Posted on All Souls' Day, the Day of the Dead, Monday morning, November 2, 2020.
Dancers in a Day of the Dead procession in Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo for Paul Theroux's “On the Plain of Snakes” by Steve McCurry. HMH. Via the Los Angeles Times.
Growing up Catholic in upstate New York State, I knew today as All Souls' Day. And I knew it as a holy day, although not a holy day of obligation. I did not know it as a holiday. When I was an altar boy, I went to mass, but those masses were solemn and often sad because families of the departed would request the masses to be said in their loved one's memory. I didn't think of it as a celebration of life by way of a mocking Death. Something I wish the nuns had taught us...
Each evening, on the days from before Halloween through All Saints’ Day (also called Dia de los Angelitos, Day of the Dead Children) on November first, and the Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos), on the second, Oaxaca is transformed. The comparas---troupes of masked marchers and musicians---subverted the order of the city, asserted their marching multitudes, pushed forward along the cobbles, and sprawled, taking over the streets, thrusting everyone else aside, turning them into spectators. Then the city belonged to the processions of skull-faced children and ghouls and drummers, and trumpeters and the Angel of Death.
...As the processions grew larger, more people, more banners, so did the images they carried---a queen, a clown---much taller, the costumes becoming fancier, the masks more elaborate, the music louder, until (as local parades often do) they too over the whole street, filling it all the way to Zocalo, creating a spectacle. Where there had been pop music and karaoke issuing from balconies and bars, now there was the blare of a brass band.
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...Outside the Panteón, Oaxaca’s walled-in cemetery, there was a carnival---food, games, rides, beer---and the niches on the high interior walls, where bodies were filed away and labeled, were lighted by candles. At each tombstone inside, at the crypts, vaults, and tombs that were like villas---with roofs and columns---a family was gathered, drinking and eating. I was welcomed: “Have a drink?” “Are you hungry?”
The parades in daylight were jovial, with prancing monsters and the effigies of ghouls and beauties, but when night fell on All Saints’ Day...the vigils began, and I went to the old cemetery in Santa Cruz Xoxocotlan, a center of Day of the Dead activity, where I saw that a vigil was a drinking party or a family picnic or, for some, a solemn, prayerful veneration. The drinking and shouting in a cluster of hearty masked celebrants is so odd you take it to be transgressive, but it is fitting, because the Day of the Dead embodies elements of insult and protest, in the cause of grieving and satire, which is a form of grieving---as well as binge eating.
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The protest, the rebellion, was a tonic. In the parades, using the freedom of pandemonium, many of the masked and costumed marchers chanted against the government...or carried signs boldly lettered MUERRA A MALGOBIERNO! [Death to Bad Government!]
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The images of death, of Santa Muerte, or bony Catarina, are not mournful, because the mood is festive with a subtext of anarchy. The celebrants are people who work and live humbly all year, then seize this chance to make noise, to protest, to drink themselves silly.
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Memento mori--remember you must die---is the subtext of Mexican life...The medieval theme was “Death comes to all and makes a mockery of us all.” And in the street theater and cemetery crapulosities---borracheras---of those days of the dead, the Mexicans return the compliment: they dress as skeletons, they parade in skull masks, they make gifts of sugar skulls, they engage in macabre dances, they mock death.
---from “On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey” by Paul Theroux.
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