Luis Adelardo Dominguez looks uncomfortable. Smartly dressed in tan corduroy slacks and a plaid shirt, a cell phone neatly holstered at his hip, he kneels awkwardly to pray beside a dusty roadside in Corrientes, an agricultural province near Argentina's border with Paraguay.
After a four-year job search, Mr. Dominguez, a well-educated corporate manager from Buenos Aires, finally has found new employment. He has come to Corrientes to light a candle to mark his good fortune, pray and thank Antonio "Gauchito" Gil, his favorite saint.
Gauchito Gil is no saint recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. An itinerant Argentine cowboy and outlaw born in obscurity in the late 1840s, Gil nevertheless is revered as a kind of South American Robin Hood and is widely credited by Argentina's rural poor to have performed a miracle with his last breath.
"I wanted to work because I still felt useful," says Mr. Dominguez, 60, tears of emotion welling in his eyes. "I would have done anything -- except kill, rob or lose my dignity. I planned to come and visit Gauchito Gil's shrine to ask his help.
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