The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (15 page)

From my front window, trees hide most of my view of the plaza, though on those rare days when the sky is pure azure, that famous “transparent region” of the pre-megalopolis, I can see the distant, snow-covered white slopes of the dormant volcano Iztaccíhautl on the horizon. Iztaccíhautl, “white woman” in Nahuatl, is said, because of the pre-Hispanic legend of tragic lovers that gave the volcano its name, to resemble a woman sleeping on her back, though what I can see from my window more resembles a very distant, floating, crumpled origami of white tissue. A mountain pass connects Iztaccíhautl to the live volcano Popocatépetl, 17,800 feet high, though it seems to be outside my window’s viewing range. In the legend, Popocatépetl was the name of the Tlaxcalan warrior lover who kneels in eternal vigilance before the snow-covered body of his dead princess, a chief’s daughter, both of them turned into mountain volcanoes by pitying gods, Popocatépetl spewing ash and lava in rage and grief over the loss of his beloved, as that volcano still does all these centuries later. In one variation of the legend, Popocatépetl carries his princess’s body to the top of the mountain and lays her down in the snow, hoping that its icy cold will wake her.

Mexicans are often thought, especially outside the country, to have a special relationship to death, even to be in possession of a unique understanding of death. This is mostly because of the worldwide renown of Mexico’s carnivalesque Day of the Dead and its popular iconography of festive skeletons and skulls. But the idea that these express a nearly “occult” national relationship to death, or an intrinsic or buried ancient knowledge of death passed down from the Aztecs, is no truer of Mexico than it is true that in the United States, because of Thanksgiving, we are a nation of turkey whisperers. Still, as Claudio Lomnitz demonstrates in his
Death and the Idea of Mexico,
actual death and its many representations were explicitly present in the formation of the Mexican nation and its identity in a way that certainly isn’t true of the United States, say, or even of other Latin American countries. (Perhaps only Haiti is somewhat comparable.) It seems that no one can say with absolute certainty when or where what became known as the Day of the Dead began; its origins seem buried. Did the Day of the Dead emerge from Aztec death culture, its ritual sacrifices, its cannibalism and skull racks, and its concept of circular time if not necessarily of anything like the soul’s afterlife? The Zapotecs and Mayans and other native Mexicans, especially in the Yucatán and southern Mexico, did practice ancestor worship. In the holocaust that befell native Mexico during and shortly after the conquest, some 90 percent of its population was lost, mainly to European-borne disease but also to violence, slavery, overwork, and despair. The Spanish Catholic missionary priests brought a new culture of mortuary beliefs and imagery, the moral hierarchies of the afterlife and the death pageantry of medieval Europe, which were laid over or absorbed into whatever was left of what native survivors of that nearly inconceivable and swift dispeopling had understood about death before, such as the Mayan belief that it was the manner in which you’d died, naturally or violently and so on, rather than how virtuously or not you’d lived, that decided where your soul or spirit went in the afterlife. Mexico, understandably, had a death obsession from the moment it entered the history of the West as New Spain, and nothing happened over the next nearly half-millennium to lessen it.

Throughout its long premodernity, widespread violence and the harshness of daily life for the poor, that is to say for nearly everybody, made Mexico notorious as a land of ubiquitous and cruel death—“Barbarous Mexico.” Regular outbreaks of war and foreign invasions spawned a new martyrology of slain revolutionary and patriotic heroes and leaders: the birth of a nation steeped in necrology. At some moment, somewhere, probably in the south, some Indian villages more or less began to appropriate Catholic All Saints Day and All Souls Day on November 1 and 2 for the expression of their own furtively maintained beliefs. To lure the souls or spirits of their dead relatives, villagers brought food and other offerings to family grave sites, built altars to house those souls or spirits, and stayed to honor and accompany them with drink and song throughout the day and sometimes through the night. What became known as the Day of the Dead evolved and spread. Once a year, throughout much of Mexico, people enduring harsh and often violent lives converted their cemeteries into places of family and community festivity. The Mexican Revolution seized on the Day of the Dead as a new icon of national identity. Fearless revolutionaries “laughed” in the face of death. Skeletons,
muertos
, represented the fundamental equality of man through the universality of death. Life and society remaining so unequal, the skeleton was also a perfect medium for satiric commentary on matters large and intimate. When the late-nineteenth-century penny-press engraver and genius José Guadalupe Posada’s cartoons and images of animated, dressed-up skeletons—a skeleton priest hanging himself, for example—were rediscovered by artists decades later, they inspired André Breton to coin the term “black humor,” and were celebrated by the hugely influential Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo as totemic of autochthonous Mexico. The Day of the Dead and
muertos
“provide a space,” writes Lomnitz, “for the expressions of a whole array of political desires and anxieties.” But by the mid-twentieth century
muertos
culture had been folklorized and pushed outside the margins of modern urban and consumer society as a primitive remnant of death-obsessed Old Mexico, as something to be sold to tourists. Foreign writers such as Malcolm Lowry and Cormac McCarthy incorporated the Day of the Dead into novels set in Mexico, but the Chilean Roberto Bolaño, who grew up in the 1970s in Mexico City, never even alludes to it. But whenever “Mexican death” suddenly became politically useful again, it was reclaimed: skeleton imagery was deployed to protest against the massacre of students in Tlateloclo in 1968, for example, and to counter the influence of U.S. consumer culture as manifested by the upper classes’ enthusiasm for Halloween. The Mexican middle and upper classes generally like to mimic U.S. lifestyles, but the sight of costumed children in wealthy neighborhoods going door-to-door with their trick-or-treat bags was more than many, on both the left and the right, could stomach. A Mexican writer, María Luisa “La China” Mendoza, quoted by Lomnitz, wrote, “In other words, while we decry the hunger and needs of so many disinherited children who ask for pennies, sell chewing gum or clean windshields, our bourgeoisie mimic the Texans and allow their children to go into others’ houses dressed ridiculously and to ask for alms, which they WILL receive.” In response to the “threat” symbolized by Halloween, national and local governments began to encourage a secularized revival of Day of the Dead festivities and their adoption in places that had never celebrated the day before, such as the country’s northern regions. The festivities took hold, and why not? It’s a nice holiday, after all, and it is authentically Mexican, and it’s undeniably healthy to set aside a day for the memory of the dead in a way that isn’t lachrymose or morbid. Día de los Muertos is now a two-day national holiday in Mexico, though in Mexico City far more people are likely to take it as an excuse to escape to the beach than to visit their family graves. Still, in urbane Colonia Roma, as throughout Mexico, there is a public altar competition; the extravagant and often comical and politically pointed constructions line Avenida Alvaro Obregón’s median.

There is a Catholic middle school behind the building I live in. From my window I could see the huge altar students had made in the playground. During the week of the Day of the Dead I stopped into the school for a closer look. In the foyer, a big bulletin board was entirely filled with small orange cardboard skeletons lined up in rows, and every skeleton was imprinted with the name of a student or teacher. It was a charming sight, but also a bit unsettling. It returned you, however cheerfully, to those original ideas of skeletons representing the universality of death and of our fundamental equality. I tried to imagine what it would mean to me, as a twelve-year-old, to have my own personalized skeleton hanging on the wall of my school along with all the other exactly alike skeletons of my classmates and teachers. During my Massachusetts boyhood I was not often inspired, especially in school, to ponder the meanings of my own skeleton, except now and then in biology class—though I did grow up next to a cemetery, where in winter we slalom-sledded through the gravestones.

What does death in Mexico mean now? Whenever I read cultural commentary, often by U.S. academics, that gushingly recycles such phrases as “Mexicans revere death,” or Octavio Paz’s assertions that death is Mexico’s “most enduring love” and that Mexicans play with, caress, and entertain death—just Google “Day of the Dead” and you’ll see what I mean—I feel a surge of revulsion, and I wonder about the persistence of these kinds of romantic clichés affixed to entire nations, so similar to rah-rah politician rhetoric (“The American people are———”). Are the femicides of Ciudad Juárez or the barbarities of the narco war and the migrants’ trail in any way manifestations, or do they ever at all evoke, that reverent and playful love of death? “If any of that were true,” the journalist Diego Osorno, author of
La guerra de las Zetas,
told me, “with so much death all around them, Mexicans should be in some kind of perpetual ecstasy now.” There sure is no ecstasy in Marcela Turati’s disconsolate piece “The National Decay,” in which she visits the Matamoros morgue after the news gets out that yet another mass grave has been discovered in the area. “Hundreds of people from across Mexico,” Turati explains, “came to see if their vanished loved ones—whom they were too terrified to report as missing—were here, among the executed.” On the lonely highways and winding roads between cities and towns in the state of Tamaulipas, buses and cars are routinely stopped by gunmen of one of the two cartels waging war against each other in the state—the Zetas and the Cartel del Golfo—and the passengers are ordered out of the vehicles and are often murdered right there, or kidnapped and murdered in whatever place they’re taken to, usually an isolated ranch. One of several possible reasons cited by Turati is that the cartels murder passengers in order to prevent young men from traveling into an area under a rival cartel’s control and becoming its forced or willing recruits. “About this, little is known for certain,” writes Turati, “because the local press cannot report on it, and correspondents from the national and foreign press would be in grave danger if they even tried to set foot there to investigate.” Yet neither the federal government nor state governments warn people about the danger of traveling by bus on those roads. In “The National Decay,” people outside the morgue tell Turati about their missing family members.

“They motioned to my sister (Luz Elena Ramírez, a thirty-year-old mother) to come over to a gray car. She walked up; they grabbed her by the shoulders, and that was the last we saw of her.”

“I’m looking for Édgar Silquero Vera, manager of a gas station in San Fernando. We just found his Expedition truck. Soldiers were driving around in it, but they said they don’t know anything about what happened.”

“My son would be about twenty years old now. They took him in a mass roundup in San Fernando, because they take everyone there and force them to work. But it would be better if you erased his name.”

The morgue workers take another break and come out to smoke.

It is Thursday, June 14, 2011. They have been working all week and have just heard that another truck with a dozen bodies is set to arrive.

The daily newscast reports that the Tamaulipas state government will promote the state as a tourist destination during Holy Week.

“Those bastards are so full of shit!” says a furious prosecutor from the district attorney’s office.

A local reporter, noting the general fatigue, comments: “And to think, they still have to excavate the grave sites in Camargo, Alemán, Guardado de Ariba y de Abajo, the towns of Los Guerra y Comales, Ciudad Mier, Valle Hermoso, Anáhuac, Cruillas, González Villareal, Nuevo Padilla, Nuevo Guerrero . . . The whole state is full of hidden graves.”

Everything around here reeks.

The people Turati speaks to and observes at the Matamoros morgue express and project sorrow, anguish, heartbreak, fear, and rage. Nothing marks them as responding any differently from how people anywhere else in the world would respond to such a grotesque tragedy as that faced by the families of Mexico’s disappeared and murdered. When I observe the spectacle of Mexican death from inside the Mexico City “bubble,” it seems all too contemporary, both all too horribly familiar and unfathomable.

Maybe I’m getting Octavio Paz wrong. Maybe when he wrote that Mexicans have a love affair with death he didn’t mean that they have a love affair with actual death—certainly not in the way that some sects, in other cultures, have seemed to. What did he mean then? Paz obviously meant something deeper than that Mexicans, many of them anyway, love their harmless Day of the Dead festivities and trimmings, sugar skulls,
pan de muertos,
and Catrinas. These do have their origins in the deep feelings and convictions of hard rural lives that are now buried in time and that may no longer speak to us. Was there a time when Paz was right, and has the contemporary world flushed that Mexico away? Does some residue remain?