Penitente brotherhoods usually are made up of Spanish-speaking Catholic laymen in rural communities. Although the activities and artifacts vary in specific details, the basic structure, ceremonies, and aims of penitentes as a cultural institution may be generalized. Full membership is open only to adult males. Female relatives may serve penitente chapters as auxiliaries who clean, cook, and join in prayer, as do children on occasion, but men hold all offices and make up the membership-at-large.

Penitente membership comprises two strata distinguishable by title and activity. In his study of Hispano institutional values, Monro Edmonson notes that penitente chapters are divided into these two groups: (1) common members or brothers in discipline, hermanos disciplantes; and (2) officers, called brothers of light, hermanos de luz.

Edmonson names each officer and lists his duties:

The head of the chapter is the hermano mayor. He is assisted in administrative duties by the warden (celador) and the collector (mandatario), and in ceremonial duties by an assistant (coadjutor), reader (secretario), blood-letter (sangredor) and flutist (pitero). An official called the nurse (enfermero) attends the flagellants, and a master of novices (maestro de novios) supervises the training of new members.[2]

In an early and apparently biased account of the penitentes, Reverend Alexandar Darley,[3] a Presbyterian missionary in southern Colorado, provides additional terms for three officers: picador (the blood-letter), regador or rezador (a tenth officer, who led prayers) and mayordomo de la muerte (literally "steward of death"). As host for meetings between penitente chapters, the mayordomo may be a late 19th-century innovation that bears the political overtones of a local leader.[4]

Having less influence than individual officers are the penitente members-at-large, numbering between thirty and fifty in each chapter. Through the Hispano family system of extended bilateral kinship, however, much of the village population is represented in each local penitente group.

Edmonson's study in the Rimrock district demonstrates the deep sense of social responsibility felt by penitentes for members and their extended family circles. "Special assistants were appointed from time to time to visit the sick or perform other community services which the brotherhood may undertake."[5] At other times of need, especially in sickness and death, the general penitente membership renders invaluable service to the afflicted family. In addition, penitente welfare efforts include spiritual as well as physical comfort such as wakes, prayers and rosaries, and the singing of funereal chants (alabados). At EspaÑola in November of 1965, I witnessed penitentes contributing such help to respected nonmembers: grave digging, financial aid, and a rosary service with alabados.

These spiritual services, however, are peripheral to the principal religious activity of penitentes—the Lenten observance of the Passion and death of Jesus. During Holy Week, prayer meetings, rosaries, and via crucis processions with religious images are held at the morada and at a site representing Calvary (calvario), usually the local cemetery. On Good Friday, vigils are kept and the morada is darkened for a service known as las tinieblas. The ceremony of "the darkenings" consists of silent prayer broken by violent noise making. Metal sheets and chains, wooden blocks and rattles are manipulated to suggest natural disturbances at the moment of Jesus' death on the cross. This emphatic portrayal of His last hours is recalled also by acts of contrition and flagellation in penitente initiation rites, punishments, and Holy Week processions.

Penitentes use physical discipline and mortification as a dramatic means to intensify their imitation of Jesus' suffering.[6] Heavy timber crosses (maderos) and cactus whips (disciplinas) are used in processions that often include a figure of death in a cart (la carreta de la muerte). Disciplinary and initiatory mortification in the morada makes use of flint or glass blood-letting devices (padernales).[7]