Is Day of the Dead still a day of celebration?

For some Mexicans a dolorous mood hangs over days that traditionally have been celebrated with high hearts, beginning with the Thursday, October 31 celebration of  El Dia de Brjuas (The Day of Sorcerers).  Friday was Dia de Los Santos (All Saints Day),  remembering los angelitos, the “little angels,” who died in infancy.   Saturday is Dia de los Muertos, (Day of the Dead), also called Fieles Difuntos and La Parca, honoring teen-agers and adults.  By whatever name, this cluster of days has become more complex – emotionally and spiritually – in recent years.  This complexity grows out of myriad kidnappings and of mass, and individual, random slayings by drug gangs.  Especially troubling is the slice of the kidnappings that a discomforting number of eye-witnesses report are carried out at the hands of the Mexican military.

November 1 and 2 constitute a fitting example of syncretism, a classic mestizo moment when Mexicans observe a tradition that twins Catholic ritual and the Aztec/indigenous belief that the dead return once a year to visit kinfolk. 

But increasingly as the plague of death and disappearance has spread, many mourners no longer feel impelled to join in the the robust joking, the often dervish acts, costumes and performances accompanying the decoration of graves, of bringing great platers, canastas overflowing with sugar- and chocolate-covered skulls and papier-mache skeletons.  These accompany the dead’s favorite drinks, the toys of childhood, those close-held impedimenta fostering both the recall and reasons for celebrating those kinfolk and friends who’ve passed on, it is believed, to another world.  Many parents  across the Republic have had too many offspring kidnapped, tortured and killed, or simply vanished, to crank up the traditional sense of mocking humor about death.  The ironical caress of death, the jovial recall of remarkably silly and very lively past deeds no longer breed unabridged laughter, but more often tears of loss and anguish.

The victims of Mexico’s seven-year war on drugs has spread the anguish of merciless slaughter so deeply and widely that to try to think of kidnapped and butchered kin as victims of something similar to an illness, an accident, a misdiagnosis is impossible for relatives of the murdered.  This wave of death is not the result of a revolutionary war against a dictatorship, or an unbearably oppressive government – though for some it should be – or a campaign against an invader.  The present death plague deals not with any kind death that could be called “natural.”  There is no reason for deaths inflicted by organized crime and its imitators.  Though many young people have become involved in independent drug ventures – and have been captured and killed – a vast number of victims were not involved in the drug trade.  A good many were merely walking home from work, waiting for a bus, engaged in a family celebration, or a festive gathering (TGIF, etc.) with friends or otherwise engaged in some innocent activity.

Today the plans of some of the surviving families of the torrential victimization is a quiet time of “carrying on,” trying to stymie unspeakable images of how slain family members suffered at the hands of butchers.  Yet others, seeking distraction from painful recall or tormenting mental images, will engage in as much active rascality and energetic diversion as possible.  Some will rigorously seek to be flamboyant in their colorful marking of this date – a rebellion against the evil, against those acts that steal the joy from one‘s heart.

When Hernan Cortes and his Spanish followers, all of whom viewed death as the end of life, arrived here they found people who dealt with death quite differently.  Those people actively lived in a 3,000-year tradition that viewed death as the continuation of life.  They didn’t culturally sense death with fear.  They embraced death.  Life, to them, was a dream.  Only in death did humankind truly awaken.  “These indigenous pre-Hispanic people honored duality as being dynamic,” said Christina Gonzales, at the University of Colorado.  As senior lecturer at Arizona State University several years ago she wrote, “(The Aztecs encountered by Cortes) didn’t separate death from pain, wealth from poverty” as people did in European cultures.  Thus, Mexico today, even when  honoring its dead with an ancient rite, to great degree is clearly more European.    

And that is why, in most part, they will be aggressively aided by authorities encouraging a plethora of civic activities (Reporter October 26-November 1, pages 1, 3, 21, 28).  Yet those wounded most by lost relatives, reportedly have never been contacted by authorities said to be working to solve these crimes.  That is something very few of the families of victims seem to believe will ever occur.   They don’t trust the police or Mexico’s judicial system.  And they are reluctant to press either of these entities to practice what those officials are hired for and assigned to do.   But these families, whose hearts may never really heal, are fearful of official retribution.           

Apropos of this is Tuesday’s revised report of the  “spasm of violence that shook” Michoacan last weekend.  The death toll finally appeared and the number of electrical substations put out of commission in the attack was at last doubled to the true number: 18, not the government’s initial report of nine. Nearly a half-million people were without electric power for 15 hours. The government reported six gas stations torched, and “at least” five men killed in a shootout at the city hall of Apatzingan, a key city. 

A leader of one of the citizen self-defense squads that have responded to the federal and state governments’ slacker response to ravages by cartel gangs, put the death toll at 13 cartelistas.  The second highest state official in the Institutional Revolutionary Party government of Michoacan, Jaime Mares Camarena, blandly announced that except for the attacks on the electrical installations all is normal and tranquil in Michoacan.  Hipolito Mora, a leader of the self-defense forces, said people were asking him for more protection. “With these attacks, (drug traffickers) want to intimidate the government,” he said.  Clearly. intimidation is working, noted more than a few of Mares Camarena’s constituents.

Meanwhile beyond the smiles, the music and dancing and graveyard visits that may at least temporarily staunch the most visible wounds for a while, these killings and disappearances can crush the morale of families.  Yet, contrarily, it seems apparent that some will eventually, stubbornly, demonstrate that not all the endurance and love these folks share will succumb to attempts at such a merciless theft.