San Miguel Arcángel (Saint Michael) is a warrior angel who leads the fight against evil in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In tradition, he is the head of the archangels, the leaders of the angels. In the Caribbean and across Latin America, especially the Dominican Republic, he is an icon for syncretized (blended) Catholic, Afro-Diasporic, and Indigenous traditions, especially among the working class in the barrios.
San Miguel
San Miguel is the patron saint of military and police, first responders, bankers, and grocers.
He is a warrior angel who defends God’s people from evil, originally in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. He is known for leading God’s army that defeated the forces of evil in heaven and cast them out onto the Earth. As the angel of death, San Miguel helps faithful souls on their journey to heaven. In the Judgement Day tradition, he weighs resurrected souls to determine where they are going to heaven or not.
Symbols of San Miguel include the sword he uses to defeat evil, and the scales he uses to measure the merits of souls on Judgement Day.
In the Caribbean context, you can see San Miguel as a defender of native peoples against the colonizers who practised a particularly cruel and violent form of Christianity. The people protected their Indigenous and African heritage traditions by hiding them within the colonizer’s Christianity.
In the Dominican Republic, San Miguel is a Christian representation of Dominican folk traditions (Palo, 21 Divisiones, or Vudú). Dominican cities and upper classes tend to be more oriented towards images of Christ, whereas barrios and working classes tend to be more inclined to images of San Miguel. Many Christ-oriented folks say San Miguel represents witchcraft and evil. Yet those who love San Miguel consider themselves Christians, and they really are. Nobody knows the name of God, and fighting over whose traditions are the right ones is ridiculous. All of the traditions are beautiful and there is nothing scary or bad about any of them.
The earliest mention of San Miguel Arcángel is in the Book of Enoch, an ancient Jewish religious text mostly about the beginning and end of time, written between the third and second centuries BC. He is considered a protector of the Jewish faith.
Archangel Michael is also the patron saint of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.
Iroko “Kiko” Keith Looking for San Miguel
I don’t know why saints resonate in me, but they do. I’ve had many wonderfully strange experiences involving saints and orishas since the day before I moved to the Caribbean. I don’t believe in anything other than nature and the stories we tell to try and explain its mysteries, yet I cannot deny my own experience. My story may be true or just the story my creative mind made up to try and explain what are nothing more than coincidences, but it’s a great story.
My life tends to change radically around saints days. I don’t foresee it. I only see the connections when I study the saints and look back on my own life, but I’ve learned to trust it when it happens. Around this time last year, I was working really hard and was very alone in the Dominican Republic. A friend said there was going to be a palo for San Miguel. I interpreted that as a drum, song, and dance gathering like bomba Puertorriqueña which I love. I survived the solitude of the pandemic by becoming a bomba drummer in Puerto Rico. That changed my life.
So I went looking for San Miguel. My friend didn’t come through, but another friend named Miguel, said he knew of a palo. So I went with him to an ofrenda (home altar) created by a woman in the barrio. It was great. On the way in, I could hear the drums outside her house which gave me the same exciting feeling as when you go looking for an Argentine tango dance, and know you are close when you hear the music.
It was just a recording (of renowned Palo singer Eneroliza Núñez), but my host had turned an entire back room of her house into an altar for San Miguel. Everything was red and green, the colors of San Miguel. There was his iconic image and one of Mami Wata. More about her later. I brought a red candle and a bottle of rum as an offering. She had a cake like a birthday cake for San Miguel.
As I left, my host picked up a perfume bottle and asked if I wanted a spray. I don’t like perfume, but let her spray me as part of the experience. Only later did I realize that she had baptized me in San Miguel.
So that was my introduction to the religious practice of Dominican Palo. The religion is called Palo, and so is the music and dance. It’s around, but often denied. It’s accepted in the barrios, but generally repressed. An altar may be filled with Christian iconography, but it may represent another of the ten thousand names of God. In the end, it’s the same One God as for everybody else, but people have learned to adopt the cloak of Christianity to avoid violent repression because Christianity was brought to the Americas at the end of a sword, pistol, or match.
And Then
The next weekend I called my friend Miguel and said let’s go out. I’d been working so hard that I needed to unwind. I wanted to dance son Dominicano at the Son de Keka block party in Los Pepines, Santiago de los Caballeros, so I asked Miguel to bring a friend who dances. He showed up with two very wild and happy ladies. I quickly realized that these two would not fit in at Son de Keka, so we went to a discotec. It was early, so the place was empty. The girls drank and danced a little bit. They perreo’d me until my shirt smelled like butt, but I wasn’t interested in that. They couldn’t quite figure me out. Afterwards, we took them home to their husbands in the next town. It wasn’t what I was looking for, but was still fun.
The next morning I called Miguel and thanked him for a fun night. He said I had to go out again tonight. I didn’t want to go out because I was going back to New York in two days and had to work. I was already tired from the night before. (Dominicans are night people, but I’m a day worker.) He insisted. I agreed, but only if I got home early.
Miguel brought just one friend this time. We went to a bar that has live merengue for dancing. As soon as we sat down, I looked at his friend with her hair pulled back in a pony tail, and had the strongest feeling that she was my family. I’m a Thai Canadian American, and thought she was Japanese or Filipina, something Asian like me. I get that family sensation from Indigenous peoples of the Americas because they originated in Asia. I spent much of my pre-teen years in Bangkok, Thailand, so Asia is very much part of me.
We danced and it was great. I don’t fall in love because that’s crazy, and I’ve done the craziest things in my life for love. But I fell in love with her right then and there. It was the proverbial love at first sight. It was so noisy in the club that it was hard to talk. I took her outside. A light rain began to fall. It only made her more beautiful. I told her that even though it is totally crazy, I had fallen in love with her, and with her permission would like to find out why. I didn’t get home until three or four in the morning. Oops.
When I woke up, I called Miguel and thanked him. He said I should go out for dinner another night to get to know her. I agreed, thinking it would be after I came back from New York. I passed out from fatigue. I couldn’t work.
Around 6pm my phone woke me up. It was Miguel saying he was outside. I panicked thinking I had slept through the night and would miss my early morning flight. I went outside to greet him and he had a woman with curly hair, a pajón (an Afro), in the back of his car. She was beautiful, but I didn’t recognize her.
I was a little mad at Miguel for bringing another woman when I had just fallen in love the night before. I was still half asleep when I sent them on their way. When I went back inside, I thought about the beautiful woman in the back of the car. Then it dawned on me. OMG. It was her with her hair down. I called Miguel to ask if it was her, and insisted they come back. She didn’t want to. She was mad at being rejected. But they came back, we had dinner, and that was our beginning. I now have a Dominican family.
I try and connect with the locals wherever I am. Dominicans like merengue, bachata, and dembow, but I found that many Dominicans on the street will sing along to palo music. It’s a way to connect with the people that I could only learn on the ground in the RD.
There is an origin part to this story that involves Oshún, the Yoruba orisha of love and beauty. In Puerto Rico, I named my bomba drum Oshún, to protect me from bad love. I’ll tell you the story another time. My friend Miguel is right in the middle of it. Told you the saints resonate in me.
So when I went looking for San Miguel, I ended up with a wife and kids that defeated the evil of my solitude. Oh, and in her pajón, my wife looks just like the iconic image of Mami Wata who I recognized on the altar for San Miguel. You can’t make this stuff up.