Perhaps there is no meaning more paradoxical than the festival of the dead celebrated by Mexicans. The decorated cities, the ecstatic people, the food, drinks and flowers displace the usual meaning we associate with death. Mexicans, as part of a culture of many resignifications, celebrate the Day of the Dead with a gigantic popular and festive demonstration. The dead, as part of the collective imagination, serve to raise questions about how we live: talking about death is talking about life.
The writer Carlos Fuentes, in his The buried mirror (1992), states that death is “the great egalitarian spectacle that dissolves the boundaries between the setting and the audience, between the author and the spectator, between what looks and what is looked at”. In festive Mexico, a set of legacies from the Mesoamerican peoples and their forms of permanence in the collective imagination are present beyond the process of the Spanish Conquest, which began in 1519, or more recently the impacts of the globalized Halloween party.
The culture of great sacrifices practiced by the Mayans, Toltecs and Aztecs gave rise to humanity, according to the beliefs of a sophisticated religious system. Celebrations and sacrifices were experienced amid uncertainties and catastrophes that date back to the founding myths of Mesoamerica. The story of Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent, for example, had great weight in Aztec culture, which believed that the world had previously been destroyed and was reborn with the sacrifices made by the gods; Therefore, it was necessary to continue sacrifices for humans, to preserve life. In the Aztecs' conception of the world, life and death were not opposites. The idea of repeating cycles signaled that the meaning of living was not death, but a symbiosis of regeneration of creative forces.
A party, many resignifications
The proximity to the Catholic date of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day is not accidental. Between the various dates of the ancient calendars of indigenous peoples and the consolidated date of the festivals, between October 31st and November 2nd, there is a visible appropriation of the ephemeris and the reasons for the celebrations, as occurs in other phenomena in the Christian world, such as , at Christmas.
Between October 31st and November 2nd, ceremonies take place on altars with the dead's favorite foods, as well as lots of flowers and candles. The construction of altars is a familiar phenomenon of remembrance and joy. According to local tradition, the dead return once a year to visit their relatives. The abundant tables, the flowery porticos and people dressed as skulls are a way of welcoming them and making them not feel like strangers. Visits are welcome and the hosts are characterized to be like visitors at a real party and without any macabre connotations.
Whoo Kazoo's award-winning animation about the Day of the Dead refers to affections, memories and festivities of Mexican culture
For Octavio Paz, in The labyrinth of solitude (1950), the way Mexicans caress and celebrate death has ambivalent meanings. The Mexican is no less afraid of death, he just doesn't hide it, nor does he hide from it. The paradoxical effect would be that, perhaps because of this, there is so much contempt for life in a society marked by the culture of sacrifice, by the decimation of millions during the Spanish conquest and colonization and in the violence that marked the country's most recent history.
The popular character of the festival of the dead has a face: the Calavera Catrina, by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913). From a close look at popular characters came some of the best-known engravings in Mexico. The Calavera engraving, for example, was circulated in periodicals and today is one of the most characteristic prints of that country and was named La Catrina by the muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957), when he reproduced it in his work Dream of a Sunday afternoon in the Alameda Central.
Posada's success, as a printmaker who explained archetypes and common types, was due to his talent and the increase in circulation of a popular illustrated press in the second half of the 19th century. The themes of local culture created a humorous way of portraying the daily lives of Mexicans. The poorly literate population identified parties, criticism and a fun form of representation about themselves and their customs.
A culture of absence?
The peculiar celebration of Mexicans in Day of the Dead It should help us ask ourselves why we avoid it and don't want to deal with it naturally or even think about death in a festive way. How do Mexicans manage to transform pain into joy? Wouldn't this joy be nonsense in the face of living?
Mexican history, in more recent times, has been marked by uncomfortable figures and situations: more than 1 million deaths during the Mexican Revolution, the series of victims of persecution by the political system of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the Tlatelolco massacre ( 1968), the 43 young people who disappeared in Ayotzinapa (2014) and the countless cases of deaths in the violent drug trafficking dispute are clues to think about the meanings of life and death.
Violence is not exclusive to Mexico. The banality of life and death spread everywhere. But, among Latin Americans, only Mexicans manage to transform death into something to be celebrated and dignified in other ways. There is a lot to learn in this way of living, to reflect on the weight of your culture and the way our brothers they rework themselves in the face of each pain and each absence, giving new meaning to their own experiences and filling their voids.
“Death is non-transferable, like life”, wrote Octavio Paz.
Let us know how to live and die well! And, if possible, with lots of partying!
