Warning: This essay touches on suicide and anti-trans violence.Like most Latinas, I was born and raised Catholic, and like most Catholics, I had both a tremendous fear of and a powerful fascination with death from an early age.
I knew that I wanted to be a girl, and that God had made me a boy — and that made me want to die. But I also knew the only thing worse than having to live my whole life as a man would be dying as a man and having to be one for all eternity.
I didn’t know there were other options; I didn’t know there was Santa Muerte, the Mexican folk saint whose name means Holy Death.