A melancholy man lovingly decorates the grave of his dead wife with marigold petals and prepares for an all-night vigil. A raucous family in the same cemetery remembers their dead relative with alcohol, chilaquiles and song. A three-year-old excitedly carries a sugar skull to his kindergarten where he will proudly put it on the school altar. A protest group sets up an altogether more somber version outside a government office to demand justice for murdered young girls.
Mexico’s El Dia de Muertos is colorful, poignant, mystical, political, contradictory, satirical, macabre and rather childish — all at the same time.
The classic place to immerse yourself in Mexico’s Day of the Dead are the islands in Lake Patzcuaro in the central state of Michoacan, populated by indigenous Purepecha. The mist from the lake mingles with the mysticism of the indigenous culture to produce a particularly intense experience. But finding a place to stay can be a nightmare, and to get away from tourist trinkets you have to get yourself to the most remote islands.
Perhaps the purest sense of the celebration’s pre-Hispanic roots requires a trip to the Mayan town of Pomuch in the Yucatan peninsula, where relatives exhume the bones of dead loved ones to give them a brush up for the year to come. While the prize for the most aesthetic celebration may well belong to the city of Oaxaca, long renowned for the quality of its local artists who use colored sawdust in extraordinarily intricate altars set up on pavements.
But of all the many options available you could do a lot worse than choose the easiest of all: Mexico City. It may not sound very exotic, but it does drive home just how adept the Dia de Muertos (which is really two days, sometimes more) is at reinventing itself for each new era and remaining at the center of Mexican popular culture.
The origins of the festival stretch back to the different ancient Mesoamerican cultures who lived in the area but shared a fascination with death. None more intensely than the Aztecs who dominated central Mexico for centuries, and held a specific fiesta for the dead in the middle of the year that the Spanish colonial powers moved to coincide with the Catholic holiday of All Saints’ Day on Nov. 2.
At the core of the celebration are the ofrendas, or altars, which are said to guide the spirits of the departed back to Earth for a brief sojourn among the company of those they left behind. For a feel of how much preparation goes into them, pop into a market from the last week of October until the spirits go back where they came from on Nov. 2. Any market will do, outside the business districts, from the historic center to the southern barrio of Coyoacan.
There you will see locals struggling under the weight of huge bunches of bright orange cempazuchitl flowers (local marigolds) and a very smelly bright purple flower, that act as beckoning beacons. Then there are the piles of pan de muerto, a sweet round decorated bread that provides the spirits with sustenance when they’ve found their way.
Most of the stalls are dedicated to the more humorous side of the whole endeavor that became a key element of the urban celebration in the 20th century. There will be models of skeletons getting drunk in cantinas, sculptures of ornately clad female versions, and sugar skulls with space to write your name on the forehead in colored icing.
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