Mexicans Cheer Day of the Dead with Food, Flowers



By Tim Gaynor

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) - From indigenous Indian villages to violence-torn cities on the U.S. border, millions of Mexicans trekked to cemeteries on Monday to honor their dead with flowers, food and musical tributes



The two-day celebration has its roots in Roman Catholic tradition and ancient pagan rites where families honor dead relatives by cleaning their graves, offering them favorite food, laying out flowers and even serenading them with the music they used to love.


Drawing on a belief of the Tarascan people in central Mexico that departed souls can be lured back, the celebration begins on Nov. 1 with the Day of the Innocents to honor departed children while the Day of the Dead on Nov. 2, coinciding with All Souls' Day, is to remember adults.


The tradition is one of the most colorful and deep-rooted in Mexico and celebrated by factory workers in boomtowns along the U.S. border, urban professionals in the capital and among traditional Mayan communities in the tropical south.


"It's a happy occasion because you're remembering someone beloved," barman Alfredo Rodriguez said in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.


The party mood inside cemeteries amounts to a celebration of death, even in Ciudad Juarez, where a horrific 11-year killing spree has claimed the lives of well over 300 women.


Those murders, the failure of authorities to catch the killers and vicious turf wars between rival drug gangs have seen Ciudad Juarez dubbed "The City of the Dead."


MOCK AND EMBRACE DEATH


But Mexicans both mock and embrace death in these annual celebrations.


"You have to smile, as you'll be joining them soon enough," Rodriguez quipped as he tended the tiny grave of his brother Jose Antonio, who died aged four months in 1974.


"It's a day for everyone in the city to remember their dead, and we make a party of it," working mother Sofia Lopez said in Ciudad Juarez as she knelt to heap golden marigolds on the dirt grave of her daughter, Elizabeth, who died in 1990.


"We come here to spend a little time with her, just as if she were alive," she added, as around her visitors raked dirt by the tombs of much-loved family members, and touched up weathered headstones with paint.


In some indigenous communities in the Yucatan peninsula in sultry southeast Mexico, families traditionally take the bones of dead relatives out of their vaults ahead of the two-day festival, cleaning and caressing them in an annual rite.


Altars loaded with flowers and large skeleton figures -- some in indigenous dress, others as Spanish conquistadors -- were set up in Mexico City's vast central square on Monday, and incense filled the air.


Day of the Dead spills out of the cemeteries and small-town graveyards into shops, restaurants and homes across Mexico, where the souls of the dead are beckoned home with altars charged with votive candles, candy skulls and cherished keepsakes.


Offerings include "pan de muerto," a cake sprinkled with sugar and decorated to look like bones, as well as tequila shots and a glass of water to quench the returning spirit's thirst after the journey from the afterlife.


While supermarket chains increasingly stock up on pumpkins and Halloween masks imported from Mexico's powerful NAFTA-partner to the north, few doubt the resilience of the national tradition to hold its own against trick-or-treating.





"It is important to conserve and pass on traditions to children," lawyer Elizabeth Maldonado said as she tended her mother's grave at Mexico City's urban Dolores cemetery, while around her children dressed as devils and clowns played hide-and-seek among the tombstones.

"But (the children) are happy with costumes, and that doesn't damage tradition. It's a mixture," she added. (Additional reporting by Noel Randewich in Mexico City)

I love day of the dead! We Italians have something similar (All Souls Day) but, it's NEVER this awesome!

I always honor my ancestors on Halloween/Samhain. Yay for our dearly departed! My godfather is with me wherever I go...

applekisses said:

aka All Saints Day. Yep, its not that festive either, just a boring mass, LOL.

Tom said:

Well...All Souls Day is today and All Saints Day was yesterday But, you're right...we don't get any cool candy...or presents...or costumes...I think we should start a PR campaign to make it more festive! (can you tell I'm going crazy being out of work?)