A few weeks ago we celebrated Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) in Oaxaca.  Despite the enormous flood of people into the city’s heart, it remains one of my favorite holidays here in the south of Mexico.  Do any of you from our community celebrate Day of the Dead in your home or town?

Before arriving in Mexico, my understanding of Día de los Muertos was fairly limited; I called it “Mexican Halloween.” While the two certainly share thematic similarities–Halloween’s traditions stem from Celtic rituals meant to ward off spirits, while Día de los Muertos focuses on calling the dead to draw close.  The distinction is unmistakable when you see it in person.

Here in Oaxaca Muertos is a big celebration lasting over the course of five days.  Each day has a different function or occupation for those celebrating. You can read online in detail about the various traditions in Oaxaca, or in the rest of the region.  It’s a subject that has drawn artists, authors, journalists and filmmakers to the state and country for years.  I thought I’d share a more personal story from my experience celebrating Muertos with my local family.

I have the hands of a prize fighter. They’re not lightening quick. They don’t carry the force of a freight train. Nope. They’re just really narly and chewed up. Have I started taking part in bar room brawls? Am I engaging in illegal Gringo Fighting? No. I participated in Day of the Dead. And it took a toll on my poor, dainty hands.

Day of the Dead hopes to celebrate and commemorate those who have passed away. So perhaps it’s better to call it a Mexican Memorial Day, than Mexican Halloween. Each household creates an altar, or space to invite their dead to visit. Bright orange marigolds, guavas, jícamas and tejocotes hanging from vines, peanuts, candied skulls, or sheets of colorful and delicately cut tissue paper, photos of those who have passed away, chocolates, mole deck these altars. It is a shrine to memory as each family places specific items on the altar that were favorites of their deceased loved ones; a box of menthol cigarettes, a bottle of Indio beer, a glass of scotch and water. I helped build the altar in the house of my friends the Cordero’s. I nestled in a photo of Grandma and Grandpa Martin, one of Grandma Kack and my friend and mentor, Forrest Church. I pour a glass of Scotch for Granddad and lay out some cigarettes for Grandma and a cup of coffee for Forrest. The activity starts in the home–constructing small or large invitations of love.

I  accompanied my adoptive family here in Oaxaca to the cemetary early Friday morning to clean off their father’s grave.  A year of grime had encroached on the family tombs. Mud caked around lettering; weeds snaking up to wrap around an angel’s wings.  The tiny graves are packed so tightly next to each other that I found myself balancing my mop on Señor Cordero’s neighbor’s headstone for a spell while I scrubbed. I hope he didn’t mind!

The whole tradition is  quite lovely. Whilst toiling, scrubbing, and hefting, you naturally reflect on the person you’ve lost. Great stories about my friends’ families arose between the rinsing and the filling of buckets. Songs they loved broke from our throats as we placed new, fresh flowers along the headstones.

Later on that Friday night I returned to the cemetary around midnight. The place was jumpin’. The city alights all of the niches, where in days of yore, people’s caskets were interred and cemented in for eternity. Local artesans create altars and colored sand tapestries at the cemetary. The crumbling ruins of a chapel stand at the center of everything; a tree stretching towards the moon right in the center of the rubble. It’s lit it in scarlet for the occassion. The place was packed. People crowded around tiny tombs, drinking and toasting their dead. Roving bands criss cross the cemetary offering a serenade for your muerto for a small fee. Some stay all night, sleeping next to the stone tombs.

I spend the late evening touring the elaborate cemeteries in the outer edges of the city–Xoxocotlán and Atozompa. Some spots, like Xoxo, are packed with visitors. Vendors take advantage of the traffic to sell glow-in-the-dark baby Jesus necklaces. Families open the large courtyards of their homes to construct a make-shift restaurant for the occasion.  I prefer the quiet of Xoxo’s old cemetery. It’s small and tranquil.  Fewer people trek all the way out to this tiny outcropping.  Here I can weave my way through the ruins, stopping in the candlelight of a tomb to draw closer to the memories of those I love.  That is what this week is about; memory.  It is a space, opened and created once a year, physically in a home, or cemetery; spiritually in your mind or heart.  It is a celebration of a return.

Has anyone caught this fascinating talk on experience versus memory on the TED site?  This one is a bit longer (20 min) than the usual video I post to the blog.  But the subject is fascinating. If you take a peek, you’ll hear from Daniel Kahneman, who is said to be one of the most influential living psychologists. He and his former partner, Amos Tversky, won the Nobel Prize for their pioneering work in behavioral economics.

Kahneman starts by telling a story of a guy who goes to a “glorious” concert.  But at the end, there is a loud noise, that the guy describes as so bad it ruined the whole concert.  Kahneman argues that the concert wasn’t ruined, just the memory of the concert.

“What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves. There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present…And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life…Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self and getting confused between them is part of the mess of the notion of happiness.”

If I’ve piqued your interest, then hit play below.

I’m curious what photographers and artists would have to say about this notion of the experiencing and remembering selves.  How does photography or the visual arts play into this concept and the cognitive trap of measuring experiences and emotions that Kahneman mentions (want to weigh in, Mike?)  What do you think, reader?  This has got my brain churning.

Saludos,

Megan