1981_11 The Daily Collegian November 1981

              centerspread
"/ Dia de los Muertos
By RicardoAvila
Hispanic Link News Service
ON LONG ISLAND, where I live, the end of October
brings Halloween—a day when my children behave even
younger than they are. So do some adults. Silliness and
greed rule.
In my Mexico City childhood, it brought El Dia de los
Muertos, a pause that mixed celebration with solemnity.
The Day of the Dead was an adult ritual fashioned to
incude the participation of children.
My strongest memory of a Halloween-past in the
United States is when, a few years ago, we ran out of
candy and a disgruntled trick-or-treat child painted
'Cheap SOB' on our front walk.
My strongest memory of a Day of the Dead celebration
in Mexico is when, per custom, my parents led me to
the cemetery to pay tribute to our departed with food,
song, flowers and words. A majestic woman in black ar¬
rived a few graves down the row with a piano. She had
it planted on top of her buried husband and delivered
him a personal concert.
MY DAUGHTER and three sons welcome Halloween
as an excuse to behave foolishly and beg for candy which
will destroy their teeth.
For my wife and me, it has become an occasion to worry
about children as they race mindlessly across streets, of
endless dog-barking and door-knocking, of graffiti and
candy wrappers to be cleaned up the morning after.
Sometimes I have to take a drink to settle my uneasi¬
ness, and the alcohol doesn't mix well with the collec¬
tion of candy my children force me to share with them. It
gives me indigestion and makes me reflect on the issue
at hand: death.
It appears to me that death has very different meanings
in the United States and Mexico. Here it is the final act.
There it is no more than a stage of being which
can bring joy and strength to life.
Mexicans are used to celebrating death from pre-
Christian or pre-Columbian times. Most Aztec celebra¬
tions included human sacrifice to please the season's
gods and bring success in war, business, matrimony,
health, and other wordly affairs—even peace. The
advent of Christianity did not erase such thinking. Today,
as funeral processions in  New Orleans  become  more
and more rare, Mexico's dead may still enjoy a wake sur¬
rounded by friends who relish good food and drink, music
till dawn, a priest's farewell, and a procession aplenty
with brass and drums.
The Spanish conquistadors were shocked to see skulls
and bones decorating temples and palaces. Yet, when
thev massacred the Indians, the victims didn't condemn
the act as a holocaust. The thousands of deaths were
just acts of fate, mundane passings.
TECHNOLOGY AND IBM have not changed
Mexicans' attitudes toward the celebration of All Saints^
Day. The first day is for the small dead, children who
will dwell in limbo. Families, rich and poor, sweep their
dead children's graves and decorate them with toys,
fruit, pottery and flowers. Cemeteries become splashes of
color on the hillsides. The bright orange of the
sempasuchitl (African marigold) can be seen for miles.
The second day is reserved for the adult dead. Los
Fieles Difuntos. It is the main celebration. Some of us
still carry on the pre-Christian traditions. We spend the
entire night visiting the dead, offering them their favorite
foods, serenading them with a hired mariachi or our own
guitars, and keeping the candles burning.
Bakeries display their delicious pan de muerto (the
dead's bread) with 'bones' running like spokes to its
edges, sprinkled with white frostine or coconut flakes.
Families prepare duke de calabaza (pumpkin candy);
' the women wash the pumpkin and te/ocotes (Hawthorne
fruit); the men bring the panocha (brown sugar) from
the market; the children clean the sugar-cane stalks.
Vendors in the plaza offer sugar-candy and chocolate
skulls, big and little, for parents to give their children and
for friends and lovers to exchange. The candy skulls bear
names—Lupita, Petra, Juanito, Carlos—across the fore¬
head.
Other vendors go door-to-door hawking papier-mache
masks of skulls and animals.
In newspapers, politicians are drawn with skull faces
(calaveras) and ridiculed in verse. Jt is an exciting day for
artists, writers and poets. It is an exciting day, period.
THIS YEAR THERE will be no American Halloween at
our house. Together, as family, we will bake pan de
muerto; we will prepare pumpkin dessert; we will make
calaveras, those personalized candy skulls, to share with
each other and friends. It will be old times again.
Photos by Robert S. Hernandez