Day of the Dead Redux

All right chav@s, we've survived another year and now the time has come to hang with those who haven't. So, this means a few things: a little Ofrenda in my house, first of all. Just a little thing, on my nightstand. Marigolds, "cockscomb" flowers, some pears for my granpappy ol' reliable (who, okay, maybe never wanted to see another damn pear in his life, being a pear farmer, but give me a break, I never met the guy) plus tangerines, sugarcane, a little water, a little salt, some grapes (who doesn't like grapes?) a couple candles... and a little incense thingy that I couldn't figure out how to use properly despite technical advice from many angles. I successfully filled my house with smoke, but that's about it, to be honest.

Anyway, the epic aprovechamiento of the Day of the Dead began on sunday, when we did a mad-dash grocery run followed by an attempt to go to the town of Mixquic (at a bus stop where the bus never came, but on the other hand there was a very cute puppy). We saved the day by jumping on a shortbus to the center of Xochimilco. We got in and there were people EVERYWHERE. In the plaza they were just barely starting to put up a couple of ofrendas in the first plaza (here it's common to put up colossal ofrendas in the plazas as display pieces), and in the second plaza there was a honey fair, where oddly we bought coffee and pan de muerto ("dead guy bread") and this circular bread covered in pink sugar (so it looks like fungicide-coated seeds, so I call it "pan de fungicida", though I remain ignorant of its true name, and which, by the way, I've only ever seen in Xochimilco and its surroundings). Then, passing the honey fair, we found the main square of Xochi, where they had some colossal ofrendas, and, like last year, a life-size pulquería diorama, including drunken papier-mache skeletons, witty sayings, pulque-extraction tools, a real-live agave in a heap of soil and educational labels explaining the history, process and culture of pulque. We got there a bit late but in the early afternoon they have pulque-tastings and such things. There's also a giant list of all the pulquerías in the Xochimilco area.

Then, crossing that plaza, we encountered the Dance of the Silly Gachupines ("Gachupin" is a derogatory term for Spanish person here in Mexico) which has a real name but I don't actually remember what it is, but the concept is that (in this case they were mostly schoolchildren) dress up in big, elaborately decorated velvet robes, giant inverted-truncated-cone hats, and bearded wooden masks and dance around in circles in the street. Originally this was to make fun of the Spanish, who, for mala onda ("being jerks") never invited the indigenous people to their parties. So, the snubbed indigenous people took it upon themselves to make an elaborate satirical ritual of it. The band and the dancers (the smallest of which was a kid of no more than six years, who continually got distracted and had to be repeatedly dragged back to the group by older kids) were followed up and down the streets by firecrackers and photo-snapping crowds. Thus was traffic impeded and were many children and grownups amused.

As it began to get dark-- the power went out! So we were on our way out of Dodge when we passed the darkened, candle-glowing market and I insisted we go in. Candles wedged among piles of tangerines, burning pieces of sugarcane stuffed between fans of bananas, illuminating (or not) the vendors, who continued as normal, barking their goods in the darkness. It was pretty cool.

Then, we stopped in at a prehispanic restaurant which we'd seen on the way into Xochi, where we had a delicious grasshopper soup and corn-smut pasta, with tiny mugs of mezcal on the house (I'm pretty sure we were drinking from a dollhouse tea set) with grub-salt, and an agua-fresca with lime and chía seeds. It was a pretty tasty dinner. Furthermore there was this awesome ambience because of the power outage, just listening to the festival on the street outside, the evening breeze through the window, watching the candlelight move around on the paintings on the wall. It's a very beautiful, and only slightly expensive restaurant that I highly highly recommend to tourists.

Then we went home.

BUT! The Day of the Dead adventure is not over yet. On Tuesday we went to Mixquic, a little bitty town famous for its adherence to traditions. From Tasqueña station we took two HOURS to get there on a two-peso RTP bus, passing the entirety of Tlahuac (which has awful traffic because they're building a new line of the Metro there) . On the bright side, we saw a ginormous skeleton in the center of Tlahuac, which was cool. Anyway, we got into Mixquic hungry and tired, but enjoyed the fair that they had set up around the perimeter of the cemetery before going in to check out the dead. The church of Mixquic is prehispanic in origin, which is to say that it has an archaeological site in the courtyard containing skeletons, carved rocks and ancient statues. It's one of the loveliest churches I've seen yet in Mexico, one of the ones with the outside all stone and serious and the inside drenched in gold-leaf, so beautifully decorated it's sort of hard to cope with. I just sat there in the pews for awhile, staring. In the pulpit there was a long and elaborate ofrenda with all kinds of fruit and candles and everything, and of course on the front wall behind the pulpit was a giant statue of Jesus with, of course, a Virgen de Guadalupe suspended above him. Along the walls were various wooden statues of Jesus in different stages of his life; though as usual, the anguished crown-of-thorns stage appeared most favored.

But outside and all around the church was where it was at. Throngs of people buzzed amongst the graves, composing flowery magna opi to their dead relatives on top of their graves. Whole families, children still bedecked in Halloween costumes from several days before, arranged marigolds, cockscomb flowers, little white flowers that here are called "clouds", candles, sometimes making patterns or designs of the dismembered petals, on the slab of concrete, pile of dirt, mausoleum, tiled surface or whatever that marked the grave.

This, I should mention, is the most tightly-packed cemetery I have ever seen in my whole life. It's incredible. Only one person can pass at a time between the graves, and I suspect that families may bury one person atop the previous on the family site. There is literally zero real estate available in the Mixquic cemetery and I promise you that no grave goes undecorated. For this reason it's a well-known attraction for Chilangos and foreigners alike in this season. And that was how, as it got darker and darker, I became trapped and unable to escape among the graves. The incense smoke rose into the air, clouding my vision and inundating my olfactory sphere. The rumbling of thousands of voices, the silence of the old ladies who sat watching the candles, the sound of camera shutters on all sides... and no escape! I believe I spent a good half an hour twisting amidst the graves after deciding I wanted to leave. But it was nice, actually. Guitars, barkers from the fair, ladies selling cotton candy between the graves... it's sort of weird, really.

Now the one thing we noticed, and maybe you're taking this as tourist advice, so listen closely, is this: there were a ton of police in the fair. So, our conclusion was this: be careful in Mixquic. The fair itself and the cemetery are safe, but definitely watch your back, because if they're putting that much security in place, it might be for a reason. That's it.

Next time: the collapse of Hacienda Mixiuhca. Stay tuned!