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.