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BELIEF & PRACTICE:
Roadside Crosses
February 25, 2005 Episode no. 826
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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Here and there, all over the country, you can see roadside crosses. Who puts them there and why? They are especially prevalent in the American Southwest. So we went to Austin, Texas, where Bob Bednar of Southwestern University gave us the story behind this tradition of memorializing the dead.
Professor BOB BEDNAR (Chairman, Communications Studies Department, Southwestern University): Most of them die in car accidents.
The sites are there to mark the place where the person died and to warn others not to let it happen to them. It started as a Catholic tradition, but it's so diffused now -- it's no longer just a Catholic practice.
The cross is there because it's as universal a symbol as this culture has to mark death spots.
Roadside crosses have a couple of different origin points. Some of them started with Spanish settlement into the Southwest. Particularly in Catholic faith traditions, the cross is meant to signify the place where the soul left the body before it could be consecrated -- sudden deaths that were too quick to have a priest deliver the last rites.
It becomes a kind of a portal where people can go and speak to the dead person. They come here and they leave things for the person.
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You see an array of things at the site ranging from a votive candle of the Virgin of Guadeloupe to CDs, hats.
One of the most striking things about roadside shrines is that you find acts of communication like this. The message says, "Hi, my angel. It was so nice to see you last night. Thank you for giving me your strength and protection. You will always be the love of my life."
A red WWJD -- What Would Jesus Do -- bracelet as well. This is something where people have come to visit and have left something that is really close to them and their body. It's been on their body, and they put it at the spot where this person died as a way of sharing something very personal.
They are illegal. The only sites in Texas that are legal are the Mothers Against Drunk Drivers sites. Those are officially sanctioned by the state.
Why do people who know it is illegal do it, and then why do people whose job it is to enforce the law not take them down? I think it's such a rich practice that people respect it.
They can set the terms of the memorial. They can say, "This is what I want to remember about my loved one, and this is how I want to remember it."
One of the reasons why the practice is so important to people is that it gives them a place where they can have -- someplace where they can think about death and be in the same spot where their loved one died.
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Related Reading
ROADSIDE CROSSES IN CONTEMPORARY MEMORIAL CULTURE by Holly Everett
ROADSIDE RELIGION by Timothy Beal
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