Viva Los Muertos November 2, 2022
Oaxaqueños call the fiestas this time of year Muerte-adas, a made-up word which sort of means “deadings,” and these days do certainly evoke a party atmosphere on the downtown streets, as tourists swarm beneath golden garlands of Flor del Muerto (Cempasúchil, or Aztec Marigold) and have their faces painted—for only a hundred pesos, you can be made to look extremely dead.
Downtown Oaxaca has seized on the commercial possibilities, mining the images of the opening scene of a 2015 James Bond flick (Spectre) to essentially combine Halloween and Dia de Los Muertos into one generic holiday, with a menacing touch of Caribbean Carnival. To say the whole thing is made up seems pointless, since every holiday is more-or-less “made-up.” Still, this “tradition” only started after 2015, so skeptical minds can draw their own conclusions.
Our immediate neighborhood is inundated day and night by the passing marching bands, belting out the same basic tune, over and over, with horns and clarinet and snare drum. Vane best describes the repeating sound as slight and sloppy variations on the Pogues’ “Fiesta,” an ode to drunken revelry, not to mention an Irishman’s foolish attempt to speak Spanish:
“I am Francisco Vasquez Garcia
I am welcome to Almeria
We have sin gas and con leche
We have fiesta and feria
We have the song of the cochona
We have brandy and half corona
And Leonardo and his accordione
And Kalamari and macaroni
Come all you rambling boys of pleasure
And ladies of easy leisure
We must say Adios! until we see
Almeria once again
There is a minstrel, there you see,
And he stoppeth one in three
He whispers in this one’s ear
“Will you kindly kill that doll for me”
Now he has won cochona in the bingo
All the town has watched this crazy gringo
As he pulls off the dolls head laughing
And miraldo! throws its body in the sea”
As Banda played with abandon, Shane McGowan’s piquant verses should find new form among the bacchanalian Englanders and Yanquis that are roaming the streets tonight, in their white-washed gangs, looking for the next mescal bar, while reminiscing about the cemeteries of Etla they visited yesterday. The small town north of the city is such a tourist attraction on Day of the Dead that the road into the town is now apparently closed. Someone must be trapped among the candled altars somewhere.
Meanwhile, those still seeking cemeteries closer to home need only walk around the Zocalo, en Centro, as Catrina skeletons—some standing, some hanging from balconies, or sitting on bicycles, or in the heated embrace of another Catrina—are everywhere. It is as if cadavers outnumber living souls, but it is all in jest, decidedly more halloweeny than Dia de los Muertos.
Despite the brash display, Catrinas did not, in fact, originate with El Dia, as the seasonal association only came later. Jose Guadalupe Posada started sketching his cartoons of Calavera Catrina, the “elegant skull,” as early as 1899, in the wake of a deadly volcanic explosion near Mexico City. His comics, both playful and poignant, gradually rose to national prominence, whereas Posada’s stinging comedy grew more political.
By 1910, Porfirio Diaz was facing a revolution. While Mexicans were writhing from a cholera epidemic, famine, and violent discontent, Diaz still dreamed of a European high-society. Hence, the skeletons of Jose Posada were deliberately dressed as dandies, in frilly lace and flowery hats and gaudy jewelry, to highlight the hypocrisy, the inanity of vanity, in the midst of such suffering—and to remind the moneyed class that Diaz would soon be as dead as a skeleton, as would they all. In this way, La Calavera Catrina gave voice to a new style of Mexican dissent. And it was funny.
Nowhere was the bitter dissent greater than in Oaxaca de Juarez, the place where Porfirio Diaz rose and fell. Here the complexity of the struggle was cast in sharpest relief, at the entrance to the underworld, among a population ravaged by plague. Porfirio’s final gift to his people was the magnificent theatre on Calle Independencia, but, by the time of its opening, the revolutionaries were in control, and elegant skulls became the rage on stage, featured in newspapers throughout Oaxaca and beyond. In his ambitious mural “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central,” Diego Rivera made sure to stand with Catrina, front-and-center, arm-in-arm, along with her creator, Jose Guadalupe Posada, and her chief publicist and polemicist, Frida Kahlo. Standing at the center of attention, Catrina wears her favorite long-dress for the occasion.
Beyond the pop culture and politics, Catrina gives Mexicans hope that there may be a woman awaiting us in the afterlife, who loves to party, which is no small matter. And that afterlife never gets any closer than on the second day of November, which explains why so many are here—to see the veil lifted, as they like to say. For that reason, tonight’s special performance at Teatro Macedonio Alcalá is the silent-movie classic, Dante’s El Infierno, which debuted in this same theatre in 1911. 9 circles of Hades are promised in just 68 minutes, the marquee announces, just like the 9 fronteras in the Aztec underworld of Mictlan. Coincidences are too eerie.
Accompanying the original silent film is a killer 4-piece jazz ensemble, which, according to my ticket, is supposed to be the Oaxaca Symphony, but definitely is not. The balcony we occupy is packed full of eager out-of-towners, with selfie-sticks, their deathly faces incrementally blurred by paint smudges, waiting for Hell to start.
Then the giant round chandelier dims. A jazzy pianist greets the audience by saying, “Viva Los Muertos,” whatever that is supposed to mean. In response, we hear a loud amen coming from the unfathomable darkness below. The terrible descent is set to commence. However, the real horror may soon be waiting outside, on the streets of Oaxaca, as news is trickling through the internet that the union of trash collectors has just declared a strike. Oh, the horror.