The colourful and noisy Day of the Dead festival in Mexico’s Michoacán state celebrates life’s ultimate journey. ELISE RANA takes a look at the spectacle.
Roses, violets, lilies – flowers whose fragrance we can recognise anywhere, evoking different feelings in us all. But the humble marigold? Experience the Noche de Muerte in Mexico and it’s a smell you’ll never forget: the smell of life, death and joy.
As we wait for our night’s adventure to commence, dusk is gathering in the main square of Morelia, capital of the rolling, lush Michoacán state. The bright, bold flowers we’ve seen stacked up on the roadside in the country and piled high in the back of pickups have ended their journey here. Local schoolkids are busy at work, winding them onto display frames ready for the night’s festivities. The air is thick with the smell of marigolds.
The Day of the Dead is one of Mexico’s best-known events, a ghoulishly surreal carnival of religion and public celebration that epitomises much of what is so intoxicating about the country itself.
Sure enough, when we arrived at the end of October the preparations were well underway, sugar-paste skulls for sale in the markets and shop windows and public buildings alike decorated with jaunty skeletal tableaux. Evidence of creeping cross-border cross-pollination with Halloween, children togged up as mummies, witches and vampires trail plastic pumpkin-head buckets for trick or treating. Originally confined to the first two days in November, El Día de los Muertos has evolved into a three-day festival that’s bigger than Christmas.
Still, the tradition already represents a mingling of indigenous Mexican beliefs and Catholic pageantry, so what’s a bit of commercial paganism thrown into the mix? An awareness of death and what lay beyond was central to pre-Hispanic cultures. A release from suffering for the downtrodden poor, death as the ultimate leveller provided rich inspiration in pre-revolutionary Mexico. Artists and poets mocked the soon-to-be-futile earthly vanities of the social elite by portraying them as preening, hobnobbing skeletons. Still a popular symbol of the festivities is the elegant Catrina, a fur stole around her fleshless shoulders, a bony haunch peeping from beneath a turn-of-the-century gown and a flamboyant feathered hat atop her grinning skull.
The black humour hasn’t changed, but it has been updated. As we hang around Morelia checking out the candy offerings, we note tiny skeletons in hospital beds hooked up to a tequila drip, skeletons sitting in a barrel of booze, skeleton bridal couples and skeleton mariachi bands. Yet for all the frivolities, this is also a deeply traditional celebration.
Nowhere is this more so than here in the state of Michoacán, whose indigenous Purepecha people have preserved their ancestral heritage more keenly than most. The Purepecha ‘festival of souls’ honours children on November 1 and adults the next day, but it is on the night between – the ‘Noche de Muertos’ – that the gateway falls open between the worlds of the living and the dead. Who knows who we’ll bump into, then, as we depart Morelia for an all-night trip around the villages of Lago de Pátzcuaro, the lake believed by the Purepecha to be the portal for this spiritual traffic.
Night has fallen by the time we arrive at Tzintzuntzan, the oldest village in the region, where the party is well underway. Bright light and delicious smells stream from a labyrinth of stalls selling hot snacks and garish cocktails – which could explain the high spirits of the local teenagers as they head to the churchyard to watch the game of pelota (an ancient sport that’s somewhere between hockey and lacrosse – played on this occasion with a flaming orb for a ball).
By contrast, all is rather quiet on the streets of Santa Fe de la Laguna, but the main square of this tiny Purepecha village is anything but dull. Altars to the recently deceased twinkle all around it, each including the four elements: earth (foods whose aromas feed the returning soul), wind (fluttering paper flags); water (for the long thirsty journey from the other side) and fire (each candle represents a soul, an extra one being lit for the forgotten). We join the small crowd of villagers dropping by to pay their respects to one family’s late grandmother, to whose memory a huge altar takes up the whole room, the masses of fruit and flowers testament to her popularity. This is no gloomy visit though, as each visitor is handed a bowl of pozole (corn stew) and expected to stay for a chat. When grandma only comes back once a year, she wants to hear what’s been going on.
At Jarácuaros, where the Noche de Muerte tradition is all about entertainment, it’s a noisier affair once again. Beneath a whitewashed church topped with a neon cross, local musicians and dancers put on an all-night show: in the village’s famous ‘old man dance’, performers stomp gleefully across the stage in wooden clogs, painted masks and ribbon-bedecked hats; later, the harmonising voices of the Lopez brothers drown out a drunken heckler. It’s now heading for 2am and babies snooze, swaddled on shoulders and laps while hot, sweet punch is ladled out (with a bottle of tequila on hand to add a tot for those who ask nicely).
In Arocutín, the belltower overlooks a very different scene. Ablaze in candlelight, the churchyard buzzes quietly with soft chatter, as villagers hold all-night vigils in honour of deceased loved ones. Tombstones are festooned with flowers, fruit, specially-baked bread and other offerings – the bottles of Pepsi and packs of cigarettes on the grave of one beloved abuelo will, like everything else, be shared out come morning. Relatives huddle peacefully under blankets and warm themselves against the highland chill by makeshift fires, one woman nestling into a wheelbarrow as her kids play around her. The still, crisp air is perfumed with clouds of incense – and marigolds -and the atmosphere one of overwhelming warmth and love. Death, I’m beginning to realise, is anything but macabre.
Our final stop is Pátzcuaro Lake itself. It’s 5am and we’re dropping in and out of sleep as our boat glides out among the ghostly reeds, fog rising from the murky, Styx-like waters. Half-awake, half-dreaming and with the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead well and truly blurred, we reach the island of Pacanda, where another magical vigil is taking place in the hilltop cemetery.
The sun is up when we return to Morelia, but the day has to be put off for a few hours of sleep first. I close the blinds and begin to drift, wondering: did the dead come back to our world, or have we just been to theirs? Either way, it was a hell of a journey. •
• Elise Rana travelled to Mexico with Flight Centre (0870-499 0042; www.flightcentre.co.uk), who have fares to Mexico City from £440. Budget (0844-581 9999; www.budget.co.uk) offers car hire from Mexico City from £13.50 a day including unlimited mileage when prepaid online.
