Over the last twenty years, the Cuban Yoruba-derived spiritual practice of Santería and its music have exploded in Mexico. Mexico City—once the vibrant center of the Aztec Empire, until it was violently overtaken by Spanish conquistadors in the early 1500s—is now the hub of a growing religious phenomenon.
Although there are no official figures—Santería is not included in the national census—Óscar Méndez, a professional ritual musician who has been part of the Mexican Santería community for over thirty years, recalls that in 1987, when he began drumming in ceremonies, there was only one tambor (religious drum ceremony) a month, with only three or four Mexican santeros (initiates) in attendance. But over the last ten years, he said, “the religion has grown like wildfire.” He estimates the current number of initiates in the city to be around a million.
In the religion of Santería, to become fully initiated, one must be presented to Añá, the Yoruba deity believed to reside within the three consecrated, double-sided drums known as batá or fundamento. Añá, through the sonic waves created by ritual musicians, acts as a portal through which humans can communicate with deities known as Oricha.
The burgeoning community of santeros in Mexico has led to an unprecedented demand for ritual musicians called omó Añá (“child of Añá”), men and boys initiated into a male, heterosexual drumming cult who serve the religious community. Driven by a love for the profound and complex music of the Orichas combined with the opportunity to earn a comfortable living, omó Añá have been arriving in droves from Cuba over the last twenty years or, like Méndez, were homegrown in Mexico.
I want to explore why Mexico has become such fertile ground for this kind of religious expansion. What motivated a leading politician to facilitate the arrival of sacred drums in Mexico? What is life like today for professional ritual musicians working in Mexico City? And, finally, why do some associate Santería with criminality in Mexico?
Entering Mexico’s Ritual Soundscape
My interest in the batá tradition in Mexico began after hearing stories from two friends working as professional ritual drummers there in 2015: Antoine Miniconi from France and Dionisio Alzaga Cortés from Mexico. Both described a vibrant and growing religious-musical community that offered them abundant work.
In January 2025, I traveled to Mexico with my partner, David Pattman—a British initiated batá drummer—to stay with Miniconi and his family. We had the privilege of meeting some historic figures from the Mexican Santería musical community, attending and performing in ceremonies, and gaining a rare glimpse of an emerging part of Mexican Santería culture rarely witnessed by those outside of it.
On our first day in Mexico City, we raced through the city on our way to our first Mexican tambor de fundamento (musical rituals using consecrated batá drums). We were invited by the internationally renowned Cuban batá drummer “Piri” Manley López, who moved to Mexico City in 2013. To me, López is batá royalty. He was featured on many of the recordings I had listened to obsessively when I first began learning batá music. That day, he greeted us like old friends and opened the door to the world of sacred batá drumming in Mexico.
It was a beautiful day. A large marquee had been erected in the car park in front of a row of modest houses. We were invited into a small room to watch the oru seco (a ritual drum-only recital) performed before a shrine in honor of the Oricha Oyá. The recital was virtuosic and, at times, explosive, with Nereo Herrera on the iyá (largest drum), Piri on the itótele (middle drum), and “Astor” Alfonso Toro on the okónkolo (smallest drum).
I learned the purpose of the tambor was to “present” seven iyawós (“bride of the Oricha,” or newly initiated devotee) to Añá. This musical ritual would complete a crucial part of their initiation. Vitia Valdés’ voice, leading the call-and-answer chants, cut through the air. Accompanied by the drums, he sang through the oru cantado (a recital accompanied by songs and salutations). The atmosphere was buoyant as the congregation chorused and danced, their response alive with an energy both ancient and timeless.
As we moved into the main section of the ceremony, “Martincito” Martín Silva, a babalawo (priest of Ifá) and drummer and owner of the fundamento, invited me to sing a sequence. My heart leapt into my throat at the thought of singing in front of Piri—a daunting honor I could not refuse. With all the courage I had, I sang for the Oricha of honor that day, Oyá. No sooner had I gotten through the first line than my nerves dissipated. Eternal and beautiful, the song and rhythms carried me forward.
Masterfully crafted by Valdés and the drummers, the tambor progressed, increasing in energy and intensity. Then, one by one, the iyawós were led out and presented to Añá, each dressed in the clothing and colors of their Orichas. The congregation’s support for their spiritual journeys was tangible. Voices lifted, hands clapped, and they moved in time as a single, flowing body as the tambor reached its joyful climax. After a brief closing ceremony, it was all over. People lingered, chatting under the marquee, as if we had all just been to a village dance.
Portable Spirits: The Adaptability of Santería in Mexico
According to anthropologist Nahayeilli B. Juárez Huet, Santería is flourishing in Mexico due to the intersection of culture, politics, economics, communication technologies, migration, and tourism. Interest in Santería first emerged in Mexico during the 1940s and 1950s through music, cinema, and theatre—though often through racist stereotypes. Santería practice remained largely clandestine, as it was widely considered “witchcraft” in both Cuba and Mexico.
The first Santería practitioners in Mexico were Cuban artists who emigrated during this period. Mexican involvement before the 1990s was rare, limited to middle or upper strata with U.S.-Cuba ties. Over the past twenty-five years, as practitioners have grown, this demographic has shifted. Oricha worship is now concentrated among poorer communities on the city’s outskirts.
Santería is an imported spiritual practice rather than one rooted in the Afro-Mexican population, which makes up only 1.16 percent of the national population. Juárez clarifies that Santería’s adaptability—with its “portable practices and symbols”—has allowed the practice to flourish in Mexico.
López’s reasoning is more succinct: “Mexicans are believers.”
Mexican pre-Columbian Indigenous traditions, Catholicism (introduced by Spanish colonizers), Afro-Cuban spiritualities such as Santería and Palo Monte, and Santa Muerte (a new religious movement centered around the Mexican folk saint of death) are all spiritual systems that can merge, syncretize, and overlap without necessarily competing with one another. It is not uncommon for a believer to practice elements of all these traditions without feeling that they are compromising their faith.
On my first visit to Mexico City’s beautiful central Plaza de la Constitución, I witnessed a line of people—who looked like they were on their lunch break—waiting to be “cleansed” by Indigenous practitioners dressed in traditional attire. They used smoke, herbs, and cantations in a ritual that looked very similar to a limpieza (spiritual cleansing) performed by priests of Santería.
The growing influx of Cubans and their culture into Mexico over the past decade has fueled the expansion of Santería. To put this in context, in 2018, 492 Cubans presented to immigration authorities; by 2023, the number had risen to 26,832.
But this is only part of the story. In 1985, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel—now Mexico’s chief of staff—helped bring the first tambor de fundamento to the country, giving voice to Añá in Mexico for the first time.
Cárdenas and the Birth of Añá in Mexico
Long before I had the opportunity to speak with Cárdenas directly, I had heard about him from several drummers. They spoke of him with reverence—for his knowledge, his skill as a drummer and singer, and for the pivotal role he played in the emergence of the Mexican batá tradition.
Cárdenas hails from a prominent political lineage—his grandfather, President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (1934–1940), is one of Mexico’s most revered leaders. He studied percussion at Instituto Superior de Arte in Cuba, where he met his wife. After graduating in 1983, he returned to Mexico to study ethnohistory, graduating in 1987. He then began his political career, following in the footsteps of his father, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and became governor of Michoacán in 2002. In 2024, he was appointed chief of the office of the presidency by president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum.
With a longstanding passion for Cuban culture, connections to Cuba’s drumming elite, initiation into the Añá drumming brotherhood, behind-the-scenes support for religious-musical education, and the advantage of relative wealth and a powerful family, Cárdenas was uniquely positioned to help bring Añá to Mexico.
In 1984, Cárdenas heard the Danza Nacional de Cuba planned a tour of Mexico—a troupe which featured his future wife, Mayra Coffingy, and elite drummers, including his mentor, Ángel Bolaños, and the legendary batá master Jesús Pérez. Cárdenas requested, on behalf of several Mexican iyawós awaiting initiation, that Pérez bring his set of fundamento to Mexico to play a tambor. Pérez agreed, and that year fundamento batá were brought and played in Mexico for the first time.
Pérez, also known as oba ilu (king of the drum), is iconic in the batá world. He was renowned not only for his playing but also for his advocacy for the protection of Afro-Cuban culture through performance and pedagogy. Some fifty years before playing Añá in Mexico, he played one of the first-ever artistic presentations of batá music in Cuba using aberikulá (non-consecrated batá) at Fernando Ortiz’s inaugural ethnographic conference on Afro-Cuban culture in 1936.
This performance aimed to help a White Cuban audience learn about, appreciate, and stop fearing Black Cuban religion. This event had a resounding impact on the international dissemination of Cuban batá music—an influence that is still felt today, as batá rhythms and their cultural and spiritual significance continue to be replicated worldwide.
The first tambor de fundamento in Mexico was held at the home of Margarita de la O, a Cuban santera and daughter of Yemayá who was living in Mexico. The drummers included all those on tour with Danza Nacional de Cuba at the time: Pérez, Bolaños, Regino Jiménez, Armando Aballí, and Orestes Berríos, as well as Cárdenas and Gabino Fellove.
Another key development in Mexico’s batá tradition was an educational Afro-Cuban music and dance program that Cárdenas helped establish in 1987. These workshops continued for several years in universities and cultural centers in Mexico City, Jalapa, and Tijuana, feeding directly into the religious milieu of Mexican society.
During this period, strained U.S.-Cuba relations made it difficult for North American citizens to travel to the island. Mexico thus became a nexus of cultural, religious, and musical exchange; Cubans shared their knowledge, while interlocutors from Mexico and beyond spread the word, fueling exponential interest in the religion and its music.
The next significant stage occurred in the early 1990s, when two sets of Añá were brought to Mexico to live. One belonged to Luis Valdés, who was born in Cuba in 1960 and raised in Miami. He studied with and was sworn (initiated) to Añá in Miami by Pipo Peña, who, incidentally, is believed to have consecrated the first set of Añá on U.S. soil in 1975. He also played alongside Juan “El Negro” Raymat before moving to Mexico City in 1987.
“When I got to Mexico, there was no [religious] music,” Valdés recounted. “I went to Mercado Sonora—a huge religious market in Mexico City—and there was no Santería paraphernalia, nothing. I bought some güiros and made my own instruments. Then I hired Roberto Agüero, who had arrived with Enrique Horín’s group—a very famous bass player—and I initiated him to Shangó. I sat on the conga, my brother sang, and we played the first güiro [musical religious ceremony using non-consecrated instruments]. There must have been 300 people there. I thought, ‘Wow, what is this?’ No one was initiated, but they were all amazed.”
In 1994, Valdés brought Mexico’s first set of Añá from Cuba, called Añá Shango Ade, officially consecrated on March 22, 1994, and “born” from Isidrito’s drums, Añá Obanikoso. Valdés explained that when the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba later arrived with consecrated batá, ceremonies became very exclusive. Valdés’ drums, however, were of the people, serving Mexico’s growing religious community.
Although Valdés never made his living from drumming, his fundamento worked every weekend. He told me that there were so many iyawós needing presentation that the ritual musicians grew tired of repeating the required song and drum sequences, so they began limiting presentations to six or seven per ceremony.
Valdés was instrumental in teaching batá to the first generation of professional Mexican players, with Óscar Méndez and his brother Paolo among his earliest students. A few years later, when the Méndez brothers brought their own set of Añá to Mexico, “all of a sudden everybody went for drumming—and it’s still going,” he said.
The second set of Añá was brought from Cuba by Cárdenas in 1995—the same year he became an omó Añá. Unlike Valdez’s, Cárdenas’s drums were not played in the wider religious community. I was intrigued to know if this had something to do with Cárdenas’s political career—especially considering the negative press linking Santería with Mexico’s criminal underworld.
“There is still a lot of prejudice because of a lack of deeper knowledge of the origin of the culture and the root behind all of this,” Cárdenas explained to me. “It is seen in many other parts as magic, superstition, or practices like that of witchcraft… I got close to this because of a cultural interest, because of an interest in music, and because I was also studying anthropology, so I didn’t come to this through religion, to put it that way.”
Present-Day Añá in Mexico
Despite the favorable beginnings of Añá in Mexico, Méndez, López, and Miniconi all admit that musical and ritual knowledge was, until recently, limited and somewhat cobbled together. It is only in the last fifteen years, following the influence of key Cuban drummers living in Mexico who have shared their knowledge, that Añá and the batá tradition have matured, evolving into a full-fledged musical-ritual practice.
As López puts it, “If all the Cubans left Mexico tomorrow, the religion would continue without them.”
Cárdenas clarifies: “Mexico has been fortunate to permanently enjoy the presence and contributions of great Cuban omó Añá: Piri, Yumey, Alexis, Vladimir, Lekiam, Alexander, Damiani. It can be said that, with all of them, as well as with the older omó Añá from Danza Nacional and the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional, Mexico has received the best of Cuba. This has allowed to build a community of batá drummers in Mexico as strong and solid as those found in New York or Miami.”
Two brothers, known as Los Niños (“The Boys”), emerged as key progenitors of the Mexican batá tradition during my research in Mexico. Óscar Méndez was six years old when he and his brother, Paolo, earned their first pesos playing as a tambor de fundamento—making them possibly the youngest Mexicans to play Añá at that time. They were taught by their uncle, Juan Jiménez, who, according to Cárdenas, was among the students who attended the Cuban batá courses in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From those humble beginnings, they would go on to preside over a batá empire. Los Niños can have up to six sets of Añá playing simultaneously in different locations and average around fifteen ceremonies a week.
“Right now, in Mexico, you can make a living off the tambor,” Méndez clarifies. “And you can earn a lot more than someone with a college degree.”
However, he adds, “A lot of depth has been lost. Many say it’s just a trend, a money thing, a business, a lifestyle. But it wasn’t like that before. There used to be a lot of rules and a lot of respect.”
López explained that a professional batá drummer can earn enough to survive with just two or three ceremonies a week—if you don’t have a family and share rented accommodation. This is not the case in Cuba, which is experiencing an economic downturn, resulting in a talent drain as many Cuban drummers move to Mexico. As a result, according to López, there are now hundreds of sworn ritual batá drummers earning a living by playing in ceremonies across Mexico City—a number that has doubled since he arrived thirteen years ago.
Playing for Power: Tambor de Fundamento and the Mexican Underworld
While most Santería rituals have been copied from Cuban practice and pasted onto the Mexican socio-religious landscape intact, there are exceptions. One example is the unique way Santería intersects with, and is interpreted and expressed through, its integration with Mexican Indigenous and modern spiritual influences such as Santa Muerte. Another more extreme example is how it has been adopted by Mexico’s criminal underworld in the pursuit of power and protection.
There has been a flood of media coverage that equates Santería with drug-trafficking. The most infamous was in 1989, when Mexican authorities uncovered evidence of ritual human sacrifices in service of the drug trade operating on a ranch near the U.S. border. Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo, a Cuban American drug trafficker and Palo practitioner, was killed during the police raid, but several of his followers were tried and convicted. There is no credible evidence that Constanzo was a formal practitioner of Santería, but in the popular Mexican imagination, “Santería” was tainted.
While not all smoke means fire, there are reports of Santeria being used as a form of protection for those involved in, or connected to, violent crime. For example, Méndez recounted playing at a ceremony where the so-called iyawo was someone who had been kidnapped. The following day, he found out that everyone at the ceremony had been arrested. During another ceremony, a gun was pointed at him and his car smashed up after the padrino (religious godfather) officiating the tambor took a disliking to two of his friends.
“We’ve had to go to other states in Mexico where we have driven up roads lined with people holding guns,” he continued. “Then they put a dark hood over us. Super crazy. Like something out of a Netflix show. But with drums!”
*****
The story of Añá in Mexico is one of migration, resilience, adaptation, and contradiction. What began as a modest cultural-religious transplant has evolved into a powerful musical and spiritual force, shaped by the contributions of Cuban and Mexican drummers, devoted practitioners, and influential figures. Through their voices, we hear Añá echo across the country’s religious landscape—simultaneously preserving and transforming Afro-Cuban traditions as they are woven into local spiritual, cultural, and economic realities, fueling Santería’s rapid rise in Mexico in recent years.
While stories of criminal exploitation have threatened to taint its image, these coexist with a deeper and more abiding truth: one of devotion, artistic excellence, and community.
Vicky Jassey is a musician, scholar, and educator specializing in Afro-Cuban music and culture. She holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from Cardiff University and a master’s in performance from SOAS, University of London. Founder and artistic director of Bombo Productions, she has supported Afro-Cuban music in the UK since 2007.
An expanded version of this article is published on the Bombo Productions website in English and Spanish.
This article was updated on December 1, 2025, to include the account and photo from Luis Valdés.
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