“Today you have to get deep into the countryside, get out of your car and walk awhile before you can find a real Mexican Dia de los Muertos celebration,” 72-year-old Palomon Jurado Vazquez complains, spitting in the mud of a pueblo street.
He is annoyed by the decline of Mexico’s celebration of November 2, All Soul’s Day on the Roman Catholic calendar. “Chinga,” he exclaims, “we used to celebrate all week long, ‘mano. All of us kids and my mother used to go up into the mountains and gather wild flowers and nopales and late corn and wild camotes. Then we would begin setting up an ofrenda (altar) the night of October 26. That would be so we could get everything we needed ready by October 28 for all those who have been killed. You know, all those killed in riñas (feuds) and lovers’ quarrels, over insults and disagreements over women and land disputes, things like that.
“Then, on October 29, we had an ofrenda for those who died in accidents – bus and car accidents, falling under trains, and such things. October 30, we would honor those who died, pobrecitos, unbaptized. And lots of pueblos and campo families squeezed in a night for the souls of all those that no one remembers. For me, when I was a kid, that was really the saddest night of all.“
“All Saints’ Day, November 1, is dedicated to Las Almas Inocentes, to the children, Los Angelitos. Everybody came out to the panteon in the old days, to clean up and repair and decorate the graves of children. In some places, the ofrenda for the Angelitos is bigger than those for adults. In other pueblos they have a small ofrenda, but piled with pan de muerto, frutas, dulces, agua, candles, zinpasuchil and toys, of course.” (Zinpasuchil is a local pronunciation of the Nahua cempoalxochitl, the word for the marigolds that decorate ofrendas and graves in grand, scented piles – their odor supposedly offensive to demons.)
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