The Return of the Muertitos
Today is the Day of the Dead here in Mexico. Rather than being at all scary, this holiday is playful, decorative, creative, and fun. There are skeletons and skulls everywhere, together with colored crepe paper designs, "bread of the dead" (pan de muerto), and offerings of fruit, sweets and alcohol for the departed.
Dead people aren't to be forgotten or feared, but embraced. They are often addressed in the diminutive - so instead of "dead," they are "the deadies" or the "little dead guys." Everybody dies, so of course there's nothing wrong with being dead. It makes sense.
Somewhere along the line in the last few weeks, when I saw one more of the tranquil, smiling skulls, I think I started to get this holiday, and with it a key difference between Mexican and US cultures. Here, death is less of an ending and more of a second act in the play of life, a continuation of the events of this lifetime. You even get to come back and see your loved ones, or at least they make an effort to remember you.
Most people recognize the link with Halloween and El Dia de los Muertos, but the emphasis of the two holidays are totally different. I got to see this with special clarity this year, since I was in the US for Halloween and in Mexico for the Day of the Dead, which starts the next day. November 1 is the day for remembering children who have died, and Nov. 2 is the main holiday, for deceased adults, so I got to be here for the whole thing. In Philadelphia on Oct. 31 there was candy everywhere - in the lobby of my hotel in a plastic container shaped like a pumpkin, handed out by costumed employees of the UPenn bookstore, and even in my airplane meals. But even so, by and large, on Halloween everything is business as usual. It's really for kids and a few rambunctious adults, and it doesn't have much meaning beyond the candy and kitsch.
Back in Mexico, most people didn't even go to work on Friday, November 2. Government employees had the day off and the streets were full of families, at least the ones that didn't leave town for a four-day weekend. It felt like Christmas in the US - a holiday where you couldn't get much done even if you wanted to because the majority of society is hanging out at home. When I went out on Thursday morning I noticed my apartment building was decorated with meticulously cut paper banners and skull sculptures with candles on top. On the Avenida de la Reforma, Mexico City's equivalent of 5th avenue, though not quite as glitzy, people rambled through a long line of tented offerings, sort of like installation pieces with food, poems and meaningful objects for "los difuntitos." Some of my favorites were one sponsored by a hotel with a skeleton getting room service and another sponsored by a publishing house with a skeleton reading after getting out of the coffin of ignorance. The booths were full of color, with flowers, colored paper, drawings and mountains of fruit.
At home, I decided to make my own offering. It started out as dedicated to my aunt and to a professor of mine who both died of cancer, but later others started to enter in - my grandparents, my boyfriend's grandfather, and his little sister who died shortly after birth. Here it is, my humble "ofrenda":
Feliz Dia de Muertos!