Life in Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, centers around life cycle events. Dia de los Muertos — Day of the Dead — brings us together at the village market to prepare our altars to welcome the difuntos — the spirits of our loved ones who return to earth to visit us each year.
This could be considered the most important observance in Oaxaca, especially in the villages, where customs and traditions that survived the Spanish conquest continue. The most money is spent on altar and gravesite decorations during Muertos than any other annual holiday, I’m told. It looks that way.
For days, the streets surrounding the market are closed to vehicular traffic. It is packed with people and vendors from the countryside. Backs of trucks and stalls are overloaded with oranges and apples, pineapple, sugar cane fronds, pecans and peanuts, skeleton beeswax candles adorned with handmade wax flowers, tapers, incense burners and copal incense.
At the molino (neighborhood mill) down the street from where I live, women wait in line with their baskets of ingredients to get their turn at the grinder. Their men — husbands, fathers, sons — wait out front by the truck, catching up on village business. The women will make and serve mole negro, mole amarillo, toasted garbanzo bean soup, or atole — the pre-Hispanic corn drink flavored with homemade chocolate and vanilla. All these need ingredients to be ground. The women bring their unique family recipes, generations in the making.
Ten of us are here for the Day of the Dead Women’s Creative Writing Retreat. We come to express ourselves through the written and spoken word. We write about memory and loss, mourning and grief, forgiveness of self and others. In our writing we honor our dead, we cherish what we have lost and in the process we give life to those who have left us.
The culture that celebrates death, celebrates life, says Octavio Paz. Here in Teotitlan del Valle, we are privileged to participate in a sacred ritual of celebration, memory and renewal of spirit.
We buy the ingredients to create our own altar, including those listed above. To this we add chocolate, mounds of marigold flowers, Pan de Muertos, mezcal and beer. We use a special quilted cloth made by Gretchen Ellinger who could not be with us. We bring photos of our dead to remember them. We remember them. We cherish their memories. We write about them, our feelings of loss, survival, making do without their day-to-day presence. We bring the practice of another culture closer to us to understand that there are different ways to approach life and death, as a continuum, as a process, as we examine and accept our own mortality, too.
I write about my father. It is my blessing to his memory, that his life informed mine and gave me meaning. I write about his love of coffee and cigarettes, how he quit, where he failed and endured, how he died. I write the vignettes of memory as a child turned adult. It is my portrait of him, my love for him, his quirks and idiosyncracies. This is my time to go beyond Oaxaca Cultural Navigator, into the depths of my family and my heart.
I savor Dia de los Muertos because of this. I think the women who are with me this week share in this sense of honoring our loved ones, discovering our voices, and giving words to feelings. As we said, we grieve many things: the loss of people in our lives, the loss of self as we age and change, the loss of circumstances that alter us, the loss of who we wish we had become and embracing who we are.
I’ll be writing more about this in days to come. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy these photos of preparations. We were at the market today at 7:30 a.m. It was packed with people!
Getting Ready for Dia de los Muertos in Oaxaca, Parade of the Catrinas
I can’t help myself. Those flamboyant, extravagantly costumed Catrinas, made famous as a Dia de los Muertos symbol by political cartoonist Jose Guadalupe Posada, are starting to pop up all over town. Day of the Dead is a big deal in Oaxaca, Mexico.
As I walk the cobbled streets and uneven sidewalks, I remember to look up (as well as down to make sure my footing is solid). There are Calaveras on rooftops and leaning over balconies here in Oaxaca, too.
Of course, I have to photograph them and the golden marigold flowers that are coming into full bloom. Their fragrance guides the dead from the other world back to this one for the annual visit to loved ones still living.
Whimsy, fun, mockery, parades, joyfulness and celebration are all part of Day of the Dead. Local people take the return of their loved ones seriously. They are deadly serious. One mother I know from El Norte who lost her adult son this year to a rare illness, is waiting with family in her local village for Muertos when she will be with her son again.
This is a pre-Hispanic tradition based in belief and mysticism, attached to the harvest season when all that lived returns to the earth.
We have two weeks to go but the energy is building. Shop windows lure the eye with decorations that are uniquely Oaxaca plus a blend of Halloween, an adaptation of commerce brought to Mexico by the U.S.A.
So, we see a blend, a syncretism of sorts, of plastic pumpkins, witches on broomsticks, ghosts, candy corn, spiders and gauze integrated with skeletons riding bicycles, skeletons wearing rebozos and skeletons dressed in indigenous clothing.
My vote for the best decorations is the patio entrance to Los Danzantes Restaurant.
Today, I went to the printer to make a copy of a special photograph of my dad who died in 1997. I’m thinking about the altar I will build where I will display his photo in memorial, light copal incense and guide his spirit back to me.
He wasn’t a drinker, but he liked a beer on a rare occasion. It really didn’t matter what kind. So, maybe a Victoria will go on the altar along with fresh fruit and a 24-hour candle whose flame will remind me of life, death, memory and the commitment to honor a beloved parent.
How to build a Day of the Dead Altar and Another Version
As I passed through the Zocalo, I noted doorways decorated with flowers, young boys tossing balloons, mothers and fathers strolling with their infants hugged to their bosom or nestled in carriages. A bandstand was set up awaiting the next performance. More tourists are in town meandering, eating in outdoor cafes.
Soon Muertos will be here. Another opportunity to count blessings, to appreciate life and to honor those who gave it to us.
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Posted in Cultural Commentary, Oaxaca Mexico art and culture, Photography, Travel & Tourism
Tagged calaveras, Catrinas, day of the dead, Dia de los Muertos Oaxaca, Mexico, Oaxaca, skeletons