Sea Wolf: Los muertos de México

I recently returned from a trip to Mexico. I arrived in Cancun on the evening of Halloween, where there were all sorts of American style celebrations going on in the streets and in the bars of the tourist strip. The Mexican celebration of "Dia de muertos" (day of the dead) happens the following two days, on November 1st and 2nd, and is more of a celebration rather than something solemn or mournful.

Alters are created for deceased loved ones, with photographs, usually marigold flowers, with food and memorabilia that the departed liked. Families gather and remember their loved ones by going to the cemetery, again leaving 'ofrendas' (offerings) behind and eating food like 'pan de muertos' and candy sugar skulls while reminiscing of their departed loved ones.

There are variations throughout Mexico, so I was told, and often celebrations can carry on for weeks. I spent the next three weeks travelling to Merida, Oaxaca, Mexico City and Guanajuato and everywhere, there were skulls and skeletons represented with street art, banners hanging up above, parades with traditional puppets and orchestras playing music... all celebrating the souls of those that have departed.

There are also many pre-Hispanic traditions around the dead that have added to the rich culture of Mexico and their ways of looking at death. Unlike say in North America, where we pretend it doesn't exist until it inevitably happens to someone we know and love, here it seems so much more part of everyday life, historically, culturally, artistically. In towns like Oaxaca, there were skulls in galleries, painted on walls, in cafes, hanging from balconies, in the market, in hotel lobbies...

"Do you miss the life you had? So do I."
(in memory of those that are no longer with us)

'Full length' for sale at the market.

"La Catrina" has become the most popular representation
of Day of the Dead and even beyond as a Mexican symbol on
handicrafts, dolls, stickers and, in this case, a mural.

In a hotel lobby

"When everything passes, I'll look for you and I'll hug you so strongly that we will
forget time. When everything passes, I will need you more than ever."

A sand painting at the Zapoteca ruins of Monte Alban.

There are many art galleries in Oaxaca with printmaking presses and,
of course, with a lot of pieces on the theme of 'muertos'.

Meanwhile in Mexico City, there are daily dances in the Aztec tradition at the Zocalo, site of the pre-Hispanic temple of Tenochtitlan and symbolically represented with rituals they had on death and sacrifices for the Gods. At the Museum of Anthropology there are hundreds of artifacts from clay figurines to carved stone stelae to burial remains from various Meso-american civilizations spanning hundreds of years before the Spanish arrived. And on the streets, the Angel of Death is always waiting for some spare change.

Down and out in Mexico City

In the famous Museo de las Momias of Guanajuato, there are naturally mummified bodies from a cholera outbreak in the early 1800s that were interred in a vast cemetery then subsequently exhumed a few decades later for families that did not pay a 'burial tax'. They had naturally mummified due to the minerals in the soil and the climate of the region and those that had been removed had been stored in a room until the 1950s. The subsequent museum and story became well known in Mexican popular culture. Amongst the displays of sixty + mummies is one that is the smallest in the world, that of a 5 month old fetus found in a pregnant woman. It was an incredibly fascinating, if not creepy, place.