“Today you have to get deep into the countryside, get out of your car and walk awhile before you can find a real Mexican Dia de los Muertos celebration,” 72-year-old Palomon Jurado Vazquez complains, spitting in the mud of a pueblo street.
He is annoyed by the decline of Mexico’s celebration of November 2, All Soul’s Day on the Roman Catholic calendar. “Chinga,” he exclaims, “we used to celebrate all week long, ‘mano. All of us kids and my mother used to go up into the mountains and gather wild flowers and nopales and late corn and wild camotes. Then we would begin setting up an ofrenda (altar) the night of October 26. That would be so we could get everything we needed ready by October 28 for all those who have been killed. You know, all those killed in riñas (feuds) and lovers’ quarrels, over insults and disagreements over women and land disputes, things like that.
“Then, on October 29, we had an ofrenda for those who died in accidents – bus and car accidents, falling under trains, and such things. October 30, we would honor those who died, pobrecitos, unbaptized. And lots of pueblos and campo families squeezed in a night for the souls of all those that no one remembers. For me, when I was a kid, that was really the saddest night of all.“
“All Saints’ Day, November 1, is dedicated to Las Almas Inocentes, to the children, Los Angelitos. Everybody came out to the panteon in the old days, to clean up and repair and decorate the graves of children. In some places, the ofrenda for the Angelitos is bigger than those for adults. In other pueblos they have a small ofrenda, but piled with pan de muerto, frutas, dulces, agua, candles, zinpasuchil and toys, of course.” (Zinpasuchil is a local pronunciation of the Nahua cempoalxochitl, the word for the marigolds that decorate ofrendas and graves in grand, scented piles – their odor supposedly offensive to demons.)
“Everybody who could afford it wore black. All the women in dark dresses and rebozos. And nobody went drunk. Of course,” he shrugged, “there was pulque and tequila at the ofrendas of those who, when they were alive, liked those drinks. And there were people who would get drunk during the night, but that was because of their sadness, not recklessness.
There were always candles everywhere. In all the stores, at the market, at the cantinas, dozens at street-side shrines, and many, many at the burdel (brothel), if the pueblo was big enough to have one.”
Ofrendas for adults traditionally were decorated not only like those of children, but also with great culinary emphasis on the favorite foods of the deceased, the tools of a man’s trade, a woman’s favorite possessions, and, of course, incense burners of smoking copal at all ofrendas and graves.
“In those days, women and girls cut skeletons and skulls out of thin papel chino,” says Paloman. And the color red was often prominent on candied breads, and dulces, perhaps recalling pre-Hispanic times when the dead were painted red before entombment.
But today, say many jalisciences, the tradition of ofrendas reflects Mexico’s increasing urbanization – even in some of the countryside. And, of course, Paloman snorts, many people find they have to buy many of those things they once harvested from fields and mountainsides. They once grew their own cempoalxochitl in their flower gardens, collected eggs for pan de muerto from the family’s flock of chickens (many rural people still do). And the turkey for the customary Dia de los Muertos main meal of mole came from their corral where their turkeys and geese were kept, and the chilies from the nearby garden. Even in parts of the countryside women no longer make their own tamales to accompany the day’s main course. “Certainly women in cities don’t do that,” my friend said. And few of those men can kill and clean a turkey. They have to buy everything. They don’t grow it. And these days they don’t know they can find it growing wild just along the vareda running above their house, or next to their milpa. There’s an old song that says ‘cities kill customs.’ Do you know that one?”
At various times federal, state and local governments have promoted the traditional aspects of the Day of the Dead. But to many Mexicans that seemed undermined by the fundamental contradiction of the effort: over a very long time, Mexico was “officially” anti-Catholic. Constitutional religious restrictions were many. Thus, the effort to reanimate such church-related traditions (many of which echoed pre-Hispanic ritual) as the La Parca (another name for Day of the Dead), seemed to some to generate considerable cultural confusion. That created a sliver of space for Halloween, brought home by workers (who Palomon calls “fence-jumpers”) returning from the United States and quickly commercialized by Mexico’s first supermarkets which began to thrive in the 1970s. Mexicans weren’t confused about Halloween, they simply didn’t know anything about it. They just liked all the colorful paraphernalia.
This has led to many Mexican schools and social clubs marking La Parca with Yanqui-style plastic pumpkins, black cats and witches wearing tall, black dunce’s hats and other Halloween frippery.
“There’s nothing wrong with jaloguin – for gringos,” says my friend, “but we Mexicans should maintain and defend the Day of the Dead, which is the way we honor the dead. And the government should put down the prices of the things we need for ofrendas, instead of letting them go up. That’s the real way they could help us defend this Mexican tradition.”