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A
Splendid Reception in TEOTITLAN
DEL VALLE, Oaxaca,
Mexico |
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The people
of Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, thirty kilometers
from the state capital, are widely recognized as exemplary hosts, and the
souls who visit on Day of the Dead receive a truly royal reception. Preparations
for their welcome are in the making for days, and beginning October 31, the
villagers are already attending spirits. The first
to arrive are the angelitos – the souls of dead
children – on November 1. All Saints’ Day, given that angels and saints have
much in common, even residing in the same heavenly abode. They depart just
after the first adults begin arriving from the “other world” at 3 p.m. the
same day, officially the souls take leave at 3 p.m. on November 2, but should
that day fall on a Sunday – the day liturgically reserved for the Lord – the
spirits must simply wait and return on November 3. The normally industrious
town of CONSTANT COMPANY AND KIND WORDS It is
mid-day, November 1, and many years have passed since Antonia Ruiz lost her
last child. This spirited, compact woman speaks form first-hand experience as
she has buried five of her eleven children. She leads me past the newly
renovated room where the altar has been set up, across the porch and into her
daughters’ bedroom. I am initially perplexed to be moving away form the
living room, but as we enter into the cool darkness a small altar emerges. Antonia
explains that this was the original living room in the home built by her
husband’s parents forty years ago. This room had housed the altar until 1980
when Antonia and her husband, Félix built a new
living room. She says she still maintains this small altar because it was
here, in this room, that the wake was held when her own children died. This
is the place they know. This is the place they come back to. “We receive the
spirits here,” explains Antonia while her daughter Reina
takes down the offerings left on the altar for the children’s spirits:
peanuts and pecans, tiny egg loaves, miniature clay cups filled with hot
chocolate used for making this essential beverage. “While
the angelitos are here we often hear the clinking
of ceramics coming from this room,” Reina tells me,
“ the same sound made when you take a drink and place the cup back in the
saucer.” The same afternoon
in another house-hold in Teotitlan del Valle, Doña Clara Ruiz is already busy attending to four
visitors in her living room when another couple arrives. On a day like today,
whit so many people coming and going, she has left the front door open. Her
sister-in-law Leonora, and her husband Renaldo, enter the room quietly while
the other guests fall into a respectful silence. The couple goes directly to
the altar, unpacking form a large basket their offering of bread, fruit, nuts
and a single taper about a meter tall. Leonaro’s
kit candle joins six others on the floor at the base of the altar
illuminating a framed photograph of Emiliano Mendoza,
Clara’s deceased husband. According to custom the couple kneels respectfully
before the altar. Only after the dead have been properly greeted do the
guests direct their attentions to the living, first Clara, then her adult
sons and the other guests. They take their places at the large table and
comfortable conversation resumes. The
spirits want constant company during their brief twenty-four hour visit. And
while virtually every home has its own spirits to attend to, in a tight-knit
community like Teotitlan, most folks spend a good
part of the fiesta paying their respects to deceased relatives at other
homes. Hours
later, Clara instructs her grown children to keep watch over the altar and
attend to and visitors while she goes off to visit the homes of several
relatives. In the ???? reed basket tucked
under her rebozo she carries a bottle of mezcal, half a dozen egg loaves and several blocks of
chocolate. She will return home more than nonce to replenish the basket in
the course of her obligatory rounds. Her first
stop is at the home of her deceased mother-in-law. The door is open and she
slips silently into the living room, ignoring the others seated at the long
table se moves directly to the altar. She kisses the edge of the altar then
kneels to pray. I asked Doña Clara what she prays for at this moment. “For the
spirit of the deceased to be at peace,” she replies. Rusing,
she greets her brother-in-law, Andres Ruiz, who, as the youngest son, and
concurrent whit Zapotec custom, still occupies his
mother’s home. Emerging from the kitchen, Andres’ wife Rosa joins her husband
and receives the loaded basket from Doña Clara.
This same scene has been played out countless times. Everyone has taken part
in it at some point, out of the deep sense of commitment that exists within
this community to perform the duties allotted to each person. Antonia
and her husband Felix Mendoza offer their vision of the spirit’s comings and
goings during the fiesta: “Sometimes the spirits come to visit with friends
or maybe a compadre. They also visit other homes
apart from where they lived and died – they go to the homes of their
children, godparents and favorite relatives.” So while
the living make their rounds, paying their respects to the spirits of loved
ones, likewise the spirits have an open invitation to enjoy the aromas rising
from other altars. Even young couples living in new homes where no one they
know has died prepare offerings partly for unknown spirits that could return
to their ancestral site, and partly for the souls of family members or
godparents that might come to visit. Should the need arise to leave their
house unoccupied during the fiesta, such an offense maybe remedied by leaving
the door to the altar room open, which is symbolic of inviting the souls in
to visit. Even
worse than offering a half-hearted welcome to the spirits is to not receive
them at all. The people of Teotitlan have much to
say on this matter. Antonia remembers that as a young girl her family moved
to a large property in the heart of the village. “Many people had lived and
died on this land long before we came to it bur for years it had been
abandoned. When our first Day of the Dead came upon us, in the early hours
for November 2, my mother heard moans out in the large courtyard.” So, at
four in the morning, Victoria González Martínez went out in the dark to reassure the sad souls.
She spoke to them and told them that they were welcome. “Even if we don’t
have much to five you, please join us” she said. Almost half a century has
gone by now, and the unknown souls have been content, and never a mysterious
moan has been heard since. THE OFFERING Just as
flashing lights on the runway guide an airplane, the elements on the family
altar reassure the spirit that it has come to the right home. For the reason,
whenever possible photographs are made central to the arrangement. A simple
glass of water is perhaps the most indispensable offering on any Day of the
Dead altar. As with the soul’s first journey to the “other world,” this too
has been an arduous one, and the dead need to quench their thirst. Candles
play an important symbolic role. Alejandrina Ríos believes that they illuminate the spirits’ path on
their return. “If you offer no candles then they light their little fingers to
better see the rocks and thorns that line the dark road back”, she says.
Could this be why kit candles are also place on the grave immediately
following the burial and again on the Day of the Dead, times of travel in the
spirits world? At three
in the afternoon on November 1, as the church bells signal the spirits’
arrival, the living put the finishing touches on their altars. No hands
remain idle at this time of year. Antonia’s three daughters are busy in the
kitchen. Reina pours a cup of hot chocolate whipped
to a thick froth and nestles it among three large panes de muerto-sweet loaves marked
with a cross baked especially for this fiesta. Elia
deftly mounds steaming tamales on a platter while Altagracia
ladles the ubiquitous black mole
over a cooled turkey leg. Antonia runs a tight ship and has strategically
placed the hot chocolate, tamales and mole on her altar, anticipating by
minutes the arrival of los muertitos. “But
things were not always like this,” Félix Mendoza
emphasizes, comfortably presiding over the long wooden table he has mode
himself, with his back to the wall and his gaze upon the doorway. This trim,
handsome man in his late fifties, dashing with a well-groomed mustache and a
thick head of hair, has, like others of his generation, seen more changes in
half a century than any Zapotec ancestor since the
arrival of the Spaniards. Félix recalls, “I would
work day and night to finish weaving a serape before the Day of the Dead. I’d
take it to sell in the Tlacolula market and there were
times when I returned home whit the unsold piece after an entire day sitting
in the sun. We would be really desperate then! If I didn’t sell the serape we
would have noting to offer our dead – not mole, not turkey, not even
chocolate! My only option would be to sell it to one of the wholesalers in
the village who would pay us whatever they wanted in those days, sometimes
only half the value of the waving because they knew we had no other choice.” The grand
altar at Clara Ruiz’s home takes first place for its sheer abundance. It
entails a true balancing act using plates of apples, oranges and tamales.
Around the edge of the altar a wall over half-a-meter high has been
constructed of panes de muerto reminiscent of fieldstone walls. This
arrangement stands so high that the photographs making up Mendoza Ruiz family’s saintly entourage-concealed within wooden niches
and embraced by crepe paper flowers-are barely visible over the oven-browned
bread. For a
woman in her mid-sixties, Clara glides gracefully yet industriously form
altar room to patio to kitchen, intent on properly attending to her guests.
She miraculously appears serving bowls of scalding atoll, hot chocolate and steaming tamales. After 1 p.m. they
dispense with the breakfast foods and switch to mole de castilla, her deceased husband’s
favorite dish. Aroma is
to the spirits what taste is to he living, so the heady incense of copal
resin and tiny scented wild flowers are essential elements on any Teotitlán altar. The intense smells satiate the dead
while the living indulge in bowls of rich turkey
mole and yellow tamales. The villagers often comment that when they place the
bread on the altar it weighs more than when they take it away, or how the
fool removed from the offering has no flavor. Marino Vásquez,
a respected village elder, explains that when the dead feast on the spirit of
the food, they take away its essence, which is why fool from the altar is
seldom eaten b the living. “It isn’t
just food we offer the dead children – we buy them presents too!” Antonia
elaborates. Tiny sheep, turkeys and angels of sugar decorated with colored
frosting are made especially for the altars of angelitos.
Some families will add miniature objects to the altars such as metates (grindstones) and tortilla presses for their
daughters, and toy hammers and hoes for their sons. “Every
year we buy a brand new tenate (woven basket), molcajete (mortar and pestle)
and jarrito (clay jug). Sure we use them after
wards but they do take he gifts away–symbolically. We know that, “Antonia
explains, “because women who have gone to wash clothes in the river before
the fiesta is over testify, in spite of their fright, to seeing the dead
leading away their pack burros or carrying baskets under their shoulders
loaded whit the offered gifts”. Don
Marino explains that if the spirits like to drink mezcal
then a toast is made. The juez (judge or official mescal server) will first pour a
shot and drizzle it in the foot of the altar. A drink having been offered to
the deceased, he will then pass out shots of mezcal
to all the visitors at the table, in order for importance. THE RETURN TRIP Many
villagers insist on “seeing off” their loved ones at the cemetery, much like
taking someone to the airport rather than calling a taxi. Others, like Félix Mendoza and Antonia Ruiz never go to the cemetery
on November 2. Félix is quick to justify his
actions, saying that this would be “the equivalent of kicking them out of the
house. Some spirits leabe slowly and others get
drunk and so the fiesta spills over to the third.” At three
in the afternoon of November 2, deafening explosions from firecrackers in the
churchyard and homes signal to the entire populace, living or dead, that it
is time for the souls to think about their journey back. A visit
to the cemetery on this same afternoon is a sight to behold: the graves dance
with enormous bunches of oxblood, cock’s comb and brilliant marigolds, dotted
with delicate calla lilies. Many families go to the cemetery bearing fruits,
peanuts, bottles of mescal and cases of beer. This is a time to clean the tombstones, some are even diligently scrubbed with soap
and water. Candles are lit and long-winded toasts are made to the departing
loved ones. If the
graveyard is to the spirit what the airport departure lounge is to the
earthly traveler, the spirits that come to Teotitlán
del Valle for the Day of the Dead get a first-class send-off in every sense.
In early November, the warm glowing rays of the late afternoon sun heighten
the intense tones of the flowers, and as one draws near the cemetery’s tiny
chapel the woeful chants of the alabanceros (members of Teotitlán’s
lay clergy) invite those present to indulge in the moment’s sweet sorrow. The band
plays emotive dirges and slow marches, the same sad songs played for the
funeral processions that every villager has accompanied on countless
occasions, escorting close and extended family on their last and ultimate
rite of passage–the journey we will all, one day, make to the “other side.” Just as
Sunday is dedicated to the Lord, every Monday in November belongs to the
dead. For five weeks, Padre Rómulo – who attends to
the spiritual needs of Teotitlán as well as four
other nearby villages – will visit each community in turn, celebrating los responsos
in the town cemetery. On the Monday designated for Teotitlán
even those who remained at home with the languishing souls on November 2 will
likely visit the cemetery making a small donation to the priest for which he
will recite individual prayers at the graves of their departed ones. The
exuberance of fresh flowers and the canted prayers heighten the sense to take
in every detail of this moment suspended in time and space, somewhere between
Heaven and Earth. Mary Jane Gagnier |
