All Souls Day

All Souls Day
A Day of the Dead in Mexico – Experiencing Cultural Community Art

(Published in ArtsOn, A Publication of Community Arts Ontario, Winter 2002.)

In the days and weeks leading up to All Souls Day, November 1, all of Mexico is awash in skeletons. You see them everywhere, in homes, hotels, restaurants, galleries, markets and just in the streets. Skulls and skeletons made out of papier mache, candle wax, sugar and coloured sand seem to swim in a sea of colour, of flowers, of celebration. How can something we associate with such fear and grimness be so joyful? This is a culture of famous contrasts, death and life, past and present, Catholic and pagan, even Osama bin Laden and George Bush marching with their arms around each other, leading a peace demonstration. And suddenly everything and everyone is a skeleton, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, doctors, teachers and musicians, children and babies, old people. In one little tableau I picked up in one of our market expeditions, a skeleton doctor delivers a skeleton baby from between the legs of a skeleton mother.

I have come to Mexico with the grand excuse of doing research for a book I want to write some day about community art. But the intensity of this culture, the violent pictures in the daily papers set against the most incredibly gentle and generous smiles I’ve ever seen; the sun saturated streets; the endless processions, now 100 children dressed in Hallowe’en costumes, an hour later 200 people following a statue of the Virgin, with her own personal generator to keep her lit at night, now a group of theatre students demonstrating for peace–all thoughts of theory are driven right out of my mind. Fine, OK, I’m a gringa, and like legions before me, seduced.

As the Day of the Dead approaches, ofrendas appear everywhere, “offering tables” of extraordinary artistry and complexity. Just like in any good community art project involving lots of participants, diversity flourishes within strong unifying elements — in this case, the skulls and skeletons and marigolds, marigolds, marigolds. No one knows the origins of this national custom, part pre-Columbian, part Catholic, where people welcome back the spirits of the dead, both personal and communal, and invite them to a feast. On the ofrendas are all the things the deceased loved in this life, especially their favourite foods and drinks. The feast is sometimes in the home, sometimes at the actual grave. The spirits come and suck the essence of the food and drink, and then their living friends and relatives eat and drink, with lots of music and dancing, right in the cemetery. The day after, a taxi driver handed me an apple from his ofrenda and demanded to know whether I thought it tasted different!

It’s hard not to risk romanticizing a culture where art can hardly even be called art, it plays such an integrated role in the everyday lives of people. We would need a new language to describe this. For years I’ve made it my mandate as a community artist to “make art part of everyday life”; it’s another thing altogether to experience a culture where the split hasn’t happened. All the same, my very presence, along with multitudes of tourists, has eroded the “pure” ceremonies of the Day of the Dead. In Oaxaca, where we were, there is a city sponsored competition for the best ofrenda in the cemetery. Hundreds of people – local and tourist- stroll around the periphery of the town’s main cemetery, while a mariachi band plays, looking at dozens of ofrendas in the competition. North American Hallowe’en commercialism encroaches. Still, whenever I saw an ofrenda I particularly liked, I proffered a small bottle of Canadian sweetness, maple syrup, and was rewarded with a shot of mescal.

Later, in search of a more “authentic” Day of the Dead celebration, we took a cab to the cemetery in an outlying village. But we were too late, someone had told us the wrong time, the cemetery was deserted. Only flickering candles on the graves, under a full moon. I felt a wave of sadness sweep over me. The spirits had gone for another year, and what of my own dead? In our culture, we are supposed to move on and let go and forget after how long, a month, a year? Then we don’t talk about it, wrapped in our lonely, private sorrows. But we don’t stop missing the ones we loved, and I left Mexico with a profound wish that we could find a way here in the cold North to come together, to welcome back our dead, to dance and to celebrate their lives and ours.