Beyond the binary of Mexico-United States

I realized today that many of my posts tend to boil down migration–the process, the experience–to a duality. I, the American, moved my life to Mexico, and as a result, my world is a constant push-and-pull between two poles: my native culture and language and the adopted language and culture I currently inhabit. It’s a convenient way to break down a complex set of feelings, misunderstandings and contrasts. But migration goes beyond the binary.

First of all, I’m not only an American, I’m also a Californian–I realized this when I went to college in New England. Furthermore, I’m a Silicon Valley-ite (silicon chip?)–I will be irritated if you assume I’m from Los Angeles. National identity isn’t the only one at play, or even the most important to me personally, but it’s the one people tend to assign me when I’m internationally located.

And I tell Americans that I’m in Mexico, but I tell Mexicans that I’m in Guadalajara, or Jalisco. The specificity matters. Our middle-class neighborhood, with its 7-Eleven and highway on its fringes, is worlds away from the highland pueblos where I’ve stayed in Chiapas (Mexico’s southernmost state). Paco, who hails from one of these pueblos, feels like something of a foreigner here in Guadalajara, too.

But what brought about this idea of complicating the binary, in fact, was not these regional and local nuances to how we understand ourselves. It was actually a Valentine’s Day date.

Let me backtrack a little. Just a year ago, on Valentine’s Day 2009, I was still in college and Paco was in Chiapas. We celebrated by reading the love letters we’d oh-so-old-fashioned-ly mailed each other, and staring at our respective fiancé/e’s faces on our laptops, thanks to the miracle of Skype. So this year, happily living at the same address, we were excited to celebrate the day with a little more pizazz. Our goal: see some live music. We looked up some potential locations, got dressed up, and discovered that BOTH of the bars we’d planned on turned out not to exist.

After doing our part to contribute to the wallets of three different taxi drivers, we ended up back where we had begun our trek, in the Colonia Americana–the ritzy neighborhood where the U.S. Consulate makes its home. We opted to have dinner at an Indian restaurant called Goa.

Another explanation needed: I am crazy about Indian food, and I’ve had a lot of good Indian food in my time (since I’m from the Silicon Valley, home to many immigrants from the Indian subcontinent). Paco, on the other hand, had never had Indian food before.

I have to admit, I was a little skeptical when we sat down. Was this going to be “authentic”?–although, never having been to India myself, I’d have to make this judgment based on the Indian food of the South Bay. Reading the menu was at once familiar and strange, seeing the names I knew “dal makni,” “palak paneer,” “mango lassi” followed by explanations in Spanish. I was paralyzed at how to ask for the dish labeled “butter chicken” on the menu: should I try to pronounce the English words in a Spanish accent? I opted to ask for “pollo de mantequilla,” to which the waiter said, “boo-ter chee-ken?”

I picked some of my favorite things for Paco to try them. Everything tasted good, but it all was just a little–different. And to me, different in a way that made me homesick. The samosas were bathed in a sweetish sauce, but I wanted them to arrive plain, ready for me to dip them in cilantro/mint chutney. The naan was just a little too thin, and a little too crispy. The mango lassi was just a little too heavy on the cardamom. And when we ordered mango kulfi for dessert, it arrived garnished with chocolate syrup, whipped cream and a cherry. I’m not opposed to anything with sugar in it, but it just didn’t seem right to combine something as exotic as mango kulfi with Hershey’s. I will say that I relish any opportunity to eat a maraschino cherry.

While we waited for these dishes to appear, Paco and I stared at the many decorations–the restaurant was positively covered in Indian handicrafts. We liked them, but I told Paco, “you know, I have never been to an Indian restaurant that was this decorated.” Thinking aloud, I mused that a Mexican dining in an Indian restaurant has certain expectations–of exotic, unfamiliar food. The decorations become part of the culinary journey, transporting you away from the usual. But in the Silicon Valley, most Indian restaurants are frequented primarily by Indians. They don’t need a folkloric Indian decor to appreciate the food, and the food isn’t exotic at all–it’s comforting.

And my expectations for what Indian food should be–where do those fall in spectra of accuracy or authenticity? Long before I learned Spanish or became interested in Mexico, I was in contact with Indian culture on a daily basis–through family friends and my classmates. Some of my dearest friends are Indian. So a less-than-fluffy naan stands out to me.

It’s even hard for me to talk about Indian things here in Mexico due to a simple translation quirk: the translation for “Indian” is hindú, that is, Hindu. I think this is because here, indio invariably refers to a Native/indigenous Mexican, although the term is not only scandalously incorrect but also often pejorative. So it’s not convenient to refer to Indians from India as “indios.” But for me, calling Indians from India “Hindus” just seems wrong. Hinduism is a religion, not a nationality, and in fact, it’s a religion that not all Indians practice. Talking about Hindu food (comida hindú) doesn’t sound right, but that’s what Indian food is called here.

Seeing the way another culture–Mexican culture, to speak in very general terms–condenses and interprets other cultures makes me wonder about the lenses and shorthands I use, without thinking twice, for cultures I learned about in the U.S. context. In Mexico, chino (Chinese) is a nickname given to people with “Asian features,” and it’s also a frequently used substitute for “Asian.” Both of these uses smart of racism to me. But who knows how many Taiwanese silently take offense to being labeled Chinese? Yet the distinction is often optional in U.S. parlance.

I don’t consider myself an expert on any culture, including the one I was raised in (and I wouldn’t even know what to call that culture, if it has a name). Maybe one day I’ll visit India, try “real” Indian food and find myself disappointed that it’s not Silicon Valley-style Indian food! But if we can recognize migration as a non-linear journey–not just from country A to country B, but a constant, whirring, spiraling transit among infinite mindsets and languages and moralities–we can leave “authenticity” aside as a figment of our imagination. Not even a very useful figment. We can pursue, futilely but doggedly, the endless realm of nuance–to learn of local particulars and forget about national-level generalizations.

Back in Jalisco, and going back to school!

The Existential Migrant is back from vacation! I returned to Guadalajara last week after a shockingly easy trip: a direct flight from Oakland, California gets me to Guadalajara in 3.5 hours. I couldn’t believe I could be riding through suburban Bay Area streets and passing by dusty, industrial neighborhoods in Guadalajara, all in the same day, and that none of the contrast surprised me. It seems that the transition between the United States and Mexico is getting easier–or more normal. I know that whatever language I’m switching into will feel funny at first, but that it will get better. I know how it feels to drive my dad’s sedan and shop at Trader Joe’s, and I know how it feels to get on the Guadalajara city bus and zone out on a hard plastic seat. Both modes of transportation seem standard to me.

But leaving Paco to go to California, and leaving my family to go to Guadalajara, both feel a little wrong. When I go “home,” I’m also leaving “home.” Feeling comfortable and loved in two places is a blessing, but it also divides me. I feel more or less at ease when I’m in one place or the other, but the movement between them always hurts. Especially difficult is accepting reduced communication: when Paco is at his parents’ house, I can’t call him or email him. He has to go into town to use an internet café to write to me. And of course, I couldn’t really check in with the cat while he stayed at the kennel.

While I was in California, I adamantly refused to eat anything Mexican: particularly, no tortillas and no black beans. On my first night back, my parents took me to eat Indian food–I reached nirvana with the taste of pakora in my mouth. I ate everything that was hard to find in Mexico–goat cheese, blueberry muffins, hummus–and cooked for hours in my parents’ well-equipped kitchen.

I relished brushing my teeth with tap water. I pondered the sound of my voice in English–was it different? The family’s artificial Christmas tree, covered in funny ornaments we’ve had forever, made me smile every morning when I rose, at least an hour before everyone else (still on Central Time). I read the San José Mercury News for nostalgia’s sake, since it’s a dying local paper. I watched two entire seasons of Mad Men. After a week or two, speaking Spanish seemed so foreign, so remote, and I wondered if I’d forgot it entirely.

I thought a lot about Paco, and what it would be like if he were with me in California. He would have so much to learn–dozens of Christmas carols, infinite cultural references, and of course, the English language. Worse, with my family’s tendency toward word humor and the disproportionate number of English teachers in our gene pool, we all speak a rather unusual form of English: changing accents at whim, interjecting archaic vocabulary that came up in a Scrabble match, with many inside word jokes. All this, uttered at the fastest possible comprehensible speed. I imagine any English language learner feeling pretty overwhelmed.

And in fact, I have an idea about how it feels to be thrown to the linguistic wolves in your adopted tongue. I remember the first time I visited Paco’s family in the summer of 2007. I could not understand a single word his father said. Feeling like the kid missing all the dirty jokes, I carefully listened to everyone’s funny stories only to find the punchline a slur of meaningless syllables. But it did get better with time. Lots of jokes still go over my head, but I laugh extra loud when I do get them. I can understand Paco’s father much better. Also helpful was becoming more familiar with the cultural context: it’s easier to fill in the gaps from what I didn’t understand when I can make an educated guess based on the norms of everyday life.

Truth to be told, I do still feel a little rusty in Spanish, but I know that I’ll be back in the swing of things soon. I found out this afternoon that I’ll be starting classes next Monday for my master’s program: I made it past boot camp! So there will be more tales of classroom woes, and the student visa saga will continue, but I’m so happy to be a bona-fide student again.

I hope everyone enjoyed the end of 2009, and I extend a Feliz Año (Happy New Year) to all my readers!

Us versus the Instituto Nacional de Migración, or How do you say “Bah Humbug” in Spanish?

I am in California now. I left Guadalajara early yesterday morning, almost exactly six months after I arrived. I’ll be heading back in a few weeks, but I think I’m still qualified to blog in the meantime. Part of being a migrant is the occasional trip to the home country, seeing what feels the same and what feels different.

I almost didn’t get to return to the United States. Since my last blog, my visa adventures went from frustrating to heartbreaking. On Monday, I went to the office again, this time with Paco, to turn in the last set of paperwork and payments for the student visa, and with my application for permission to leave the country while everything was being processed. Paco and I waited to speak with a licenciado (person with a college degree) so that I could make sure all my complications would be resolved. We watched as an older American man, cursing in English about the bureaucracy, waited with his lawyer. The lawyer apparently knew one of the licenciados, and he made this clear by a sort of “don’t you know who I am?” routine. The trick worked: they were seen immediately. I seethed and shot these rank pullers dirty looks. I really wanted to say a little too loudly, “I guess I should hire a lawyer if I don’t want to wait!”

When it came to be my turn (an hour later), Paco and I went into the office and sat down at the licenciado’s desk. As I explained my situation, the licenciado informed me, “you can’t leave the country.” My voice started to waver as I inarticulately tried to ask another question. Then the licenciado eventually added, “you can only leave if you withdraw the entire visa application process.” So either I was not going to be able to go to the States and see my family, or I was going to lose all of the money, trips, frustration and time I’d dedicated to getting the student visa. Faced with this decision, I started to cry–not just a little. As I was sobbing and blubbering, Paco tried to jump in and rescue me. The licenciado was clearly unmoved. Another woman in the office offered her advice.

“The problem is that you foreigners think you can just come in here and apply for a visa without knowing anything. Then you think you can leave the country whenever you want without asking us. You have to inform yourself. I empathize with your situation,” she told me sternly. I didn’t believe her professed empathy.

Through my tears, I responded, “look, I’m not making these mistakes because of cultural arrogance. It’s because of ignorance. There’s no information on the website, and nobody told me about these restrictions when I started the process.”

“The law says that ignorance does not excuse you from punishment when you break the law,” she said, and I kept crying. Later, I wished that I had said, “Ok, but if you actually want people to follow your laws, you might want to tell us what they are.” I’m sure this wouldn’t have helped at all, so I guess it’s better than I was unable to form a coherent and snarky rejoinder.

“Some people hire lawyers to help them,” she began. I interrupted, “If I were rich, I’d hire a lawyer too!”, and Paco sent me a telepathic message to shut up before we got kicked out of the office.

I didn’t know what to do, but unable to face not seeing my family, and realizing that changing my flight would be more expensive that paying the fees again (though not by much), I agreed to cancel the process. This meant more paperwork to fill out, and there were more obstacles in the way to authorize my departure. When another unfriendly bureaucrat started telling us that it would be impossible to give me the document I needed to leave the country, I started crying again, this time in front of everyone in the waiting room. It was horribly embarrassing, and I would have been sunk if I hadn’t had Paco there as my advocate. He talked when I could only whimper, and he told everyone “thank you” when I was too angry to express gratitude.

It would have saved me time, money, and emotional well-being if I had never set foot in the office at all. I could have stayed on my tourist visa and started the process in January if I were accepted into the master’s program. I thought a lot about what the woman had said to me: was it arrogance that made me think I could do this without asking? She said that I should have consulted with one of the licenciados before even beginning the process. But I realized that when I first visited, I didn’t even know that there were such people or that you could ask for help. There are no pamphlets, no guidelines, and every person tells you something different, and often the next person you talk informs you that the previous one was wrong, but now it’s your problem.

It wasn’t a total failure, because I did leave the country. When I return, I’ll be issued the same tourist visa after filling a form out on the plane, and then I’ll try again for the student visa. I dread dragging myself back to that office, especially since I made such a scene. I cry easily, but not often in public. Now I’ll have to face all the bureaucrats again, watch the people with lawyers get the VIP treatment, and make the same photocopies and the same payments all over again.

Paco and I were talking about the difference between Mexican and U.S. bureaucracy. I likened it to the difference between torture and a quick death. When Paco applied for a visa, it was a brief, horrific and unfair “no, and don’t ask again.” It was expensive, and it was over in two hours. On the other hand, I made so many visits, talked to so many people, dealt with errors, organized papers, and jumped through multiple hoops only to also get a “no,” but unlike Paco, I can try again (Paco won’t be issued a visa until he has a “strong tie” to Mexico, which we think means “earns a big salary in Mexico”). I think both systems are stacked against people without a lot of money and without legal help.

When I think about couples that are from the same town, or even the same country, I feel like everything must be so easy for them: they have the same native language! They don’t need to visas or passports to meet each others’ families! The sting of these barriers flares up when we go against bureaucracy without success. Back in California, I sit in my childhood home, and I feel Paco’s absence acutely. He’s not here only because of an unfair system that doesn’t see us or our situation. Even though our families have given us our blessing to love someone from a different country, our governments have not.

I know that there were officials who did care and showed concern when they saw me crying: not everyone sees me as just another cow among endless cattle to be processed (turned into hamburgers?). I also know that Paco will someday be eligible for other, non-tourist visas that will likely be more successful. Getting what you need out of a bureaucracy requires persistence and patience (and money), and giving up is the only way to really fail.

I talked about California. “I really do want to see that bridge,” he said. “What bridge?” “You know, that famous one.” “El puente portón dorado?” I offered, “the Golden Gate Bridge?” “But the bridge isn’t golden, it’s red,” he protested. I’d never really thought about that. “I guess it’s kind of an orange-red,” I suggested. “You can call yellow things golden, but not red,” Paco told me. As a little girl, I’d thought the same thing about goldfish. “I’d like a picture of us on that bridge,” he said.

I know we’ll take that picture one day, but I wish it were sooner.

Acción de Gracias

This is my second Thanksgiving in Mexico. Last year, desperately missing Paco, I trekked to the Newark Airport in the wee, small hours of the morning, and while the whole wide world was fast asleep, I sat awake and thought about how excited I was. It was one of those trips you only make when you’re in love–rationally excessive, emotionally vital.

Last year, I made a small-scale Thanksgiving dinner for Paco, his brother and his sister-in-law. I roasted a chicken instead of a turkey. Actually, we prepared the chicken, stuffed rosemary between the skin and the meat (the smell made me think of the rosemary bushes back home in California), and took the chicken to the neighbor’s house, where there was an oven. A bag of dried cranberries turned into cranberry sauce through the magic of reconstitution and warm water. I attempted mashed potatoes for the first time, with somewhat gluey results. I sauteed green beans. We drank cheap wine, and there was no pumpkin pie–it’s hard to make without pumpkins (or their canned incarnations) around. Paco was wearing the new scarf my mom had knit for him, and his sister-in-law snapped pictures of me trying to carve a chicken. It was a quiet meal, the food palatable, but not great, and cranberries were the star of the evening (they aren’t well-known or widely available in Mexico).

It wasn’t right. For my Mexican family, it was an interesting glimpse into American traditions, executed in the haphazard form you’d expect from a cook in her early 20s, lacking in the ways you’d expect without the standard cornucopia of T-day ingredients. But they don’t know what it means, or how it feels, because it isn’t their holiday. In the United States, Thanksgiving is a national consensus: we all stop everything for it. It’s about panic in the kitchen, actually using the sugar bowl that ordinarily collects dust in the cupboard, and the annual re-remembering that I don’t really like roasted turkey.

This year, there won’t even be a surrogate chicken to stand in for the other fowl I don’t even like. I have class this afternoon because it’s a regular Thursday here. But it feels like Thanksgiving to me, because I’ve foolishly read all the newspaper articles online about the horrible relative holiday horror stories, the recipe collections, the sales of heritage turkeys, the travel crunch. It’s all irrelevant.

In my mind, I wake up to the winter California sunshine I love so much, and I walk across the cold floors and say “Happy Thanksgiving” to my parents like it means “good morning,” just because it’s funny when we’re semiconscious and the feast is still hours away. I would make a pumpkin pie with the great recipe I found a few years ago, and I would wonder which color sweater to pick to best evoke the fall. There would be so many stories to tell, the best ones always being Dad’s, which he sneakily saves up for gatherings with the largest and most eager audiences. We would try to remember who is vegetarian, who is lactose intolerant, who doesn’t like chocolate, who wants decaf. Failing, we explain that the vegan is now vegetarian, the dairyphobe brought her Lactaid pills, and everyone eats what they can, which is more than enough.

I knew this would happen when I chose to leave the United States–that certain universal understandings, like to set aside this unremarkable Thursday too close to Christmas as a national pause and feast, would not be universal in another country. No holiday is universal. But that doesn’t make it hurt less, that taste of pumpkin pie is a distant memory and my family and friends are walking those cold floors in that winter sunshine, ready to take their places at the table when late afternoon comes.

Thanksgiving, so hard to say in Spanish, translates to “Acción de gracias,” the action of thanks. Even without the food and the company, I am grateful. I am thankful to know that there will be room at the table when I come back for Thanksgiving, because there is always room, even if we sit so close together we could share napkins across our laps.

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.