“To the resident of New York, Paris or London, the word death is never pronounced because it burns the lips. The Mexican, on the other hand, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favourite games and his most steadfast love.” — Octavio Paz
Mexico City is aquatic. The lanes and avenues used to be canals: the whole city is a basin collecting water flowing from a ring of volcanos and mountains. On the Day of the Dead, a river of people flows through the streets, carried along on the jangle of busker’s guitars, thump of bass pounding out of cantinas, eerie scream of ocarina flutes and the shouts of children for whom tonight is a candy-fest, carnival, family outing and waaaay past bedtime party all rolled into one.
People are dressed to kill. Elegant men float past with flowers in their hair. A thousands variations of La Caterina, her stitched on grin a welcome substitute for the covid masks which are otherwise ubiquitous. Mingled in with the latest media craze — small armies of minions from “Squid Game” — are regal characters from antiquity, their huipiles adorned with chrysanthemums, their skirts dangling with skulls: the Aztec underworld goddess Mictecacihuatl, brought overground tonight by mothers and grandmothers whose embodiment is part death-drag, part homage to their own buried mothers, sisters, daughters. A memorial to missing and murdered women juxtaposes a raised fist with the female symbol: adjacent, a pair of women studiously apply skull makeup to their faces while behind them, a row of 100 riot police lean, bored, on their plexiglass shields.
In the Zocalo, altars are ringed by vast carpets of coloured sawdust, arranged in brilliant, impermanent mandalas: they are beautiful, tonight, and are doomed the next time it rains. Glowing iridescent, the intricate patterns draw the eye away from colonial palaces, grey and foreboding, that loom above the square. As I’m in the lineup to view the display of Dia de los Muertos altars, a band starts up a cumbria and people all around me break out in dancing.
Each altar, or ‘offrenda’, is arranged in homage to, and as a guiding light for, the dead so they may travel from the limbo of burial back to the bosom of their families. There is an offrenda in every home, laid out with garlands of marigolds, lit by candles, and lovingly arranged around the photos of the departed. Here, in the public square, there is one for every region of Mexico: Michoacan, Quintana Roo, Oaxaca…and so on. These splendid, organic altars lit by the dazzling suns of marigolds feature the fruits, seeds, gourds, and cuisine of each area, gorgeously draped with flowers and surrounded by shredded tree bark. Strings of indigo corn, speckled bean seeds, piles of tortillas: all the noble, plain sustenance that would have been enjoyed back when this city was still inhabited by the Nahuatl’s ancestors, known as Aztecs but who called themselves Mexica.
A square outside a 16th century church is smoky with copal incense. Healers smudge the crowd with primordial forest essence; fragrant smoke drifts past MacDonald’s & Starbucks. Everywhere are these juxtapositions: the face of death, drawn on the vibrant cheeks of a grinning toddler. A string of iridescent flowers, strung across a mural depicting the mortification of Christ. A pair of skull-faced women sharing a lingering kiss. A child beggar, playing a toy marimba, squatting at the feet of a festive crowd who toss him coins but dance on past.
The pavements here are uneven. Strange odours pour from dank holes underground. You get a sense from lopsided buildings and half-ruined palaces that the city lives in a constant state of collapse and reinvention. History – human lives, human stories – are built and destroyed, breathed in and out by time’s great bellows. On this day, the Day of the Dead, the impermanence of life is not only acknowledged but lustily embraced. We die, and Mictecacihuatl coughs butterflies into another dimension, one where “I”s dissolve and we return to the dark river that is waiting for us, yawning beneath our every step.
Mexico is teaching me: it is not sinister, when you look death in the face. It is the resolution of all our tiny struggles. It is the marriage of our souls back to the great soul from which we came. It is surrender of the smallness of just one story, it is the release from anguish back to the family of origin where everything, and everyone, is related. Death is no exile. It is home.
