My father’s mother, Trinidad del Moral
Elle magazine approached me to write a travel feature for their October 1991 issue, but since I’d just come home from being on the road, I offered to write about an earlier trip I’d taken in 1985 to Mexico, in the wake of the worst earthquake of the century. I wish I’d written about what I’d seen in Mexico City that autumn when the destruction created a citywide Day of the Dead installation on every block. Or of the guerrilla artists who camped out in Tepito, one of the city’s poorest and most vice-ridden neighborhoods, and taught art under plastic tents set up in the streets. Or about the San Antonio Abad seamstresses who rose up from the wreckage of their sweatshops and created a labor union after witnessing bosses hauling out machinery from the factories instead of searching for coworkers. Or of the two seamstresses invited to Austin for a fund-raiser to benefit their union. They stayed with me at the Dobie Paisano Ranch during my residency in the fall of 1995. On the night of their event, flash floods locked us in, but not even roiling waters could stop these determined women. Austin buddies drove up to the opposite shore of the creek and tossed a rope. I watched as the two mexicanas waded safely across the raging stream as bravely as St. Christopher and the infant Jesus. The fund-raiser turned out to be a great success, raising a lot of money for the garment workers’ cause. But by the time I gathered my thoughts for the following piece, the quake (at least in the U.S.) was yesterday’s news.
My family doesn’t celebrate Day of the Dead. Nobody in our neighborhood sets up an ofrenda altar in memory of deceased ancestors.* I was north-of-the-border born and bred, an American Mexican from “Chicano, Illinois,” street tough and city smart, wise to the ways of trick or treat. I looked at the dead as American kids do, through the filter of too many Boris Karloff movies and Halloween.
I wish I’d grown up closer to the border like my friend María Limón of El Paso. There, as in Mexico, Day of the Dead can be an occasion for whole families to trek out to the camposanto, the holy ground, with brooms, buckets, and lunch basket, a day to feast with the ancestors who once a year return del mas allá, from the beyond, November lst for the angelitos, the dead children, November 2nd for deceased adults. Gravesites are weeded, tombstones washed, fresh flowers arranged, and an offering of favorite food set out for the deceased—an on-the-spot picnic for the dead and the living.
I once asked my Mexican father, “Didn’t you ever have an altar for Day of the Dead when you were little?”
“I think your abuela lit candles on her dresser and prayed,” he said.
“But no ofrenda in the living room, no dishes of mole, and xempoaxóchitl, marigold flowers, no midnight vigils in the cemetery, no shot glasses of tequila set out for the departed, no sugar skulls or loaves of pan de muerto, or calavera poems, or copal incense, or paper-cutout decorations, or framed photos of family members, or anything?”
My father’s mother, Trinidad del Moral
“No, no, no, no, no,” my father said. “We’re from the city. That custom belongs to the Indians.” In other words, my father’s Mexico City family was too middle class, too “Spanish” for that pagan phenomenon whose roots go back to a pre-Columbian America.
The year María Limón and I went to Mexico in search of Day of the Dead I was thirty. As the naive American children of immigrants, we were filled with nostalgia for an imaginary country—one that exists only in images borrowed from art galleries and old Mexican movies. We wanted to know Death with her Mexican nicknames: La Flaca, La Calaca, La Catrina, La Huesuda, La Pelona, La Apestosa, La Llorona. Skinny, Skeleton, She-Dandy, Boney, Baldy, Stinky, Weeping One.
That same year, Death herself swept through the streets of Mexico City. The earthquake of 1985 claimed at least ten thousand lives. We went to investigate personally who needed our financial assistance the most, since we didn’t trust handing our relief funds to the government agencies. On any given block in the capital spontaneous curbside ofrendas appeared before the rubble of a building—votive candles and marigolds scattered next to a heap of family photographs, a child’s toy, a dusty stray shoe.
Our ganas de conocer, our longing to know, eventually led us to the state of Michoacán, west of Mexico City. It was a short trip to Morelia, the state capital, a quick bus ride to Pátzcuaro, and then a ferry across the lake to the island village Janitzio, famous for its fishermen who still fish with those beautiful butterfly nets and for its Day of the Dead festivities.
Like the returning deceased, we were returning from the beyond too, from el más allá. From el norte, where the tradition of Day of the Dead would be all but forgotten except for a generation of artists who have reintroduced it to the community in an attempt to reclaim a part of our indigenous past. We were making our way south the way our ancestors had made their way north.
“¿De dónde vienen?” the Pátzcuaro vendors asked us, our clothes and accents giving us away. “From Chicago, El Paso, Austin, San Antonio.” Ah, pochas, they thought—that awful word meaning north-of-the-border Mexicans.
We spent the day at the Pátzcuaro market watching the town prepare for the night’s celebration: women carrying bundles of marigolds, red cockscomb, and airy bunches of Mexican baby’s breath called nubes, clouds; market stalls throbbing with oranges displayed in radiant pyramids, dizzying palettes of spices, towers of chocolate for mole, and huge stalks of sugarcane.
In the main plaza under the arcades, the candy lady let us take pictures if we’d buy something. ¡Muy bonito! Her candy pretty with pastel icing, glitter, and foil. Marzipan hearts decorated with roses, sugar ladies and sugar dogs, sugar ducks and sugar angels, sugar corpses in their sugar coffins, all arranged neatly on freshly ironed embroidered cloth. I picked a sugar skull and had my name added with blue icing, a personalized service at no extra charge.
The toy vendor sold the Mexican version of the chattering teeth—a chattering skull, pull-string skeleton puppets, skeleton miniatures with Death doing everything from driving a taxicab to playing in a mariachi band. Shelves of the traditional Day of the Dead bread were on display as well, round loaves with bone designs on top, or corpses with their hands folded on their breasts. Everywhere the living busied themselves with this business of welcoming the recent and the long-ago dead.
That night, as we rode the ferry across Lake Pátzcuaro and the fog began to rise from the lake, the village of Janitzio spiraled from the water, lit as bright as a birthday cake. All the shops open, strings of lights decorating everything. Vendors welcomed our arrival hawking fish cakes from big baskets. Doorways were framed with arcs of marigolds.
The doors were left open to allow passersby to peer in and admire the altars. In one house with heavy wooden doors, an old woman sat alone in a room aflame with a thousand candles illuminating a sea of photographs, the dead in her life outnumbering the living.
We wound our way past a huge public altar in the main plaza, dedicated to the victims of the Mexico City disaster, toward the church graveyard. The camposanto was just a bald square of dust, a walled dirt yard lumpy with haphazard headstones, nothing at all like the cemeteries we know in the United States where everything is neat order and disciplined grass.
The villagers busied themselves finding their relatives. “Are you there? How are you?” Candles were set up on the grave slab. A symmetry of flowers. A bowl with clean, starched linen and Day of the Dead bread. Some yellow and orange squash for color. Dishes and candleholders all saved for this once-a-year occasion.
María Limón and I had brought our own ofrenda. We sat down on a tombstone no one had remembered and set out our offering to her father and to my grandfather. I had brought a cigar and a Kraft caramel for my abuelito, and María had her father’s passport with his last photo. Would the little dead one sleeping here mind if we borrowed his grave? We’d come from so far away. A villager at the next tombstone nudged her family and pointed to us with her chin, but no one said anything. Compared to everyone else busy arranging flowers and food, our portable ofrenda looked pretty sad. “It’s the thought that counts,” I said to María.
“And do you stay here with the food all night?” we asked our neighbors.
“Oh, no, we just keep a vigil for a while and then take the food home after the spirits have visited and savored it all.”
But how late, I don’t know. We were so cold sitting on that slab of rock, as if Death herself were piercing us, that we left before the vigil was over.
Because we weren’t able to find a room in Pátzcuaro, we had to flag down a bus to take us to Uruapan, an hour away. We found two seats next to a window that wouldn’t close. We stuffed the night dampness out with wadded newspaper and tried to sleep. The night wind of Michoacán smelled of sweet grass.
Was it right, do you think, to do what we’d done and place our little makeshift altar there? We’d meant well. Two pochas dressed in blue jeans and berets. Maybe we hadn’t seen the spirits. Maybe the spirits could be seen only by the villagers. I wasn’t sure. All the ride back I’m thinking. That fine split between my Mexican self and my ’Merican self, those two halves that don’t fit.
“María, I’m afraid of ghosts, aren’t you? Sometimes I get terrible nightmares.”
“Those are just bad spirits trying to mess with you when you’re asleep,” María said. “Don’t you know any good spirits?”
“Spirits?”
“Like someone you were close to when they were alive; your grandfather maybe.”
“My abuelito?”
“He’s a spirit. Next time you have a bad dream call your abuelito. Whenever you’re afraid, just call him. He’ll protect you.”
I hadn’t thought about my grandfather being someone whose strength I could summon the way I called my family when I needed a loan. The idea of a ghost being familia, someone who loved you and would never hurt you, was new to me.
María Limón fell asleep before I could ask her any more questions. I watched the landscape rise and fall, thick leafy silhouettes across the green, green land and sky a deep thing, the moon following and following us, whole and round and perfect.
* At the time I wrote this I was spiritually innocent. I’ve learned a lot since and install ofrendas regularly as a ritual of memory and respect, and for personal transformation.