The Day of the Dead

Dia de los Muertos

The Dead Are With Us Always

Text by Kathleen Walker

Photographs by Edward McCain The Panteon Nacional, the huge public cemetery in Nogales, Sonora, is filled with people, jammed with them. The noise is incredible music, talk, laughter. There is nothing somber going on here today, no dark suits or grim faces. It is November 2, a holiday for the living and for the dead in Mexico. Dia de los Muertos they call it, "Day of the Dead." Thousands of people are in the cemetery. More are coming. The traffic outside the gates is bumper-to-bumper. People are climbing down from the hills above, walking along the dirt road. They move together in threes and fours and more. They are families, the old to the very young. They go to the white tombs, the graves, the slabs, the crosses that are as close together as the people in the cheek-to-jowl crowds around them. It is almost impossible not to step on a grave, brush against a final resting place. But then people are sitting on them or drawing up the chairs they have brought. They are eating meals, drinking, listening to the music of the small bands that stroll through the acres looking for a paying audience. The noise of it all shakes the air. Vendors call out from their stalls, blanket sellers use loudspeakers. The colors are blinding: orange, yellow, neon pink, purple, gold. Two young men pass through the crowd carrying a cross made of electric-blue bows. They are wearing the white, purple, and orange jackets of the Phoenix Suns.

I was not prepared for this, not at all. I wasn't alone. When we first arrived, Otto Preuss, a fellow traveler from Tucson, stood with me on a road overlooking the cemetery. "It's totally unexpected," he said of the clamor and color below. Yes, and I had been warned. "There's no way to imagine what it's like," Piet Van de Mark told me weeks before. For six years, he has led people from Tucson to this cemetery in Mexico, guided them into another culture's view of death. "It seemed to me a bit morbid when I first heard about it," admitted Marilyn Wright of Sacramento, California, a member of this year's tour, but as the bus moved south she added, "I think we try to hide death too much in our culture. We put them away and that's it." We didn't always. The belief that the dead are still among us at least one day ayear is not restricted to any religion, culture, region, or piece of history. The ancient Egyptians believed the dead visited their homes in what would be our mid-November. The Celts of the British Isles believed the dead rose the night before the long winter began, again, around November. In many times and places, humanity has believed strongly enough in the vitality of the dead to prepare food for them, in some cases joining them in the meal. It was not unknown for early Christians to feast at the site of family graves. In medieval Italy, food was made for those who would come from the great beyond for a visit on November 1, All Saints Day on the Catholic calendar, which is followed on November 2 by All Soul's Day. In pre-hispanic Mexico, death itself was a meal for the gods. Life was fed by the blood of human sacrifice. Stacks of skulls sat outside the great temples to the shock of the men who followed Cortes. They would destroy the temples but not all of the traditions.

Marigolds were the flowers of death in the Aztec world, zempasuchiles they called them. On the Dia de los Muertos, they are sold in great bundles at the main entrance of the Panteon Nacional for the decoration of the graves. Farther in the interior of the country, there are the skeleton dolls and puppets for sale and sugar-candy skulls stacked in grinning rows, sweet reminders of mortality and history.

The Dia de Los Muertos, which includes events on both November 1 and November 2, is celebrated in different ways throughout Mexico. In one town, it may include a solemn procession; in another, fireworks. It has the elements of a Memorial Day: visiting and cleaning the graves of loved ones. And, like the North American holiday of Thanksgiving, at its core is the reunion of the family. Hayde Covarrubias Zelk of Rio Rico, Arizona, has come to the Panteon Nacional on this day to be with her family from the Mexican side of the border, both the living and the dead.

"We thank them that we are here," she says standing at the graveside of her grandparents. Her children have made the trip with her. 'It is a celebration of life, celebrating our loved ones in spiritual form.' "I want my girls to remember that they used to come."

The tradition is practiced north of the border as well.

On November 2, the public cemetery of Nogales, Arizona, is filled with people tending the graves, making their floral offerings to those they loved in life.

"That's my mother, my husband, and my little daughter," a woman says in simple introduction and gently motions to their graves.

To the north, in the small cemetery in Tubac, visitors also have brought their offerings. But there only is a hint of the color of the south. There are a few pots of flowers, paper wreaths, bright-blue bows on one grave, an American flag on another. Time, distance, and memory have muted the Day of the Dead in Tubac. It is quiet here, this November 2, yes, quiet as the grave.

Some Arizonans mark the Day of the Dead by creating an altar in their home. Pronounced al-TAR in Spanish, it will hold religious statues, candles, flowers, and photographs of the dead. Food offerings also can play a part. They do so on the Tohono O'odham reservation in southern Arizona. There, families prepare entire meals for the dead, including chili, beans, and tamales. Tamales also were part of Aztec feast days.

"We put enough place settings for everyone we have invited," explains Lucinda Hughes-Juan, who celebrates with her family in Sells. The invited include the dead.

There are flowers — living, dead, and man-made — and religious icons nestled in freestanding niches of wood.

"It is the spirit of the food that they eat," she explains. The living will eat the substance later.

The offering artist Virgina Aguero made to her dead and their day of honor earned exhibition space at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson. It is a massive altar, eight years in research and creation.

"It is a celebration of life," says the artist of both her altar and the day it represents. "Celebrating our loved ones in spiritual form."

The party fills the room. Saints and sinners in photographs, paintings, and statuary flow across the altar, up the walls, down to the floor. Angels and skeletons are in close proximity. There are flowers - living, dead, and man-madeand religious icons nestled in freestanding niches of wood, nichos. Visitors are encouraged to honor their own dead by writing their names on small slips of paper and placing them within the exhibit, and they do.

"It is the beginning of going back . . . back to Sonora," says the artist, who was born in a small town in that northern Mexico state. At her altar, like the women standing before the graves, she remembers. "We used to get together with the family and make the paper flowers."

In Nogales, Sonora, bouquets of paper flowers are carried over the heads of the cemetery crowd on long stalks of sugarcane. Balloons float around them. Corn ears roast on grills. The blanket seller's harangue continues; he will have his buyers. The night promises to be cold, and there will be those staying at the graves, some of which are now covered with their own blankets of flowers, crowned with wreaths. The artists stand by the bedecked graves and tombs and acknowledge the admiring glances of those who pass.

There is one moment, one place where solitude can be found this day. A woman sits by a grave, alone, staring out at the living. But within minutes, she too is surrounded by family.

"It's interesting to see the difference between our cultures," comments Lawrence Kerski from Tucson as he moves through the cemetery.

A less-subdued Marilyn Wright calls out from the passing crowd, "It's fascinating, isn't it? It's wonderful."

"They seem to be totally dazzled by it," Van de Mark says of those who have made the trip with him over the years.

Dazzled, and in one case, exhausted. This feast for the senses can be rather rich. One of his party takes her own seat on the edge of a grave, waiting, resting, until she must make the long walk back to the bus.

Before the tour ends, it passes the Tohono O'Odham cemetery near the mission of San Xavier del Bac south of Tucson. It is a small cemetery, peaceful, marked with wooden crosses. The night before, I had watched as shadows moved among those graves, stooping to light their candles from those already lit.

Now, with the Day of the Dead at an end, the simple crosses glow white as bone in the twilight, white as bone.Author's Note: To inquire about Piet Van de Mark's tours, call Baja's Frontier Tours, (520) 887-2340. For information on annual Dia de los Muertos exhibits, contact: Arizona Historical Society-Southern, Arizona Division; (520) 628-5774.