The message of Mexico's calaveras
IN THE MIDST of America's anti-immigration frenzy, it was encouraging that this year's trophy for the "Most Spectacular" float in the Rose Bowl parade went to a troupe of immense, grinning skeletons. The predominantly Mexican-American city of Santa Fe Springs, Calif., chose to honor the Día de los Muertos, Mexico's "Day of the Dead" festival, with a float of calaveras, giant human figures in every posture of vibrant life, all of whom - even the mariachi with the moustache above his mouth - were nothing but skull and bone.
The Day of the Dead, observed on Nov. 2, the Catholic calendar's All Souls' Day, is a polychrome blend of religious ceremony, folk art, and a cheerfully tacky commercialism that celebrates, not grief, but a worldly mindfulness of death. Its emblems are various. There is the "ofrenda," an elaborate memorial to defunct relatives, friends, and occasionally celebrities, laid out on a table heaped with bread, coffee, candy, and anything - books, baseball mitts, or brandy - the departed used to love. Like the marigold flower and the sweet incense copal, the skeletal calavera is also a ubiquitous symbol of the holiday. Formed of wood, wire, or papier-mache, painted on glass or intricately cut into paper, the antic bones dance in toy stalls, get married on ofrendas, and frolic in store windows.
Unlike medieval European figures of death - skeletons who dance with and doom living humans - calaveras inhabit a parallel world that touches but does not intersect with our own. The figures are dentists and patients, drunks and lovers, brides and bathing beauties. My most recent favorite, courtesy of the state police association of Puebla, was a fully uniformed and full-sized skeleton riding a
Ignoring our gaze, these patterns of death do everything we do, except die. Like the sidewalk trails of marigold petals leading through a darkened doorway to an ofrenda, the sight in our world of the calaveras in theirs is a soft interruption of mortality into the routines and celebrations of daily life.
The calaveras and the other symbols of the Day of the Dead may have emerged from the horror of the first century of Spanish rule of Mexico. Between the vise of disease and oppression, the Indian population of the country shrank from more than 25 million to less than 1 million in 100 years. The warmth and humor of the calaveras, their immense human sympathy, grew in the shadow of unimaginable tragedy. But their transformation from a folk tradition of long standing into a universal icon of Mexican popular culture owes much to a single man, the engraver José Guadalupe Posada.
For 40 years, starting in the 1870s, Posada poured out illustrations for newspapers, magazines, broadside ballads, and books, reflecting the world of the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz in a mirror of calaveras. In Posada's hands, the grinning skulls were a natural for political and social satire. The skeleton in a general's uniform or in the elaborate flowered hat of a grande dame showed the rich and powerful as nothing more than cloth and bone. If the emperor with no clothes is a revelation of importance stripped of pretension, Posada's calaveras portrayed power as nothing more than pretense, the dictator as death in a top hat. His images gave us the original empty suits.
But greater and more long-lasting than their satirical sparks are the vitality, joy, and beauty of the calaveras. Posada's vibrant, incisive skeletons became an acknowledged source for the giants of 20th-century Mexican art. In the work of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, in Orozco and Siqueros, Posada's calaveras peep out, just as they do in every bakery window or souvenir stand on the Day of the Dead. They provide us, from our older neighbor to the south, something we need to hear in this time of assassination, suicide bombs, and mass slaughter.
The burial service of the Book of Common Prayer tells us that "in the midst of life, we are in death." It is an old truth. But the message of Mexico's calaveras is equally true, a reminder that even in the face of death we can be most abundantly alive.
Freelance writer George H. Rosen is writing a book about Early American world travelers.
