Paul Koudounaris was wearing a large fuzzy hat made from a coyote pelt, with the ears still attached. The hat, worn in combination with the gold beads that hung from his pointy black beard, made him look like Genghis Khan on his way to a furry convention.
“I think Doña Ely will like the coyote hat,” he explained. “She dresses her cat up like a Jedi.” In Paul’s mind, this was a perfectly reasonable connection.
Doña Ely lived three blocks behind the back wall of La Paz’s General Cemetery, down a cobblestone street, in a nondescript home with a single threadbare sheet hanging in the doorway. Many residences on the street had similar features: corrugated roofs, wooden walls, concrete floors. But Doña Ely’s was the only home that also had a rack of sixty-seven human skulls, wearing matching cotton beanies, ready to grant favors to their many fervent devotees.
The sixty-seven skulls in Doña Ely’s house were ñatitas. The name translates to “flat noses” or “little pug-nosed ones,” an adorable infantilization of a skull. To be a ñatita is to have special powers to connect the living and the dead. As Paul put it, “Ñatitas have to be human skulls, but not every skull gets to be a ñatita.”
These skulls did not belong to Doña Ely’s friends or family members. The skulls appeared to Doña Ely in dreams, alerting her to their presence. She went to collect them from overcrowded cemeteries, markets, archeological sites, and medical schools. Doña Ely acts as their special caretaker, making offerings to them in return for help with everything from diabetes to debt.
Doña Ely recognized Paul right away; he has been coming to La Paz to photograph ñatitas for the past eleven years. (And, to recap, Paul is pretty recognizable.)
“Dónde está su gato?” he asked. (“Where is your cat?”)
Doña Ely and Paul share two cross-cultural connections: one, their obvious love of skulls, and two, dressing up their cats in costume. Paul pulled out his cellphone and began to show Ely pictures of his own cat, Baba, dressed as “Cat-urday Night Fever” with a handlebar mustache, a gold neck chain, and a permed wig, and “Florence Nighten-tail” with nurse uniform and stethoscope.
“Aaaaah!” Doña Ely exclaimed in delight, recognizing a true kindred spirit.
The skulls, on the other hand, wore identical cotton beanies, light blue in color, with their individual names embroidered on the front, like babies in a nursery: Ramiro, Carlota, Jose, Waldo (found him!). These weren’t their names originally; the names were bestowed by Doña Ely when the skulls became ñatitas.
Each one of Doña Ely’s ñatitas has a distinct personality, and a distinct gift. Carlitos is the skull you’d visit for medical issues; Cecilia helps students studying at university. Seven of the skulls, including Maria and Cielo, were the skulls of children and infants, so they specialize in children’s issues. The skulls had coca leaves in their mouths, and the crevices between them were stuffed with brightly wrapped candy. Other offerings made to the ñatitas by their estimated two to three hundred devotees included flowers, bottles of soda, and entire watermelons and pineapples.
Certain skulls were considered the most powerful, the heavy hitters. Oscar sat on the top shelf wearing a police cap. Oscar was the first of Doña Ely’s ñatitas, acquired eighteen years ago. “We had lost our house, had no work, no money,” she explained, “and Oscar helped us to get back on our feet.” Doña Ely can say with certainty that the ñatitas work miracles, because she has experienced the miracles for herself.
Another powerful ñatita was Sandra, and it was easy to see why. At least a quarter of Doña Ely’s ñatitas were not as much skulls as they were mummified heads, and Sandra was the pièce de résistance. She had one of the more elegantly preserved heads I have ever seen, chubby-cheeked and smiling. Leathery skin covered the entirety of her face, including her lips, which seemed to curl up into a jovial smile. Two thick salt-and-pepper braids wound down the sides of her head. Even her nose was intact (rare, and hardly qualifying her as “pug-nosed”). In a feminist move, Sandra’s specialty was financial negotiations and business.
Paul came closer to take photographs of Sandra. “Ah, here,” Doña Ely said, sensing he was trying to get a tighter shot. She pulled Sandra from the shelf and removed her “Sandra” beanie, revealing the full extent of the preservation. Doña Ely looked around, searching for an even nicer accessory for Sandra’s close-up. As she went to fetch it, she handed Sandra’s head to me.
“Oh, yeah, okay, sure,” I fumbled.
When I held Sandra close, I could see her eyelids and a full set of light, fluttery eyelashes. If she had been acquired by a medical or history museum in the U.S., glass would have separated us. In La Paz, it was just me and—alas, poor Sandra.
Doña Ely returned with a tall white top hat for Sandra and plopped it on her head. Paul was snapping photos. “Okay, hold Sandra up closer to you, there we go,” he said. “Caitlin, can you smile a little, you look so dour.”
“This is a human head. I don’t need pictures of me grinning with a severed human head,” I said.
“Sandra’s smiling way more than you are, try to look a little less melancholy, please.”
After I returned Sandra to the shelves and we prepared to leave, I noticed a brand-new set of teal embroidered beanies stacked next to the door. A woman waiting her turn to consult with Doña Ely’s ñatitas explained, “Oh, they get a new color every month. Last month it was orange. These are the new ones. I like this color. It’s going to look good on them.”
DOÑA ELY HAS a significant collection of ñatitas (“I’ve photographed charnel houses with fewer skulls than Doña Ely’s house,” said Paul), but the most well-known ñatitas belong to Doña Ana. Full disclosure: I never actually saw Doña Ana. On the day we visited, a whole room of people were waiting around a huge cast-iron cauldron to enjoy an audience with her. Doña Ana’s ñatitas speak to her in dreams, and based on your problem she will tell you which of the skulls to consult (Jose Maria, Nacho, Angel, Angel 2, and the very popular Jhonny).
Each of Doña Ana’s two dozen ñatitas sat atop a glittering pillow in its own glass-fronted box. They wore safari hats with flowers along the brim. Cotton balls were stuffed in their eye sockets. Strips of tinfoil covered their upper and lower teeth, like metal mouthguards.
“What is the tinfoil for?” I asked Paul.
“To protect their teeth when they smoke,” he said.
“They smoke?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
The Roman Catholic Church, as a general rule, has never thrilled to the presence of the ñatitas in La Paz. In the past, priests presiding over the annual Fiesta de las Ñatitas have announced to the crowds seeking blessings that the “skulls must be buried” and “should not be venerated.”
The first year Paul came to photograph the Fiesta, people arrived to find the church at the General Cemetery locked, with a sign saying they would not be blessing any skulls. The people protested, marching through the streets, holding their ñatitas in the air and chanting, “We want blessings.” The church opened its doors.
The Archbishop of La Paz, Edmundo Abastoflor, has been a particularly vocal dissenter on the subject of ñatitas. “Well, of course he has,” Paul scoffed. “The ñatitas embarrass him. They make it look like he doesn’t have control over his own diocese.”
Women like Doña Ana and Doña Ely represent a threat to the Catholic Church. Through magic, belief, and their ñatitas, they facilitate a direct, unmediated connection to the powers of the beyond, no male intermediary required. It reminded me of Santa Muerte, the Mexican Saint of Death, who is unapologetically female. She carries a scythe and her long robes are vividly colored, draped over her skeletal form.
To the chagrin of the Church, Santa Muerte’s devotees have spread to the southwestern United States, coming north from Mexico where she has tens of millions of followers. Her power is associated with outlaws, the poor, LGBT folk, criminals—anyone cast out from the stern bosom of Catholicism.
We cannot single out Catholicism as the only belief system with a history of dismissing the agency of female devotees. Regardless of a woman’s more egalitarian place in modern Buddhism, the ancient scriptures tell of the Buddha encouraging his community of male monks to take trips to the charnel grounds to meditate on women’s rotting bodies. The motive of these “meditations on foulness” was to liberate a monk from his desire for women; they were, as scholar Liz Wilson calls them, “sensual stumbling blocks.” The hope was that charnel meditation would strip women of all their desirable qualities so men would realize they are merely flesh-sacks filled with blood, guts, and phlegm. The Buddha was explicit, claiming that a woman’s deception is not in her accessories, like makeup and gowns, but in her fraudulent garment of flesh, surreptitiously oozing grotesque liquids from its orifices.
Of course, these silent, decaying women of the charnel grounds were not permitted to have needs, desires, or spiritual journeys of their own to take. Wilson, again, explains that “in their role as teachers they do not utter a single word. What they have to teach is not what is on their minds but what is going on in their bodies.” The charnel corpses are mere objects, delusion-busters for men to meditate on and thus gain the status of “worthy.”
This was not the case at Doña Ana’s, where women and their inner lives and problems were placed front and center. Nothing romantic, financial, or domestic was dismissed as a trivial issue. Her ñatitas were housed in a front room of her home, its walls covered from floor to ceiling in newspaper. Devotees had brought flowers and candles as offerings. Paul and I had brought white tapered candles, purchased from a roadside stall. I thought we would just hand over the candles as a gift, but one of Doña Ana’s devotees insisted we light them as an offering. Squatting on the concrete floor, Paul and I burned each candle on the bottom, melting the wax to get them to stand vertical on metal plates. They kept falling over as we made a mess of this task, narrowly avoiding an inferno.
Since we had brought the offerings, I figured I had better talk to one of the ñatitas. I asked Nacho to influence the U.S. presidential election, which was being held the next day. I can only assume that either Nacho was not the right ñatita for American political matters or was rusty in his English.
A young woman sat among the ñatitas, with a small boy in her arms. “This is my first time here,” she admitted. “A friend told me it would help with university, and to keep my boy safe, so here I am.”
AT DINNER one night, Andres Bedoya, a friend of Paul’s and an artist from La Paz, warned me that I “should not make the mistake of thinking we are a homogenous culture here in Bolivia.” His latest works are burial shrouds, each taking five months to create, handcrafted of leather, nails, and thousands of golden disks. “The artisans of Bolivia are sometimes looked down on, as if what they produce is not ‘real’ art. It is art, of course, and I let that inspire me.”
Andres creates his shrouds for museums and galleries. In creating this “clothing for ghosts” he ritualizes his own grief, and the grief of others. He wouldn’t be opposed to actually burying someone in the shrouds, but has yet to do so. Bolivians may not be homogenous, but funeral customs around La Paz tend to follow prescribed patterns. A solemn, daylong wake is held in the home or funeral parlor. Families hire a local service to deliver a coffin, along with crosses and flowers that light up and glow neon purple (the Bolivian color of death). “Some people think the glowing purple is tacky or kitschy, but I love it,” Andres admitted. Burial happens the next day. The coffin is carried for a block behind the hearse before being loaded in and driven to the cemetery.
Andres’s mother died twenty-two years ago, and it was her wish to be cremated. Cremation in La Paz is growing in popularity, but until recently it was challenging to effectively cremate bodies there. At 12,000 feet, La Paz is the highest-altitude capital city in the world. The ovens “couldn’t get hot enough, there wasn’t enough oxygen,” Andres explained. Today’s machines achieve higher temperatures and thus can fully cremate a body.
Now that the technology is available, Andres considered exhuming his mother’s body to honor her desire to be cremated. Unfortunately, the cemetery would require that he come to identify her exhumed body in person. “Sure, I remember what she was wearing when we buried her, but I’d prefer not to have the memory of her bones. I don’t need to carry that with me,” he said.
It was his interest in death that led Andres to explore the culture of the ñatitas. November 8 is the Fiesta de las Ñatitas, a chance for the owners of the ñatitas to bring out the skulls and display them. The party is not for the owners, but for the skulls themselves, making sure the ñatitas are esteemed and validated for the work they’ve done throughout the year. “One tends to be very romantic and say the whole festival should remain untouched. But if it were completely untouched, you or I wouldn’t be anywhere near it,” Andres said.
Though unknown in most of the world, “the festival has almost entered the pop culture realm here,” he explained. The General Cemetery, where the Fiesta de las Ñatitas is held, was once the cemetery for the wealthy, but they have moved south. The city has made recent attempts at revitalizing the cemetery, commissioning murals by street artists on the sides of mausoleums and encouraging local tourism. On All Saints Day live theater is performed at night, and thousands of locals show up.
The persistence of ñatitas in La Paz is due to the Aymara people, the second largest of Bolivia’s indigenous groups. Discrimination against the Aymara was rampant for years. Until the late twentieth century, it was assumed that urban Aymaran women, known as cholitas, would be denied entry into certain government offices, restaurants, and buses. “I’ll just say it, Bolivia is not a safe country for women, period,” Andres said. “We’re the poorest country in South America. We have a special word, feminicidio, that means a homicide where a woman is targeted and killed for being a woman, usually by a partner.”
There has been tangible improvement over the last ten years. Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, is Aymaran, and equality for Bolivia’s many ethnicities was an important part of his platform. Cholitas are now reclaiming their identity, including their fashion—many-layered skirts, shawls, and tall bowler hats balanced precariously on their heads. They are also entering public life, not as servants but as journalists and government workers. At the end of Fiesta de las Ñatitas, when the cemetery closes its gates, the cholitas perform folkloric dances through the streets on their way to different parties. “Last year, their outfits, so tied to this notion of subservience, were printed with military camouflage. The men were pissed,” laughed Andres, who photographed the dancers. “Folklore is not just historical in La Paz. It’s contemporary. It’s constantly innovating.”
Despite the increasing acceptance of the Aymara and the ñatitas, when Bolivians are asked if they keep a ñatita at home or believe in their powers, many will still say, “Oh, no no no, they frighten me!” They don’t wish to appear to be bad Catholics. There is still an underground aspect to the practice. Many more Bolivians (even the professional class, like chiropractors and bankers) keep ñatitas than would ever admit to it publicly.
“The owners are practicing Catholics, though,” Paul interjected. “I have never photographed a house with a ñatita that didn’t have a picture of Jesus or the Virgin Mary on the wall.”
“That’s part of why Bolivia is so weird, frankly,” Andres said. “I was discussing with a friend recently about how we are not a ‘blend’ of Catholicism and indigenous beliefs—they just got stuck together.” He put the backs of his hands together, creating an awkward, monstrous shape. “My sister’s office still has a yatiri [healer or witch doctor] who comes in to cleanse the space. My father was a geologist, and when I was young I used to visit the mines with him. On one of those trips I witnessed the sacrifice of a llama, because the miners demanded it. They wanted to keep El Tío, ruler of the underworld, happy. These strains of magic are still everywhere.”
THE MORNING OF November 8, Ximena set her Disney tote bag, which depicted Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck playing soccer, on the concrete entryway outside the church at the General Cemetery. One by one she pulled out her four ñatitas, setting them up on a wooden plank. I asked her to introduce them to me. Her oldest skull had belonged to Lucas, her uncle. I mentioned that the skulls are usually from strangers, but sometimes they can be members of the person’s family. “He protects my house from robbery,” she explained.
Each of Ximena’s ñatitas had its own woven beanie, crowned by a wreath of flowers. She has brought them to the Fiesta de las Ñatitas for many years. “Do you bring them to thank them?” I asked.
“Well, to thank them, yes, but really this is their day. It’s their celebration,” she corrected me.
In the middle of our conversation, the front door of the church opened and the crowd rushed through with skulls in tow, jockeying to get as close to the altar as possible. The newer attendees held back, tentatively waiting in the pews, but the experienced older women pushed their way forward and helped their friends send their skulls crowdsurfing up to the front.
To the left of the altar, a life-sized Jesus sculpture lay in a glass box. He was bleeding copiously from his forehead and cheeks. His bloody feet protruded from underneath a purple sheet. A woman carrying a ñatita in a cardboard chocolate wafer box stopped at his heels and crossed herself, then pushed through the crowd toward the altar.
Despite the contentious relationship with the Catholic Church, the priest standing in front of the crowd today struck a surprisingly conciliatory tone. “When you have faith,” he said, “you don’t have to answer to anyone. Each of us has a different story. This is a birthday celebration, in a way. I am happy we are all together, this is a small piece of happiness.”
A young woman, crammed next to me in the crowd, explained the priest’s acceptance of the skulls this way: “This festival is so big now, even the Catholic Church had to bend.”
The skulls and their owners filed out from the two side doors of the church. At each door was a painter’s bucket filled with holy water. Plastic roses served as aspergilla, sprinkling holy water onto the ñatitas as they passed. Some ñatitas wore sunglasses, others crowns. Some ñatitas had elaborate altars built just for them; others came in cardboard boxes. One woman had a baby ñatita in a fabric lunchbox cooler. The ñatitas got their blessing.
BOLIVIA IS NOT the only place where skulls have connected believers to the divine. The irony behind the Church’s disdain for the practice is that European Catholics have used saintly relics and bones as intermediaries for more than a thousand years. The ñatitas were similar in purpose to other skulls I had met several years earlier, on a trip to Naples, Italy.
“You are English?” my Neapolitan taxi driver asked.
“Close.”
“Dutch?”
“American.”
“Ah, Americana! Where am I taking you?”
“The Cimitero delle Fontanelle . . .” Here I consulted my crumpled itinerary. “In Materdei, via Fontanelle.”
In the rearview mirror, I saw my taxi driver’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Catacombs? The cemetery? No no no, you don’t want to go there,” he insisted.
“I don’t?” I asked. “Are they not open today?”
“You are a pretty young lady. You are on holiday, no? You don’t want to go to the catacombs; that’s not for you. I’ll take you to the beach. Napoli has many beautiful beaches. Which beach I take you to?”
“I’m not really the beach type,” I explained.
“You are the catacomb type?” he shot back.
Now that he mentioned it, I was. That is, if the catacomb type could be anyone other than a dead person.
“Thanks, man, but let’s stick with the Fontanelle Cemetery.”
He shrugged his shoulders and off we sped through the winding, cobbled hills of Naples.
To call Fontanelle a cemetery is deceptive, as it is really more of a large white cave—a tuff quarry, to be exact. (Tuff is rock formed from volcanic ash.) For centuries, this tuff cave was used to bury Naples’s poor and anonymous dead, from the seventeenth-century victims of the plague to the cholera deaths of the mid-1800s.
By 1872, Father Gaetano Barbati made it his mission to arrange, stack, sort, and catalogue the bones stuffed into the Fontanelle Cemetery. Volunteers from the city came to help, and, like good Catholics, prayed for the anonymous dead as they piled skulls along one wall, femurs along another. The problem was, the skull prayers did not stop there.
Spontaneously, a cult of devotion sprung up around the unnamed skulls. Locals would come to Fontanelle to visit their pezzentelle, or “poor little ones.” They would “adopt” certain skulls, cleaning them, building them shrines, bringing them offerings, and asking for favors. The skulls were given new names, revealed to their owners in dreams.
The Catholic Church was not pleased. They even closed the cemetery in 1969, with the Archbishop of Naples decreeing that the Cult of the Dead was “arbitrary” and “superstitious.” According to the Church, you could pray for souls trapped in Purgatory (like these anonymous dead), but the anonymous dead had no special, supernatural powers to grant the living favors. The living begged to differ.
Scholar Elizabeth Harper pointed out that the Cult of the Dead was strongest and “most noticeable during times of strife: specifically among women affected by disease, natural disaster, or war.” The most important factor was that these women “lack access to power and resources within the Catholic Church.” (This idea was echoed by Andres Bedoya, the artist 6,500 miles away in La Paz, who described the ñatitas as potent to those women “whose connection with the beyond wasn’t being properly managed by the Catholic Church.”)
Vigilant though the Church may have been since reopening the Fontanelle Cemetery in 2010, the Cult of the Dead has not disappeared. Amidst a sea of white bone, dashes of color burst out. Neon plastic rosaries, red glass candles, fresh gold coins, prayer cards, plastic Jesuses, and even lottery tickets are scattered throughout the ruins. A new generation of the Cult of the Dead has found their most powerful pezzentelle.
BY 11 A.M. the Fiesta de las Ñatitas was packed. The rows of graves were lined with blessed ñatitas, now accepting offerings of coca leaves and flower petals. Police patrolled the cemetery’s entrance gates, checking bags for alcohol (booze-related violence has led to the creation of new ñatitas). In the absence of alcohol, the skulls had to indulge in other vices. Lit cigarettes burned down to tar-stained teeth.
“Do you suppose they enjoy the smoking?” I asked Paul.
“Well, obviously they enjoy it,” he said dismissively, before disappearing into the crowd, wearing his coyote hat.
One woman danced with her ñatita to the raucous sounds of a live accordion, guitar, and wooden drum, thrusting this skull into the air and shaking her hips. This was the skull’s day, his celebration.
A man sat with the skull of his father. At one point his father had been buried right here in the General Cemetery. This forced me to wonder: if his father had been interred, how had his son gotten the skull back, the skull who now wore wire-rim eyeglasses and seven flower crowns piled high on his head?
When I walked through the cemetery there were empty graves surrounded by smashed glass and hunks of concrete. Attached to the front of the tombs were yellowed pieces of paper with notices that read some version of “FINAL WARNING: Mausoleum, 4th of January. To the relatives of the late: (Insert name here) . . .”
What followed was a message stating that the families had not paid the rental fees for keeping Dad’s body in the mausoleum. As a result, he was getting evicted. Perhaps he would go into a communal grave. Or perhaps he would return to his family, now skeletonized, to become a ñatita.
As I crouched, examining a mummified ñatita, with its lip curled up in a distinct Elvis Presley sneer, a woman my age sidled up to me. In near-perfect English she said, “So, you’re from the other side of the pond, you must be like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ ”
Her name was Moira, and she came every year to the Fiesta with her friend, who kept two ñatitas in his home. His first ñatita, the most powerful, came to him in a dream. In the dream she informed him she would be waiting for him in the countryside. He went and found her, and named her Diony. Then came Juanito. People come to his home all year round to visit them.
“My sister lost her cat,” Moira said. “She’s single, so this cat is like her baby. For four days the cat doesn’t come back.”
Her sister went to consult Diony the ñatita, asking for help finding the beloved feline. In a dream, Diony revealed that the cat was in the back of an abandoned car, with plants growing inside.
“Up the hill behind where my sister lives, there is a hollowed-out car that has been there for fifteen years. And there’s the stupid cat, trapped in a hole in the back of the car!
“This was a week ago,” Moira explained, “and to be safe, my sister also asked Diony to scare the cat, to make sure it wouldn’t run away again. Now it won’t even go beyond the border of the yard, like it’s being yanked back by a leash.”
I wondered if Moira believed that the power of the skull had really found this cat. She thought for a moment. “It’s the faith people have when they ask. That’s what matters.”
Moira thought longer and then added, grinning, “I can’t tell you if it was a coincidence or not. Either way, we found the cat!”
Any answered prayer can be viewed as a coincidence or not. I wasn’t in La Paz to determine whether the ñatitas had true magical powers. I was more interested in women like Doña Ely and Doña Ana, and the hundreds of other people at the Fiesta, who were using their comfort with death to seize direct access to the divine from the hands of the male leaders of the Catholic Church. As Paul bluntly put it, the skulls are “technology for disadvantaged people.” No problem—whether love, family, or school—is too small for a ñatita, and no person is left behind.
