In recent years I’ve often thought of a red concrete hut on Corrientes Avenue, in front of the cemetery that forms the hidden heart of Buenos Aires. People were always congregating there—it was, I thought, a place of quiet importance, fallow and humble. The exterior, armored with glinting, rusting plaques and posters and desperate requests for employment, was white, covered by a man’s painted visage. Walk by at midnight, drunk and weary after a gig nearby or perhaps sober after working late, and you’d find offerings everywhere, a warm glow emanating from the doorway. A name, the saint’s name, bounced around my head without much resolution, and the photographs I saw—a thousand red candles melting at once, people kneeling in gratitude—drew my curiosity. Who were the monks that tended to this sanctuary, the unmarked apostles that carried his good name? What moved these endless devotees towards their silent ministry, so frowned upon by a church that condemned them beyond its walls?

Everything became an omen in the weeks before my pilgrimage. Lights shimmered and coincidence turned into fate before my eyes. I’d left my arrangements late as always, and there were no hotels, no Airbnbs, nothing at all. I’d have to get a room in a nearby town and drive in. A week later, my lodging still unbooked, a flash downpour flooded the poorly urbanized suburbs of Buenos Aires. My brother, using the car I was supposed to take, misinterpreted the depth of a drowned street. Trying to escape the water, he somehow managed to melt the engine and fry the electronics. He was, at that point, stuck on his own, in the dark and in a dangerous area, one of the slums around Buenos Aires that emerged after a century’s semi-forced migrations from rural areas and neighboring countries. Those migrations brought to the infinite Buenos Aires suburbs, to areas like the one my brother was in, the object of my own temporary devotion—Antonio Mamerto “Gauchito” Gil Núñez, a folk saint from the Northeastern province of Corrientes, near the border with Paraguay. Was this misadventure a sign? My editor thought so.

The car definitively dead, I booked a 10-hour bus to Mercedes, the small city in Corrientes where the historical Gil was killed in 1878. His sanctuary and grave are there, sites of uninterrupted pilgrimage for almost 150 years. My ticket said I’d arrive the morning of January 8—the day Gil’s head was lopped off all those years ago, when his followers congregate in his honor—and leave that night.

They say the Gauchito materializes miracles and mediates with God on behalf of the faithful, thanks to the innocent martyr’s holy rapport. He is often depicted smiling, wearing typical gaucho garb, with bolas used to bring down runaway cattle and a mustache that stretches downward. His followers are mostly Catholics. Many attend Mass often and have close relations with a church that, for the most part, looks down on the “Gil Cross,” as the cult is known. Folk saints abound in Latin America, revered especially by poorer citizens who are largely of indigenous heritage, and who follow these saints despite their lack of official status in the church. The very same church that, upon its arrival on the continent, built its foundations through a selective, syncretic melding of Catholic doctrine and praxis with local traditions.

Of this pilgrim’s journey, I myself had nothing to ask, no promises of my own to keep nor bargains to uphold. Folk saints tend not to be kept by people of my sort, hyper-educated, white, urban elites who, if religious at all, stick to “respectable” institutions. My journey north was ethnographical in nature, maybe irredeemably so, but there was something there I didn’t understand and couldn’t deny, some knot in my mind to untangle. I am a materialist and a Jew, without patience for goyishe mystifications. Maybe this journey could cure my secular determinism or reveal some facet of faith I had yet to consider. What, I wondered, as I boarded a bus filled with ecstatic pilgrims in Buenos Aires, does devotion have to offer? To what overwhelming experiences of holiness and divinity am I blind?

• • •

The story behind the cult is fuzzy, unsurprising in an oral tradition recorded most of all in Chamamé, a popular regional music and dance genre. Antonio Gil was a gaucho, one of many impoverished cowherds who populated the Argentine plains for two centuries and were conscripted into one or another warlord’s army during Argentina’s nineteenth-century civil wars. They often deserted, refusing to inflict violence either upon their fellow gauchos or the local population. Neither did they wish to serve some remote master or relocate to the barbarous city, choosing instead to live as roving outlaws. But not for long. All but eradicated during the years in which Argentina reconstructed itself as a modern state, the radical, anti-disciplinary libertarianism of the gaucho survived to become the central myth of Argentine identity. The most famous gaucho in Argentine literature is Martín Fierro, protagonist of José Hernández’s 1872 epic poem of the same name, but the archetype continued to crop up in the twentieth century, notably in Ricardo Güiraldes’ 1926 novel Don Segundo Sombra, in many of Borges’ stories, and all the way into the twenty-first century in Roberto Bolaño’s story “The Insufferable Gaucho.”

Gil was born in Corrientes around 1840; the details of his early life remain murky. He may have had an affair with the daughter of a powerful local commander. What’s certain is that either through conscription or to avoid the ire of the commander, Gil went off to fight in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) that saw Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay devastate Paraguay, who had invaded and occupied Corrientes. He returned home to find his province caught in conflict between the bourgeois, conservative Liberal party, flying light blue flags and allied with forces that sought to emancipate wealthy Buenos Aires from the comparative poverty of the rest of the country, and Autonomistas or Federales, who flew red banners and wanted to incorporate Buenos Aires into a broader national government and distribute the port’s vast royalties among the provinces. Either because he was a Federal at heart, or because the war weighed on his soul, Gil refused to join the Liberals. He lived as an outlaw and, the myth goes, stole only from the rich to give to the poor.

He was caught and accused of desertion on January 6, 1878, and with the gaucho in chains, the authorities rode for Goya, a larger city in Corrientes. In some tellings of the legend, Gil was betrayed, like Jesus, and captured while sleeping. On January 8, a few miles outside Mercedes, the sheriff decided to execute him and claim that he’d attempted escape—a common tactic at the time to avoid trouble on the road. Gil insisted that they were killing an innocent man. He’d made enemies in his time as an outlaw, and they wanted him to pay. Innocence notwithstanding, Gil offered his own faca—the gaucho’s traditional long, straight knife—for the job. Before they hung him by the feet from a nearby espinillo tree and beheaded him, Gil prophesied that the sheriff would find his son grievously ill upon returning home. When the innocent Gil reached heaven, he promised the sheriff, he would intercede with God. With his last words, he declared that the child would make an improbable recovery.

Some say that the blood spraying from Gil’s neck healed the crippled arm of his executioner, recalling the spear to the side of Jesus, one of the Five Holy Wounds. They buried him in the Mercedes cemetery and moved on, but it was just as Gil predicted: the sheriff’s son was dying until, miraculously, he wasn’t. The sheriff returned to the tree where Gil was hung and planted a cross in his honor. The myth was born.

Since then, supplicants have asked the Gauchito for something—health, wealth, success or survival—and promised pilgrimage in return. At first a local, rural Corrientes phenomenon, migrations and word-of-mouth have made the Gil Cross an international affair, with devotees across Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and beyond. Leading up to my journey, I joined Facebook groups dedicated to him: on the 8th of every month, hundreds of believers post in gratitude or request blessings or share images of shrines at home and across the country. A grainy image of a mustachioed man wearing a slanted wide-brimmed hat who looks straight at the camera keeps making the rounds as the only known image of the real Antonio Gil, though I suspect it’s someone else, or AI-generated.

I sat next to a devotee on the bus. I couldn’t get a good look at his face in the dark, but I could tell he was mostly bald under his baseball hat, tall and gaunt, in his sixties, wearing tan pants and a dark sweater in midsummer. A couple of hours into the journey, I reached over to ask about his devotion and, wary at first, he explained:

“I was imprisoned many years ago, and the wife of a friend and I made a promise: if my friend and I got out, she’d cut her waist-length hair and I would come here, and that’s exactly what happened. It was 1997, and since then I come whenever I can.” He’d asked Gil for many things over the years: a quick release from prison, to avoid being recognized in a police lineup, wealth, good health, and work. “I am very sick,” he said, “with many illnesses.” He said he was recovering from hernia surgery. His work, mind you, was crime: Though he retired in 2023 after getting out of the can one last time, for about 30 years he’d hijacked trucks and moved stolen merchandise: “gold, jewelry, fireworks, towels, perfumes, anything I could,” he told me.

He had recently left his partner of some 20 years and, with her, three houses which, unsurprisingly, were not in his name. A few months ago, eight men had come by his house to kill him, but he survived. He wouldn’t say more about what happened, about how he escaped—that was the work of the Gaucho. Eleven slugs in him, he said, and countless shiv scars, “terminal liver disease,” and some other unspecified ailments. But once again, here he was, making his pilgrimage, full of gratitude.

He told me he was also a devotee of San La Muerte (Saint Death), an older folk saint depicted as a cloaked skeleton with a scythe associated especially with career criminals who sometimes tattoo themselves with his iconography. Gil was a follower of San La Muerte as well, according to legend, and only acquiesced to his execution after excising the saint’s tattooed symbol from his flesh. Like San La Muerte, Gil is a criminal’s saint: They say he can make evil befall one’s enemies when asked, though my acquaintance—last name Díaz—insisted that his wishes had always been positive. “I am not a materialist, I don’t care about that crap,” he added.

Devotion was central to Díaz’s life, something real and everyday. “I sometimes see him out of the corner of my eye, or feel a certain weight on my back, and I know that he’s there watching me,” Díaz whispered. In the past, if his current girlfriend didn’t want to join him, he would travel alone or bring along some other woman; he spent five years on the lam using his brother’s ID, with an arrest warrant out on him, and still made the journey. He clarified that he was a good Catholic, that he prayed and attended Mass and feared God, and that the Gauchito was, to him, “more personal”—a direct, unmediated tether between him and the divine. Most devotees of the Gauchito are also devout Catholics, but for whatever reason—if Díaz is any guide, because of extreme personal circumstances—the Gaucho provides uninterrupted access to God or to some kind of miraculous force. It’s as if God is somehow too vast, too diffuse or abstract, too saintly and pure and otherworldly, while folk saints like Gil, with their all-too-human misery, give such divinity a grounding. There is a simplicity, an honest transactional logic to the Gauchito that is never quite present with God, the kind of dealmaking for which his angels and envoys, the devil among them, are known. Give us one thing—your pilgrimage, your flesh, your sacrifice—and your prayers will be answered.

Díaz took off his hat and rubbed his scalp. We’d been talking—really, he’d been speaking and I had nodded along—for at least an hour. Then the monologue took a dark turn. “You know, my daughter doesn’t speak to me. She blames me for the death of her mother, which I had nothing to do with.” He had also stopped speaking to all of his siblings except one, and spoke at length about his parents, especially his mother—the eternal Argentine saint—who had never betrayed him. Still, he insisted, “I regret none of it. I lived my life to the fullest, did everything I wanted. And I never hurt anyone. Nowadays, these kids kill you for a cell phone, they have no ambition. I didn’t do that. I wanted to do great things, I still would if I weren’t so sick.” Then, a warning: “Be careful out there. The Gauchito festivities aren’t what they used to be, these kids drink, they smoke weed, they get in fights. Te pongo pillo,” he said, meaning that he was about to impart a word to the wise. “Don’t go around asking guys about their faith.” Before I leaned back in my seat and slept—it was almost 2 a.m., and we were due in Mercedes soon—he said one final thing, leaning in so close that I noticed a missing tooth and the faded tip of a Gauchito chest tattoo: “The Gaucho is real. I’m telling you, you come from a different world and you might not believe me, but he’s there, he makes things happen for people.” Díaz, I thought, was a selfish and pessimistic man who’d dedicated very little of his life to anyone or anything beyond himself— except when it came to the Gauchito.

Then again, what could be more selfish than a personal saint? Díaz was not here for a collective religious experience. Would he complete the pilgrimage from the Mercedes sambódromo, which is basically a road with stands on both sides to watch Carnaval festivities—a full six miles to the sanctuary? No, he told me, he wanted to dodge the crowds and get there early, take a cab. He couldn’t be bothered to walk anymore, not at his age. He would have driven anyway, if not for an unexpected car breakdown a week prior, a spooky echo of my own experience. Díaz was not as impressed by this parallel between our lives as I was. He pulled his hat down and slept. I did too, uneasily.

• • •

Night lingered over Mercedes when we arrived. The bus station was small and open to the elements, just a few stalls filled with Gauchito memorabilia and bus company ticket offices. I slipped away from Díaz, who’d acquired a rather menacing, impatient air as I watched him inquire about a taxi to the sanctuary from afar. In the bathroom, as I brushed my teeth, the freshly arrived donned gaucho costumes: baggy, bright-colored field trousers in bright red and sky blue, crisp white shirts and neckerchiefs, riding boots, traditional wide leather belts and chambergos—wide-brimmed leather hats. Wedged into their belts in a diagonal across their backs were facas, long and thin and leather-sheathed.

I wandered off into the rundown, unremarkable town. I passed a small statue of a gaucho capybara sipping mate on the station corner and continued through to the city’s main street. Its colonial façades were colorful and intricate, with elaborate rusty iron grates protecting windows, paint flecks washing down from decades of rain. Packs of gauchos on horseback rode past me as day broke. Someone told me the riders were to congregate in the main square—they traditionally lead the pilgrimage to the sanctuary—so I walked over there but found the square deserted. A lone woman with a bucket splashed water over benches in the cool air. I was in the wrong square.

Eventually, when I reached the sambódromo, surrounded as it was by horseback riders, Mass had already started. The vigil, in which the faithful spend the night inside Mercedes’ main church watching over the blood red “Peregrine Cross,” had ended at 5:30 a.m. The night before, many pilgrims had traveled to the sanctuary to leave their offerings, setting off fireworks in vast quantities. Today, after the vigil, the sambódromo stands were half-full of the exhausted and proud. A line of riders, most of them men, but also some women and children, wore full gaucho regalia and stretched into the distance. Their saddles were immaculate: first a layer of foam, then the leather seat embellished with fur. Some held cigarettes and rode with one hand. The bishop was finishing his sermon next to the blood-red cross, which would soon travel on horseback to the sanctuary. Into a microphone, the bishop intoned, “We must take care of this place together, attend to it… Long live Jesus, long live Mary, long live the Gil cross!” Riders stepped forward amid cheers with hoofs clacking, and proud grandmothers shouted their grandchildren’s names. The bishop sprayed holy water as they passed. Behind them, cars decked out in bright red Gauchito Gil flags blared Chamamés from elaborate stacks of amplifiers.

The sun would soon begin to sting. Before setting off on my own pilgrimage, I approached the bishop, who told me his name was Adolfo Canecín. He was from Formosa, a nearby province where devotion to Gauchito Gil is not prominent. But his current diocese is Goya—the town where, according to legend, the soldiers were meant to take Gil. The cult of Gil, like that of San La Muerte and many others, has historically been seen as a threat by the church, a pagan intrusion by the less educated and nonwhite faithful, an implicit threat to the established order through its veneration of an outlaw. This changed with the Francis papacy: Removing his white robe, Canecín told me that during a visit to Rome he had asked Pope Francis about the cult of Gil directly. The Pope had insisted that the church should accompany the faithful, that a novena—a devotional prayer repeated for nine days or weeks—for Gil already existed and should be republished by the Catholic Church, which Canecín soon did. “Even if we don’t understand everything,” he added, “we must tend our flock.” The Pope insisted that one should pray for the soul of the deceased Antonio Gil himself, like one would for any other soul. Shrewd as ever, Pope Francis also reminded Canecín that the diocese owned a plot of land very close to the traditional sanctuary. Why not follow the flock? He suggested that they build a new shrine to the Gauchito for the many pilgrims who make the journey.

Canecín, a kindly man with a sharp, suspicious gaze and a somewhat forced smile, shook my hand and headed off. Behind the sambódromo was a field, and then the road: the pilgrims, the riders and the drivers made a U-turn and wended their way through all of Mercedes first. On every corner, families watched, and I spotted several teary-eyed women explaining the procession to their children. The entire city was draped in red, and silence was hard to come by. Accordions and sapucai—the Guaraní people’s sharp, extended cheers of celebration and warmaking—joined the strumming of guitars. As we walked alongside the slow-moving cars, locals—a nurse from the local blood bank, grandmothers and entire families, greengrocers and shop owners—took videos with their phones and smiled and waved.

By 9:30 a.m. the air was soupy and warm. As far as I could see, everyone was drunk and celebrating. We passed well-built houses with clad windows and elaborate front gates alongside ramshackle bare brick constructions before reaching the road. A husband and wife skipped past me, he with an accordion, she dancing apace and carrying a cup of beer with which she occasionally nourished him. I squeezed by a pickup truck with a life-size, crucified Gauchito on its hood, with banners draped on all sides and speakers on the back. A half-dozen people passed drinks around on the truck bed.

By the time we exited the town of Mercedes, I found myself among a pack of walkers, clearly a pre-existing group. Together they carried a long, thin red flag that read “Gauchito Gil 2026.” There were around 50 of us—we were stragglers, late in our travel—and the group sported strict gaucho garb or blood red Gauchito colors. I, meanwhile, wore dusty black shorts, a sweaty T-shirt and, yes, a red hat. Ahead and behind, groups of four or five riders on horseback shepherded us along as they passed around the bottom half of a large plastic bottle, the top lopped off in Argentine style, filled with a clear alcohol of one kind or another. The road itself was unremarkable, surrounded by low brush and detritus from earlier waves of pilgrims. Passing cars honked and we cheered. Near me, a girl who seemed to be in her mid-twenties, wearing athleisure tights and running shoes and a plain grey T-shirt, clutched a figurine of the Gauchito to her chest. I’d seen her at the sambódromo in the same position, walking with a slight shuffle and in total silence. Was she praying? Giving thanks? Her eyes were shut but her pace never slowed. A private moment, moving as if magnetized towards the known mystery of a kept promise, blurring prayer and gratitude into one.

My experience was different: I’d forgotten sunscreen, and what I felt most was the back of my knees, burning. Which I don’t think was a sign of anything greater. I was both part of the group and not; everyone else around me absorbed, chatting and joking and passing around water and beer. Even the gauchos, so solitary and ill-tempered in our epics, rode in groups. Pilgrimage involves endless walking, yes, strains of discomfort that serve as devotion made flesh. In their collectivity, these small acts of connection with the Gaucho’s own corporeal agony transcend the triviality of a singular, long walk. Peregrination isn’t an individual act, it transpires above the self. Faith, perhaps, too.

• • •

The sanctuary itself was pure revelry, a party with little resemblance to the sober liturgies of institutionalized devotion. Sprawled out for hundreds of feet before arriving, there were tents and shops selling red candles, red strings, red cards, facas engraved with the crests of football teams and images of the Gauchito. Cumbias about partying and Chamamés about the Gaucho’s saintly martyrdom sounded one after the other in a winking harmony. Shards and shrapnel and exploded cardboard casings from last night’s fireworks were strewn everywhere. Tents and vans stretched out by the roadside for half a mile in all directions, overflowing from the campsites behind the sanctuary itself.

“I was both part of the group and not; everyone else around me absorbed, chatting and joking and passing around water and beer. Even the gauchos, so solitary and ill-tempered in our epics, rode in groups. Pilgrimage involves endless walking, yes, strains of discomfort that serve as devotion made flesh. In their collectivity, these small acts of connection with the Gaucho’s own corporeal agony transcend the triviality of a singular, long walk. Peregrination isn’t an individual act, it transpires above the self. Faith, perhaps, too.”

Mysticism tends toward a personal encounter with divinity, while collective religious experiences like these retain a near-bureaucratic streak: in this case, the longest line in which I’ve ever stood. I arrived at the sanctuary—a maze of shacks selling memorabilia and parrillas selling choripán sandwiches and Fernet mixed with Coke and beer leading up to the construction itself—at 11 a.m. The line was not moving. I knew it already, standing there as my knees burned. I stood out in the popular homeland of Gauchito Gil. It could be a question of inheritance (wealth, cultural background, race, prejudice, education) or the comfort of petit bourgeois life, but urban elites in Argentina have seldom expressed a need for folk saints or pilgrimage. My people did the walking thing for forty years and swore it off ever since. Díaz’s warning was, I think, meant to remind me that I was out of place: This does not belong to you. Had he already left his offering—a Gauchito Gil prayer card with its face worn off, given to him by a friend—and driven back to Mercedes?

Children ran about, their parents waiting in line for their turn, in silence or eating. In front of me, a group of three guys roughly my age wore mismatched, knockoff football shorts and jerseys and took turns heading off for food while discussing what Gil mementos they’d bring to their girlfriends and mothers. Snooping journalistically, I watched on as one of them texted his boss to explain where he was: “My daughter has a fever and the early signs of scabies,” he wrote. Suddenly, an eruption of music. To our left, a group of men in gaucho garb and dancing boots with little dishes on them, and women in frilly dresses or identical gaucho outfits began dancing to yet more Chamamé. They were sweaty and beatific, beaming in their red head-to-toe outfits, complete with a faca in their belts, as they spun and stomped and waved handkerchiefs above their heads. The dance break lasted for about ten minutes, and everyone nearby circled, watched and applauded. Eventually, the line crawled on.

The sanctuary itself is a simple, U-shaped construction, open and high-ceilinged, through which pilgrims walk in a single direction. Red-glass windows tint everything inside. An improvement over the shack that stood in its place before, according to everyone I asked—Thanks, Francis. Lighting candles isn’t permitted here. The dozens of niches along the walls were filled to bursting with unlit candles, football memorabilia, family pictures, cigarettes, alcohol, flowers, Argentine flags and even license plates (customary when the Gauchito has provided a new vehicle). In the semicircle’s center, scarlet flowers hung on the cross behind a life-size effigy with flaking paint. The cross itself, made of burnished and well-worn wood, was unremarkable and, like the rest of the sanctuary’s bathrooms, stores, offices, cement benches and even its small museum, brand new, having been inaugurated by the Goya diocese less than a year prior. I had been standing, shuffling, making this pilgrimage for hours in the sun. I was hungry and weak.

The young guys ahead of me, and the families ahead of them, all took pictures with the effigy, touched its hands (hence the flaking paint) and tried to find somewhere on the Gaucho or his cross to hang their offerings. Behind him, a motto: “When my spilled innocent blood reaches God, I shall return in favors for my people.” Lingering just behind the faithful, I stared into the statue’s vacant eyes and faint smile. I had traveled to Mercedes in search of this brief encounter, in pursuit of some channel to a God I’ve never understood, the kind of visual, physical remnant that my own faith distrusts. People wept and smiled and took selfies. The long-awaited, patiently-pursued presence of the divine was on display and I felt… nothing.

Then again, how could I? In a million ways, I’m simply not inside the walls of faith, nowhere close to the collective spirit that materializes every year on January 8 and stretches far beyond. But in that red-tinted concrete box, surrounded by wax and wood and after miles of walking and hours of standing, beholding the representation of something ethereal and unproven yet stubbornly real to millions, I understood some small fraction of it. In the torrid midsummer heat, joined by love, exhaustion, commitment, or gratitude, or any other tiny emotion and secondary circumstance: nothing but faith could explain it.

• • •

Outside the sanctuary, dozens of low concrete columns bore small plaques of gratitude, rectangles or hearts or circles that read: “Thank you Gauchito Gil for all of the promises you’ve kept for me and my family. Rosa D. Aguirre. 2024,” “Thank you to God and the Gauchito Gil for all the miracles you do for me. A.G.,” and a horse-shaped plaque, reading “Thank you my dear Gauchito for taking care of us always. Aguirre Aguiar Family, 06–24.” No plaque was more than a year and a half old, and there were easily over a thousand of them. A blood-red recreation of the espinillo tree on which Gil was strung up and killed sat outside, every inch draped with flags and T-shirts and shreds of cloth. Another smaller shrine nearby did allow candles, its floor covered with them except for a small path where believers could squeeze past and add more offerings. I knelt and lit my two candles, one next to the other, and tried to find some desperate wish the Gauchito could fulfill. Behind me, I noticed a group of three people my age, with small tattoos and brand-name clothing and, most notably, a large camera that read “Gauchito Gil documentary” on the tape stuck on its side. I was not the only one there flirting with ethnography. I suspect that they, like me, found the devotion mysterious and inexplicable and thought that, with enough attention or time or commitment, the feeling, the underlying material faith, would surely come to us.

I remembered the little glowing hut off Corrientes and, with it, what Díaz told me the night before: “He is real. He does things for people. You’ll see.” Did I feel something? As I lit my candles off others, as my head throbbed and my backpack weighed on me, my pilgrimage completed and mission fulfilled, I couldn’t deny that I stood in the middle of an occasion, a perfect sum of quotidian miracles: passing an exam, getting a job or a promotion, surviving an operation or an illness, grieving a death or, for that matter, getting away with something. Getting through something. I was, as the red candles faltered, then eventually stuck to the concrete floor, wicks burning into ash and wax melting, just one pilgrim among so many. What could be more divine?