Death in Mexico

Diego Rivera, Octavio Paz, and other twentieth-century artists and intellectuals created an image of Mexico as a land where death pervades popular culture. This casual intimacy with death is most famously celebrated in Mexico’s “Days of the Dead,” but lately that connection has been treated with suspicion. As Claudio Lomnitz writes, “The pride of place given to play with death by postrevolutionary intellectuals is today suspected of legitimating an authoritarian political regime that naturalized its own penchant to trample, mangle, and stamp out life and projected its own tendencies onto ‘the Mexican’s disdain of death”’ (pp. 54–55). Lomnitz’s magnificient and profound work is more than a history of Mexico’s Days of the Dead over the past 500 years; it is a critique of anthropology and comparative iconography, and it is a documented history of death, the state, and popular culture in Mexico. Lomnitz recognizes that “Mexico” was not a unified cultural realm when the Spanish arrived; there was more cultural variation among indigenous people than there was among Spaniards. He points out that observations of similarities between the contemporary celebrations and “Aztec” ceremonies is based on a mistaken understanding of their symbolism. Although the Aztec skull rack (tzompantle) and today’s marketplace stacks of sugar skulls (calaveras) on Mexico’s Days of the Dead may bear a superficial resemblance as depictions of human crania, their meanings were quite different. For the Spanish, the calavera symbolized the brevity of life; it was a sign for the criticism of worldly vanity and corrupt corporeal pleasures. For the Aztecs, the skull was a reminder of the cycle of fertility, nutrition, and earthly rebirth as much as it was a symbol of death. With no concept of an afterlife as reward or punishment, death could not be a time of judgment for indigenous people as it was for the Spanish. More significant for us, facile identification of superficial similarities and imagined timeless truths cannot be substitutes for historical investigation. This is a rich, subtle, and complex work that does not seek simple answers or attempt to smooth the rough edges of complications. In Lomnitz’s words, “Rather than try to affix a true meaning or a true origin to the death sign, I explore the history of the densely layered repertoire itself, for, as Nietzsche put it, ‘only something which has no history can be defined”’ (p. 58). A brief review can do no more than outline some of the salient points. The book is divided into three parts arranged in chronological order. “Death and the Origin of the State” begins with the massive mortality, dislocation, and reconfiguration of the sixteenth-century conquest era, the radical transformation of indigenous realms into “New Spain.” Death and destruction were the work of the conquistadors, while the Spanish colonial state developed “largely as an effort to rein in the destruction of the Indies. . . . The colonial state was built on the devastation that had been unleashed in America” (p. 97). The Church was essential in this process. As the colonial state was consolidated, ecclesiastical emphasis shifted from apocalyptic visions of heaven and hell to the more ambiguous proposition of time in purgatory. Indigenous people were forced to give up human sacrifice, cremation, and interment at home for burial of their dead in collective holy space in or near the church. They were also introduced to the doctrine of individual free will and the collective responsibility to pray for the souls in purgatory, especially on All Souls’ Day. Some indigenous communities adopted the Days of the Dead without official promotion of purgatory. Their enthusiasm for providing food, drink, and candles at harvest time increased ecclesiastical suspicion of their motives; nevertheless, the offerings were welcomed by rural priests, for whom these donations became one of the principal sources of their income. Church doctrine promoted marriage, the conjugal family, individual private property, and the reorganization of labor essential to Mexico’s integration into the Atlantic economy. Mexican popular culture “was built at every point on the domestication and popularization of the death cult, with its elaborate and plentiful saints’ feasts, its concern with funerary pomp and charity, its corporations’ savings and efforts geared to funerary expenditures, its village lands identified with village saints, and its vision of justice projected into the afterlife” (pp. 261–62). The Days of the Dead were not a strictly rural festival as might be imagined. Celebration of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day was obligatory for Spaniards, who lived in cities and towns. Not only did Spanish participants not find anything pagan in the festivities but the celebrations became increasingly larger in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The earliest government documentation relating to urban commemoration of the Days of the Dead concerns markets, which could last all month. All segments of the population, elite as well as popular, participated in the Days of the Dead, buying special foods for the occasion as well as new clothes in which to cut a splendid figure during the paseo, with its flirtation and frivolity. Viceregal authorities in the eighteenth century attempted to restrict markets as unsuitable during solemn religious festivals. Nineteenth-century politicians, despite their suspicion of the Church, were unable to limit the urban celebration. Late in the century, though, the Porfirian elite began to segregate itself from the rabble and, eventually, to ignore the festivities in order to undertake more modern leisure activities such as recreational travel on the new railways.