Religious territoriality: the San Juan Parrandero Festival as a geosymbol of territorial identity in Jiutepec, Mexico

Abstract

This article analyzes the San Juan Parrandero Festival in Jiutepec, Mexico, from the perspective of Cultural Geography and the Geography of Religion. It investigates how routes, rituals, and sacred objects reframe urban and rural spaces, shaping discontinuous and collective territories. Led by a subalternized social group, the festival articulates devotional practices that challenge Catholic normativity, exposing tensions between institutional and lived sacredness. The qualitative methodology relies on bibliographical, documentary, and iconographic analyses, using images as a heuristic resource to interpret territorialities and geosymbols. Elements of San Juan Parrandero’s figure (cigarettes, bottles, and spirits) acquire symbolic value by connecting faith, nature, and territorial identity. The study concludes that the celebration acts as a geosymbol where memory and ancestry are activated to produce a collective territory, demonstrating that religious territoriality operates as a political and cultural practice, as well as a strategy for community affirmation.