The Penitentes are an order of Spanish-American Catholics whose secret rituals marking the death and resurrection of Christ represent some of the oldest continuously practiced religious rites the United States. Pentitente ritual, which emphasized public and bodily penance, was officially condemned by the Church in the nineteenth century, but these observances continued in secret.

For the Penitentes, Easter Holy Week observance inspired the most profound public expressions of penance. Reenacting the scenes of the passion of Christ, they processed from the morada, or Penitente chapter house, toward a preselected Calvary site. In these processions, death was personified as a life-size, skeletal figure, made ever more realistic by the addition of hair, glass marble eyes, teeth, and movable limbs.