In a glass-encased altar stands a skeleton in a purple velvet robe. Each finger is adorned with rings, its neck with gold chains. Outside, at its feet, the skeleton's worshipers have left a miscellany of offerings: tequila, flowers, candles, sweets, cigarettes. These temptations, known as ofrendas, are meant to cure illness, attract abundance, bring back a straying lover—or thank the skeleton, known as Santa Muerte (Holy Death) for having helped provide those services.
Death has been an absorbing part of popular culture throughout Mexican history, and contemporary traditions draw on both indigenous and Spanish civilizations. In the Days of the Dead—October 31 to November 2—ofrendas are set up at grave sites, a tradition that goes back to the Aztecs and other native groups. Meanwhile, worship of saints for the dead and the bearing of candles at grave sites derive from Spanish Catholicism.
Any observer at a cemetery on the Days of the Dead can see that for the families who gather around each grave site, the ritual is a comforting and often cathartic experience. At the foot of the graves, they leave the favorite food and drink of the deceased. Picnicking and drinking alcohol are common, and mariachis are often hired. Laughter and tears accompany them.
In the 1890s, engraver Jose Guadalupe Posada began making comical drawings of skeletons dressed in elegant finery. Since then, Mexicans have been perceived to have an ironic, jocular relationship with death. Writer Luis Cardoza y Aragon called the skeleton "the Mexican national totem." In the month preceding the Days of the Dead, all over the country there is a brisk business in sugar skulls and skeleton figurines.
Poet Octavio Paz, Mexico's only Nobel laureate in literature, writes: "For the resident of New York, Paris, or London, death is a word that is never pronounced because it burns the lips. The Mexican, on the other hand, is familiar with it, makes fun of it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it's one of his favorite toys and his most permanent love." I heard one young woman in Mexico City reflect on death worship: "To venerate death means that you adore life."
Yet in recent years, some Mexican intellectuals have suggested that the differences are merely superficial and Mexicans treat death the same as anyone else. Regardless of how artists, bureaucrats, trinket salespeople, and funeral directors may interpret death, it is much more concrete once someone encounters it, says Claudio Lomnitz, an anthropologist at Columbia University and the author of Death and the Idea of Mexico. Lomnitz also says the Mexican state and marketplace may have tried to manipulate the traditions of death for commercial purposes. "It's abstract until one's mother or one's friend dies, or one is diagnosed with a terminal illness," Lomnitz explains. "That experience has nothing to do with social representation."
