Celebrating Day of the Dead
An eternal fascination with skeletons in Mexico City
MEXICO CITY — During last year’s Day of the Dead celebrations, a vibrant pageant of skeletal forms stretches along the wide avenue of Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma. Senoritas wearing huge skull masks shimmy along in colorful skirts while Mayan and Aztec warriors, dressed in leopard skins and wearing black and white makeup, beat drums and gesture exuberantly with spears and clubs.
The sprawling Mexico City parade — the capital will hold two big ones this year, Oct. 27 and Nov. 2 — was inspired by a fictional version depicted in a 2015 James Bond movie. The boisterous procession is a relatively recent addition to the festivities surrounding Day of the Dead, and it reflects a centuries-old fascination with skulls and skeletons.
“The roots of Day of the Dead go back to pre-Hispanic Mexico,” says archaeologist Gary Feinman, curator of Mesoamerican anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Celebrated for several days leading up to Nov. 2, Day of the Dead might more accurately be termed Days of the Dead, as the traditional holiday starts Oct. 31, with the three-day event commemorating the brief and honored return of those who’ve died. But images of skulls and skeletons have long been woven into the everyday fabric of Mexico’s traditional culture. Throughout the country are constant reminders that life is brief, and death is the other side of life.
Here are some places in Mexico City where the enduring fascination with skeletons lives on during Day of the Dead and well beyond.
Catrina and ancient Aztecs
In Mexico City, the Day of the Dead parade passes by the Diego Rivera Mural Museum. The museum’s centerpiece is Rivera’s massive “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda
Central,” a mob scene of Mexico’s national leaders, poets and politicians, heroes and villains. It’s a surreal homage to the city’s past and present. In the dead center of this brilliantly colorful canvas is Catrina, the ladylike skeleton dressed in Victorian finery. She’s the most popular of all the the happy, cavorting bony folks popularized by artist José Guadalupe Posada. Catrina’s prominence in Mexican culture is undisputed: She’s the first lady of skeletons.
Day of the Dead festivities extend all the way to Chapultepec Park, once the resort of Montezuma and other Aztec rulers. In the park and throughout the city, you’ll see tables set with miniature, multicolored skulls, costing maybe a dollar. Some of these skulls are made of clay, others of sugar or chocolate.
The skull display is reminiscent of the grisly arrays on Aztec skull racks, huge wooden frames holding the impaled heads of enemies or sacrificial victims. One such skull rack from the early 1500s was excavated in 2015 near the foundation of Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral, across the street from the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the magnificent Aztec metropolis trashed by Cortez and his conquistadores in 1521. The Spanish used stones from the fallen city to build their Christian place of worship.
An ancient stone representation of an Aztec skull rack is on display at the museum of the Templo Mayor, the doubleheaded pyramid that stood in the center of Tenochtitlan. This museum showcases another recent find: a clay statue representing Mictlantecuhtli, the skull-headed Aztec lord of the underworld, the veneration of whom some scholars believe gave rise to Day of the Dead celebrations.
In the magnificent National Museum of Anthropology, there are many stone statues representing death, including an assortment of small figures with grinning skulls from what’s believed to have been an Aztec “death cult.”
Santa Muerte, beloved, feared
“Put your phone under the seat,” muttered Armando Gutierrez-Cornejo, my driver. His voice was firm but urgent. We were passing through a rough part of town, home to thieves, low-level narcos and other denizens of Mexico City’s demimonde. Young hombres on bikes circled, ready to grab anything, even from moving vehicles. “Rats,” GutierrezCornejo sneered, “with two legs.”
We stopped at a squat brick building at Nicolás Bravo 35: the National Sanctuary of the Angel of the Holy Death. For devotees of Santa Muerte — whom they address as Bony Lady, Pretty One, Little Girl and other endearing diminutives — this sacred space pro