12/07/2026
Every year, the "camarero" posts roll in like clockwork; individuals pat themselves on the back with a title that sounds noble and aristocratic. But if we set that aside and look at the actual history, the reality of the term just might pop one's bubble.
The word camarero literally means "waiter" in Spanish. In the context of their paraliturgical customs, it was the women (camareras), often from affluent backgrounds, who were quietly and exclusively tasked with financing, maintaining, and vesting publicly revered images belonging to the Church. One famous example was Queen Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, who served as a camarera to an image of Our Lady with the same name as her.
In the colonial era, the same rules were observed here: The most celebrated ones were the La Navalβs camareras, who were all aristocratic women from pious, well-respected families, and this is thankfully a system still observed in many shrines and places. If we think about it, they are the legitimate camareras, in the original sense of the word.
But somewhere along the way, the contemporary Filipino santo subculture has trivialized it into a desperate currency, qualifying anyone with an image lying around their house as one. Following that logic, every Catholic is a camarero. Nothing really intrinsically wrong with the idea, but the term, in the santero subculture sense, has morphed into a sort of badge of honor β a bid for validation disguised as piety.
We see it every so often: the ostentatious display of ownership over an image commissioned or bought, but is it out of faith or a need to be seen? For others, it has become a status symbol, a staged opulence where the divinity represented is reduced to a velvet-clad prop, and the procession becomes a runway for oneβs fantasies. Some even resort to exhausting their means or even scamming others just to put up a facade!
Are we really camareros or just mere collectors? True stewardship demands a quiet vacancy of self. Until we can take care of an image without flexing our intimacies and vanities for the world to see, we might not be keeping a tradition alive, but merely playing dress-up with the sacred. And before you write a triggered tirade, it is worth asking: when the faithful look up at our images, whose glory are they actually being asked to look at?
