possible, after all, that the family tradition of over two centuries was not ready to die out yet.