Halloween and Día de los Muertos Report

I thought I’d post an update on the holiday weekend from October 31 to November 2.

There were a few kids in Halloween costumes on the 31st, and in the evening, I heard a group of children chanting “queremos Halloween,” which means “we want Halloween!” but I think is meant to stand in for “trick or treat.” I really hoped that they wouldn’t go knocking on our door wanting some Halloween, since I had nothing sugary to give.

Paco explained to me that it was traditional to set up the Day of the Dead altar on the evening of the 31st. Being far from our families and their photo collections, we printed out whatever photos of deceased relatives we had on the computer. Interestingly, we both had pictures of our great-great-grandparents, and the two sets don’t look all that different–same serious expressions, stuffy wool suits, and weathered faces.

As I mentioned before, you are supposed to offer foods that your ancestors enjoyed. We didn’t really know enough about our great-great-grandparents’ tastes, so we set out a basket of fruit, a glass of water, and a small cup of pox (pronounced posh, with a long o), a homemade liquor made in the indigenous highland region where Paco was born and raised.  “Who doesn’t like fruit?” we reasoned.

I had a little more information to go on about my grandfather, who passed away when I was 10. It was family legend that he liked eating uncooked oatmeal, so I set out a little bowl of raw oats, laughing to myself that Paco might worry that I was descended from horses. I was thinking more about my grandfather,  realizing that things like his liking dry oats, or how he called me “Punky,” are really all I have to remember him by. All I have are the silly sorts of things that children notice because he died before I grew up. This only confirms why it is important to have a Day of the Dead–so that we can remember together, and remember more.

On Day of the Dead, I made pan de muertos, and it was quite successful. I used this recipe. It’s a slightly sweet, orange and anise flavored bread. I believe it’s traditional to put them on the altar, but we ate ours right away (ok, it was mostly me).

And, to be honest, that was pretty much how the Hallowed Weekend ended. Paco went back to studying, and I continued on my quest to watch as many movies as possible (the joys of unemployment!). It’s hard to celebrate such a family-oriented holiday in a city where we don’t have family. I could have ventured to the local cemetery, but I would have felt uncomfortable spying on people. It’s moments like that when the isolation of having moved to another country seems most profound. Although Paco has some friends here, he too is far from home. In many ways, Guadalajara is almost as different from his home town as it is from mine.

But I wouldn’t want to end on a lonely note! On the last day of a weekend celebrating the end of life, I found out about the possible start of something new. I’ll be starting classes on Monday as the final part of a selection process to be accepted into a Master’s program here. Perhaps my unhappy time as a non-student will be over! Of course, there will be plenty of blogging fodder as I begin this new adventure, so stay tuned.

Anticipating the Hallowed Cusp of October-November

I started learning Spanish in January 2006. Like most Spanish students, along with grammar and vocabulary, we learned about various tidbits of Latin American cultures. If you’ve ever seen a foreign language textbook, you’d recognize that little box of text–the one that you skipped over while you were studying for the exam. But I always liked the little tidbits (it’s like Wikipedia on paper!). At some point during that first semester, we had to do a presentation on one snippet of culture in the Spanish-speaking world. I picked Día de los Muertos, Mexico’s Day of the Dead. Maybe this was the beginning of my interest in Mexico, now that I think about it. I should also admit that the holiday wasn’t entirely new to me: my little sister Sophi, who had so wisely started studying Spanish in elementary school, had made something called pan de muertos for her classmates. This eggy, orange-flavored bread was delicious. “Dead bread” merited further exploration.

With my extremely limited knowledge of Spanish, I struggled to write sentences to accompany my PowerPoint slides about Day of the Dead. I learned a necromancer’s set of words: skull, coffin, tomb, offering. My professor’s comments after the presentation fell along the lines of “bizarro is not a word in Spanish” and other corrections of missteps in the pursuit of fluency. But more important were the images in my mind of marigolds, jolly skeletons and morbid, sugary creations. I dreamed of spending Day of the Dead in Mexico, but the dream was a remote and vague one.

I often fantasize of being able to convert my current self into an apparition to haunt past versions of me. Sometimes, it’s to give the younger me a little comfort: “Don’t worry, 10 year old Rachel, you will crack 5 feet one day.” But I particularly enjoy the juicy possibility of shocking these past selves with the unpredictable events that came after. For example: just a few months before I began studying Spanish, I announced that I would, in fact, NEVER study Spanish since it would interfere with my years of dedication to French. In my fantasy, the current me in the form of a spirit, invisible to everyone but my former self, breezes in, and with terrible icy breath, I whisper in young Rachel’s ear, “you will fall in love in Spanish. You will move to Mexico.” Young Rachel is shocked, but fearing accusations of madness, can say nothing.

It’s overwhelming to realize my current life is so incongruous with my past visions of the future. Point being, when I made that halting, “bizarro” presentation three and a half years ago, how could I have  dreamed of spending Day of the Dead in Mexico like this: not as a visitor, but as a resident.  I knew I wanted to see the decorated altars and eat as much Dead Bread as possible, but speaking coherent Spanish seemed impossible back then, and much less likely, that I would be living with a mostly-only-Spanish-speaker.

But strange as it is to be here if I get too existential, the impending arrival of Día de los Muertos is something I’ve been looking forward to. Still, I feel that it’s almost been sneaking up on me. Since Paco and I are new in town, we aren’t really sure about how it’s celebrated here, and we don’t know many people here yet to ask. For this reason, we took advantage of the chance to consult our taxi driver friend, Gerónimo, about Day of the Dead here in Guadalajara.

“Oh, we barely celebrate it,” he lamented, “Halloween has taken over. To the point that kids go around to people’s houses asking for candy. It’s sad, because we have so many cultures here in Mexico. Why pick something from the U.S. culture?”

My heart broke in the backseat of the taxi. I think Halloween is a fine holiday, but I’ve done it many times, from my days as a bumblebee in preschool, to a UPS package in third grade, to the cringe-inducing “sexy cat” of high school (cats don’t wear short black dresses or excessive eyeliner). More recent embarrassment ensued from a college Halloween when I went to the dining hall for breakfast–dressed as an elf. Shortly thereafter I realized that once you are no longer in grade school, costumes to be worn only for parties. Last year, my Halloween was merely a preamble to Day of the Dead: I was La Catrina, a Victorian skeleton woman that’s part of the traditional Day of the Dead iconography (fabulous makeup thanks to my dear friend Eliza). I was ready to experience the real thing!

In fact, what I’ve seen so far is a fascinating intermixing of Halloween and Day of the Dead. The traditional papel picado (Mexican art of fine papercutting) that depicts scenes of skeletons now has a black and orange color scheme. Stores are filled with plastic pumpkins and other Halloween decorations, which I then see displayed side-by-side with cutouts of skeleton mariachi bands. The nursery has stocked up on marigolds, the traditional flower for Día de los Muertos, and my beloved Pan de muertos is on sale, and so are ghoulish costumes and bras with bat-print fabric.

The two holidays have much in common–skeletons, sugar, autumn–that facilitate the syncretism of U.S. and Mexican traditions. But they are different in tone. Halloween, for all the ghosts and ghouls and plastic tombstones, is about as much about death as a birthday is about birth: the gritty content of the symbolized life event is so stylized that it’s hardly emotionally powerful. That is, a kid in a white sheet has nothing to do with the eerie breeze you felt in the cemetery when you visited the grave of someone you loved. Halloween is a farce, an exaggeration, and there’s comfort in that.

Gerónimo, the taxi driver, said to us, “We Mexicans laugh at death.” Paco added, “it’s just another part of life.”  The spirit of humor and lightheartedness accompanies Day of the Dead: the skeletons are whimsical, not menacing or covered in cartoony rotten flesh like their American counterparts. At the same time, death is far more real and relevant in the Mexican holiday, for deceased relatives are deliberately and specifically remembered, honored, and celebrated. It’s a party, and it’s about death in the most concrete terms.

In the United States, it’s impossible to have a party about death that isn’t Death caricatured and removed (that is, Halloween). Americans, myself include, don’t laugh at death. We fear it, we obsess over it, we do everything we can to prevent it as if we had more than the smallest measure of control over the inevitable end of life. I think this is, in a way, very natural, given our instinct to survive. I also wouldn’t want to give people the idea that Mexicans shrug or giggle when a loved one dies. But perhaps traditions like Day of the Dead make it easier to experience grief without fear. Knowing that when you are gone, your family will put your picture on display and make offerings of your favorite foods, while drinking and spending time together, makes death seem more natural and less remote. Or, knowing that you will be remembered helps you accept your mortality without bitterness.

If I boil this down to two distinct messages, I’d put it like this: Halloween says, “Death is scary,” and it makes this palatable by the corollary “but it isn’t real.” Day of the Dead’s insistence in celebrating life and death, both real and both ripe for humor. I am very curious to see how these ideas interact when the cusp of October and November arrives.