Día de Muertos

I put up pictures long ago, but now I’ve got to tell you a little about Muertos as I have new things to blog and this thing is far enough out of chronological order already…. Sigh. 

Day of the Dead is a season around here.  The decorations go up early and stay late.  In fact, they stay until they are replaced with Christmas decorations.  Here’s to Thanksgiving for keeping Christmas fervor mildly in check – never before have I quite appreciated it as much as it deserves!  Much like Christmas, though, Day of the Dead has two faces: traditional and religious at home and more secular in the public realm.  The school hosts an altar building competition and each altar has to have a theme that tells a story.  

Each year for Day of the Dead different student groups at the UDLAP create an altar with an ofrenda that honors a theme or certain people.  The tradition was started by anthropology students and each year they honor important anthropologists or other Mexican social scientists that have died in the prior year.  Then the week of Día de Muertos they create the altar and decorate the dept courtyard and have a presentation of the story behind the altar and a reception with pan de muerto and hot chocolate. 

This year the four honored were:

-Jan de Vos, a historian who worked in Chiapas
-Phillip Weigan, an archaeologist who worked in West Mexico, especially Guadalajara, with the Teuchitlán culture
-Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa, journalist
- Lewis Binford, who was at UNM and several other schools as was a big shot in archaeological theory

Actually, Binford was my idea.  So that’s my contribution to the UDLAP.  They also asked me to bring in some photos or things for the altar to represent NM so I brought in some pictures of the church in Taos and Chaco.  Supposedly all the faculty were supposed to contribute, but since they found me in my office at 8pm on a Friday night to tell me to bring in things before lunch on Monday, I guess that explains why I was the only one who did!   Then Monday night they had a ceremony with a prayer in Nahuatl and incense and the presentation of the altar.  And snacks.  And then A&family and I went trick or treating in the Zona Resedencial, which was fun.  People loooove Halloween here too. 

More student altars:

Over the weekend I went to the center of Cholula to see the municipal altars there.  Each nook is decorated by a different group.  My favorite was the ofrenda put together by the city janitors.  It’s beautiful. 

But the themes ranged, from breast cancer awareness…

…to environmentalism…

…to altars dedicated to the recently dead actor Capulina, who was from Puebla…

..to the strangest of them all, dedicated to childhood obesity:

A few more altars:

November 2^nd is official Día de Muertos and after class I went with some students to the center of Puebla to see the municipal ofrendas there.  We also went to a cemetery where they were staging a musical set to Werewolf in London.  As often happens here: I could not make this up.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to see in the cemetery, but I saw some outrageous tombs that are made in the form of famous European cathedrals and are enormous.  A few graves and tombs had food left out and there were lots of flowers, but leaving cemetery ofrendas is not a big Puebla tradition, I guess. 

We did go into one of the municipal buildings and have a long talk with the guard there about the two ghosts of the building. Every building in Mexico has a ghost.  The one upstairs is mean, but the downstairs one is more friendly.  He also showed us a fountain with an engraved dedication and some mysterious numbers (also known as conservator’s marks) possibly pertaining to the ghost’s story.  Day of the Dead is incomplete without a little interaction with the dead.