And God Settled in the Neighborhood: ExVotos in Popular Religiosity as Testimony of the Experience of the Sacred in Everyday Life

Abstract

For the popular sectors, Religion is something of daily life. It has to do with the support that is required in the material sphere for subsistence in this immanent reality. Thus, the ends pursued within the popular religious expressions are located in the tangible reality that demands immediate and continuous satisfaction of the most basic needs. The objective of this article is to demonstrate the popular practices extolled through the ex-votos that are not necessarily framed within the margin of a ritual and disciplines of the ecclesiastical body, but are open to the immense vastness of possibilities forged in the daily life and its implicit harshness, as well as the solutions to daily problems understood from a marginal sacredness that does not require official approval to consider that the Sacred touches him raw from his unique existential situation