We timed our stay in Oaxaca to coincide with el Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The usage of the word “day” is somewhat misleading. El Día de los Muertos might be more accurately referred to as la Semana de los Muertos, or the Week of the Dead, since the celebrations are spread out over roughly a week, with two nights in particular being singled out as especially important.
A Thin Boundary
In the various indigenous traditions, el Día de los Muertos represents the time when the worlds of the dead and the living are closest to each other. During this time, the worlds are close enough to allow the dead to return to our sunlit world and spend a few days in the company of their loved ones, who greet them with feasts and fiestas.
Except that it isn’t. The period of 31 October through 2 November actually coincides with the christian holiday of Halloween, which itself was invented to supercede the ancient pagan holiday of Samhain (Pronounced “sow-wan”. Thanks, gaelic.). People we spoke to in Oaxaca told us that the original dates for el Día de los Muertos would probably be pretty hard to pin down, as different indigenous groups in the area tended to have their own variations of the celebration. This account seems to be corroborated online, through the presence of many vague and conflicting estimates of the original dates.
By the time we arrived in Oaxaca, evenings were fully dedicated to celebrations. Parades made slow progress down the city streets, many were impromptu affairs consisting of crowds having gathered around a band of musicians who played as if they had just landed the biggest stadium gig of their lives. Men on stilts painted as devils and warriors danced in the squares and in the middle of the streets, their boundaries defined by camera flashes, taco vendors and Catrina-faced tourists.
The Elegant Skeleton
In fact, Catrinas were everywhere in Oaxaca, day and night. The traditional face paint has even been adopted in the US and it’s not hard to see why. The bright colors and soft lines of the painted mask invite a welcoming and festive embrace of death and at its most basic level, la Catrina is just very pretty.
In Mexico, la Catrina is more than just a pretty face. She is a life-after-death embodiment of rebellion, native roots and national identity. The original drawing of the elegant skeleton was made by the artist José Guadalupe Posada sometime around 1910 and 1913 and was called la Calavera Garbancera, in reference to the garbanzo beans that were seen by some as a more refined food than the native Mexican maize.
Posada’s elegant skeleton, attired in her aristocratic French garb, satirized the whitewashing of Mexican culture with European trappings. It didn’t take long for la Catrina to evolve into the painted lady, whose white makeup hides her darker skin.
In typical Mexican fashion, Mexicans of all stripes embraced the image of la Catrina with gleeful sarcasm, happily mocking their then-president Porfirio Díaz‘s suppression of indigenous culture. Look at our pale white skin, they cried out mirthfully, faces painted into garish grins. Here are your pretty European clothes, hanging from our Mexican bones, they mocked. To the dismay of el Porfiriato, la Catrina quickly became a profoundly Mexican tradition that looked down defiantly upon an old and distant Europe.
Dance Like No One Is Watching
Every night in Oaxaca, tides of paraders rolled through the city streets at less than a snail’s pace to accommodate the frequent stops that bands would make when groups of people in their ambit began dancing.
Young and old danced to the gatling gun beat of drums and soaring notes of trombones, air hurled through the instrument’s brass throats by players blowing into them like breaths of CPR forced into a hopelessly lost loved one with whom the would-be rescuer refuses to part. We held each other close for balance as sequined boys and frilly girls spun each around and as stilted clowns and devils spun themselves around and as tourists spun their cameras desperately hunting every glittering detail. It is madness to keep oneself still when all the world is moving and so we found ourselves swaying to the music and only then the world around us made sense.
Stillness
In the Panteón General we found stillness. A panteón in Spanish is a cemetery and this one is the biggest and oldest in Oaxaca. A noisy and hectic market guards the main entrance and the price of entry is submitting to hear the cries of a hundred vendors competing for your attention. Cinco, cinco, todo por cinco pesos! Ricos tacos, solo diez pesos la porción! Camisa, amigo, tengo bonitas camisas! Pásale, pásale! And then we passed under the arches that separate the market’s maelstrom of the living from the blanketing quiet of the borderland that is the Panteón.
Thick gravestones and elaborate mausoleums stand guard against time with the Panteón’s walls. Upon them lay beds of marigolds, tastefully arranged in an array of designs. Many were adorned with full ofrendas, the austere faces of the deceased staring across time from black-and-white photographs alongside cups of mezcal awaiting the thirsty lips of the newly returned dead.
Then came the graves of the forgotten, those cracking slabs unadorned by any ofrenda, the names of their tenants having eroded to the mocking delight of the one remaining word not yet faded from the ancient stone: “perpetuidad”. Some slabs sat askew, revealing the empty darkness beneath them, a vertical continuation of the Panteón completing its borderland image. Even the breath we living exhaled sank into the cool dark of those polygon pits.
Not every resident of the Panteón made their bed below ground. Embedded in the walls ringing this hallowed treaty ground where the living reached out to the dead were horizontal alcoves where those who left behind the sunlit world without enough money to pay for an earthen bed. Lively candles danced to unheard rhythms in these alcoves, an opening act to the festivities soon to come.
Only the Parade Has Agency
We heard the world of the living collide with that of the dead before we saw it. A roar of brass and feet and drums and voices and fireworks surged from trickle to roar like a tidal wave in the night. We looked up from whatever touristic attraction had won our attention and were subsumed in the parade. All the passion and fervor of the prior days’ parades presented themselves but on a grander scale, a Mardi Gras during a fever dream.
Here a priest tried to be heard over the din of a hundred trumpets, his hands raised above his head underneath the unblinking gaze of a monstrous effigy of a virgin while the same stilted devil of earlier nights cavorted to the beat of his own drum and a choir chanted two streets away and could be heard for two more further on and the once again the world twisted around a thousand centrifugal points and we spun with it in time to the twirling of giant white heads held on sticks pursuing rows of flower-bearing Catrinas, themselves flogged onwards by the relentless movements of a captain twenty feet tall, nimbly dancing along very border of the living and the dead, face half pink flesh and half exposed bone and we cannot stop we cannot stop we no longer have agency, only the parade has agency and we are its arms and feet and fingers until it lets us go.
Friends
The tornado of brass and firework smoke and colorful garb flung us out of its body and into a market. The wisdom of that awesome crowd deposited us right where we needed to be to find friends, who we had met on the road and whose travels had also brought them to experience el Día de los Muertos right here in its very heart. We caught up over tamales and later, after incorporating in more parades, we found the last food vendor of the night and devoured burgers on the sidewalk before excusing ourselves for the night and taking cabs back to our various lodgings.
The cab doors closed and the fiesta sprang to life with the engine. We sped home in a metal pocket of flashing lights and throbbing beats over topes and down highway lanes closed for construction, slingshotting around 150 degree turns and weaving through traffic until we were outside our door and then we were in our rooms and then flat on our bed, having finally fallen to the day’s unyielding activity.
Our Dearly Departed
El Día de los Muertos touched home during our stay in Oaxaca. The boundary between our worlds proved thinner than we knew and Jordan’s aunt Joan and our beloved cat Mimi crossed over. It’s hard to hear of someone’s passing from such a distance away. Joan suffered a stroke, followed by a series of cardiac arrests. Seventy-six years old and sharp as ever, Joan declined medical interventions that would have prolonged her life without improving the quality of living. She passed away in a hospital, surrounded by family.
Mimi crossed the border on November 2nd from our friend Alex’s lab, after the vet had found a large tumor in her stomach just the day before. She was fifteen years old and Jordan had adopted her when she was first weaned from her mother, a denizen of our neighborhood streets in Brooklyn. We had felt conflicted about leaving her to make this voyage, but Alex, her adoptive parent/roomate, is as much a cat lover as we are and we fully expected her to live to see twenty.
When the veil between worlds thin next year, we’ll have to set up some ofrendas. On one will sit a bottle of Fireball and a photo of Mt. Rainier. The other will be covered in fish flakes and felt blankets.
