[Apropos of the October season, here is another selection from Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), available for order here or here, or as a free pdf download here or here. As with our previous excerpt, I share this chapter as a reminder of what can happen when we allow an LDS perspective to seep into our scholarship, whether we are conscious of it or not.
[For example, when I push back on Pixar’s Coco by saying, “the Day of the Dead […] is not so much a call to remember the dead (as it is presented in Coco), but rather it functions as an important reminder that the dead will not let you forget them,” that is basically a paraphrase of Malachi 4:6 (the only scripture to appear in all four of our Standard Works): “And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse”–a similar reminder that we must not only remember our dead, but that the dead will not let us forget them.
[For that matter, when I argue at the end of this chapter that the return of the dead gestures towards the possibility of an alternative set of pre-modern economic relations, I need you to understand how literally I mean that–of what sort of economy we honestly think we will be living under amidst the Resurrection of the dead, the return of the Ancient of Days and the City of Enoch, the establishment of Zion, the fulfillment of Acts 2:44-45 and 4 Nephi 1:3, and the restoration of the United Order. Whosoever hath ears to hear, let them hear.]
At the Supermarket
One of the more intriguing—if generally glossed over—cultural trends of the second decade of the 21st century has been the degree to which the Day of the Dead and Halloween have begun to quietly intermix come October. The two holidays occur within close proximity to each other, both temporally around Catholic All Souls Day, and spatially around the U.S./Mexican borderlands. In grocery stores across the western United States and eastern seaboard, the various accouterments of the Day of the Dead—the sugar skulls and Catrina face-paint, the colorful and dancing skeletons, the papel picado, Marigold petals, candles and ofrendas—increasingly crowd the holiday aisles alongside the plastic Jack-o-Lanterns, trick-or-treating buckets, cotton cob-webs, Styrofoam headstones, plastic bats and polyester witch-hats of their Halloween counterparts.
The two festivals not only intermingle on the shelves and on the calendar, but on the streets as well: in the U.S. Southwest especially, millions of Chicano children—native-born, naturalized, and undocumented alike—go out trick-or-treating on Halloween night, and then turn right around and celebrate Día de los muertos two days later. Moreover, west-coast metropoles such as (historically Mexican) Los Angeles and San Francisco regularly feature annual Day of the Dead celebrations nowadays; moreover, these are often collaborations between their ever-increasing Chicano majorities and the local white-populations, many of whom are of at least partial Celtic ancestry—and hence progenitors and propagators of the Halloween tradition as well. (Indeed, some California Latinos have inevitably had cause to complain that Day of the Dead celebrations have become “too gringo” (Marchi 107) for their tastes.) Although it was frequently exoticized as a foreign curio when celebrations first appeared in the 1970s, the Day of the Dead now entangles with Halloween freely and openly across the porous borderlands of Mexico and the U.S., just as both holidays also symbolically bridge the porous borderlands between the living and the dead.
Even more curiously, the two holidays have been quietly intermixing throughout the exact same historical moment when anti-immigrant animus towards Mexico has spiked to fever-pitch across the United States; the Styrofoam sugar skulls have been stocked alongside the porcelain jack-o-lanterns all while the ICE raids, child-prisons, border walls, border patrols, border militias, family-separations and detention centers have swept the U.S. like a nightmare. In vain do Hispanic immigrants and their allies protest that the documented and undocumented alike contribute immensely to the U.S. economy and tax base, have lower crime rates, and alone work the back-breaking agricultural jobs necessary for human survival. In reality, it was never their purported criminality or vagrancy that offended U.S. nativists, but their sheer presence: the spread of Spanish billboards and radio, the demographic shifts towards some looming “white minority,” the hysterics over “Taco trucks on every corner.” It has been strange to observe the matter-of-fact integration of the Day of the Dead into the U.S. cultural landscape while the very people who introduced it are persistently slandered, criminalized, targeted, and torn apart.
What is more, if some ill-defined cultural contamination is what really fuels this anti-immigrant animus in the U.S., then that is the supremist irony of all, since historically the most devastating cross-cultural desolation has moved entirely in the other direction. Indeed, the Day of the Dead’s current cultural ascension has been by no means inevitable; there was near the turn of the millennium a real, palpable fear among many in Mexico that Halloween would displace Day of the Dead within its home-country entirely. As the prolific anthropologist Stanley Brandes has documented: “In 1996 […] key clerics in the northern Mexican states actually prohibited the celebration of Halloween on the grounds that this holiday, which they declared secular and commercial, represented a threat to the sanctity and very existence of the Day of the Dead” (375).
These prohibitions came as a reaction against the fact that “Halloween has indeed become a palpable part of Day of the Dead proceedings”; of course, the real fear was not simply that Halloween would subsume and displace Day of the Dead, but that the United States would continue to economically and culturally subsume Mexico even more completely than it did during the land-grab Treaty of Guadalupe of 1848, when half the nation was forcibly ceded to the U.S.: “Mexicans who resent the growing U.S. influence over the Mexican economy and cultural scene respond effectively by focusing on a concrete, discretely defined event like Halloween. Halloween’s success, to these Mexicans, represents Mexico’s failure” (378). The Day of the Dead consequently became a banner for Mexico to rally around against the infiltration of U.S. cultural and economic imperialism, which many Mexicans fear has been Trojan Horsed into their country via Halloween. As historian Nicholas Rogers also documented towards the turn of the millennium:
“While many children in Mexico City have taken to the American holiday, stomping through the streets with their calaveras shouting “Dame Halloween,” others have viewed Halloween as a corrosively commercial and culturally alien festival, disrupting the time honored celebration of the Day of the Dead. Dr. Gonzalez Crussi, for example, a professor of pathology and contributor to the New Yorker, found the emulation of Halloween in Mexico City to be disquieting. ‘Have we come this far,’ he asked his fellow Mexicans, ‘to see an imitation in third-world gear, of the North American Halloween?’ One nursery teacher from Puebla regarded Halloween as nothing less than an ‘invasion, as something that doesn’t belong to us. Halloween is truly frightening for children, because it focuses on witches and witchcraft, sorcerers and devils. It deforms the imagination and threatens our indigenous traditions.’ To the local artists and confectioners who help make the Day of the Dead a colorful but respectful holiday in the Mexican calendar, the intrusion of Halloween motifs is distasteful and threatening. Novelist Homero Aridjis has even described Halloween as a form of ‘cultural pollution.'” (176-177)
Certainly, Mexico has had far more legitimate reason to fear the invasion and decimation of their culture by the United States than even the most panic-stricken U.S. xenophobes have had to fear from Mexico. Yet it has also become increasingly clear that those turn-of-the-millennium fears were premature, that Halloween has not displaced Day of the Dead as was initially feared. On the contrary: The Day of the Dead has not only bulwarked its presence in its native country, but strengthened its influence in the U.S.—on not only the supermarket shelves, but also in numerous museum galleries, exhibitions, parades, festivals, films and media across the country.
The Day of Dead has become increasingly entangled with Halloween, not engulfed by it. There is a reason most historical studies of Halloween inevitably include a companion chapter on Day of the Dead: in the North American popular imagination at least, the Day of the Dead is not a competitor against, but a distant cousin to Halloween, what some have identified as “a ‘cognate’ or, one might say, a functional equivalent of Halloween. Indeed, the historical origins of the two holidays, if not identical, are nonetheless closely intermeshed” (Brandes 371). Both Halloween and the Day of the Dead have often been presented as the parallel descendants of ancient Autumnal festivals that originated in pre-colonial, pre-Christian Celtic Ireland and Aztec Mexica respectively.
In these readings, the survival and persistence of these twin holidays have represented not the triumph of cultural imperialism but rather a successful resistance against the same, as these repressed and erased indigenous heritages defiantly exert their presence as stubbornly as the dead that these two festivals celebrate—or at least, such has oft been the story. I will interrogate these origin stories in more depth shortly; but first, let us observe that the present survival and celebration of the Day of the Dead across the Anglosphere has not been without its own fraught perils.
SPECTRE and Coco
The increased profile of the Day of the Dead across the Anglosphere in the 2010s—and its complicated relationship with the same—is illustrated in part by the massive popularity of the 2015 James Bond film SPECTRE and the 2017 Pixar feature Coco. The former features a critically-acclaimed opening scene set during Day of the Dead in Mexico. After the opening logos, there appears on screen a stark white-on-black text reading “The dead are living,” which then immediately cuts to a Mardi Gras-style Day of the Dead parade wending its way through the streets of Mexico City. In the extended tracking shot that follows, the viewer is introduced to the eponymous spy in full festival regalia: a skull-mask, a black-and-white skeleton suit with top-hot and cane, and a Latina consort (Mexican-American actress Stephanie Sigman) in masquerade dress hanging on his arm. The camera follows them as they exit the bustling streets for a nearby hotel; as they ride up the elevator, they remove their masks and begin to kiss coquettishly, and are still kissing when they enter their hotel room.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbqv1kbsNUY
But as the nameless woman lays seductively on the bed and begins to undress, she is shocked to see that Bond has not similarly disrobed but has merely changed into his traditional gray Oxford suit, and has exchanged his cane for a Glock 17 KPOS firearm. He steps onto the hotel room balcony with a flippant “I won’t be long,” then lightly roof-hops till he has his target in sight. Hiding behind a roof-ledge and equipped with a listening device, he eavesdrops on a secret terrorist plot to plant a bomb in a football stadium later that evening. When Bond is spotted by the conspirators, a shoot-out erupts, followed by a roof-top explosion as the bomb prematurely detonates. There then ensues a mad pursuit through the Day of the Dead parade as Bond chases down the sole surviving suspect. The chase finally culminates in a fistfight aboard an escaping helicopter spiraling out of control over Plaza de la Constitución, as hundreds of holiday revelers flee in terror below. Bond of course dramatically sends the terrorist plummeting to his death before wrestling back control of the helicopter at the last moment, staving off further disaster.
On a plot level, the scene sets up Bond to yet again be suspended for reckless endangerment of civilian lives for the fourth film in a row. This in turn forces him to once more go rogue in order to infiltrate a shadowy criminal organization—the titular SPECTRE this time around—without official state sanction (the Daniel Craig films do not vary much in basic structure). On a thematic level meanwhile, the Day of the Dead functions as a convenient shorthand for the film’s central motif of the dead returning (hence the double-signification of the title SPECTRE), as the movie features numerous call-backs to dead figures—lovers, villains, and allies from the three previous Craig-starring vehicles—all of which culminates in the revelation that Bond’s long-lost step-brother, Franz Oberhauser, is the head of SPECTRE (which itself is a revival from the old 1960s Sean Connery Bond films). But that plot-twist, however, has not captured the popular imagination nearly as much as that opening long shot, which has remained ensconced in pop-cultural memory long after the rest of the paint-by-numbers plot has been forgotten by audiences and critics alike.
Indeed, such was the impression made by that opening scene that Mexico City itself began to host just such a Day of the Dead style parade beginning in 2016—for it bears emphasizing that such a procession had literally never been a part of Mexican Day of the Dead festivities until the tourists came around (Shepherd). That is, English-language pop-culture colonized and altered the Mexican Day of the Dead in the very moment that it purportedly highlighted and celebrated it. There has always been a strong undercurrent of British imperialism in the Bond franchise, but here the cultural colonialism bled through and impacted the real world almost immediately, as Mexicans beheld their prized Day of the Dead become adapted to the vision of an English spy movie, in order to satisfy the insatiable demands of an Anglo-dominated tourist market. In such moments, one might reasonably question whether the Day of the Dead is truly being integrated into the U.S. cultural landscape, or if it has merely been assimilated and refashioned in the Anglosphere’s own image.
At first blush, 2017’s Coco is far less problematic. It became at the time of its release the second highest grossing film in the history of Mexico proper, while also doing gangbusters in United States’ cineplexes. The warm-hearted film follows the adventures of a young Mexican boy and aspiring-Mariachi singer named Miguel on one eventful día de los Muertos. His family, described by him as “the only family in all of Mexico that hates music,” has prohibited him from pursuing his musical dreams. They wish to prevent him from following in the footsteps of his great-great-grandfather, who once walked out on his family to pursue a Mariachi career of his own; Miguel’s grandmother even smashes his guitar when she catches Miguel surreptitiously practicing it in hiding. But then a chance encounter with an old family photograph—half of which had been folded behind a picture frame on the family’s Day of the Dead altar—convinces Miguel that a certain (and fictionalized) Mariachi legend named Ernesto de la Cruz is in fact the great-great-grandfather in question; at least, so he concludes based on the fact that, though the man’s face has been torn off, his hand grips de la Cruz’s signature skull-motifed guitar.
Miguel runs away from home, then breaks into de la Cruz’s tomb in order to steal the renowned guitar for himself (claiming it as a long-lost family inheritance) in a desperate attempt to enter a local Mariachi contest. However, at the first strum of the guitar strings, he is magically transported to a literal land of the dead, where he encounters the skeletal spirits of his various ancestors, who are as baffled by his presence as he is by theirs. Swiftly, Miguel learns that he can only return to land of the living with the blessing of these same ancestors, who promise to do so only if he promises to forswear a life of music. Miguel instead elects to give them the slip and go off in search of Ernesto de la Cruz himself, in order to obtain a far more generous blessing from that ancestor instead. However, de la Cruz’s celebrity is as massive in the next life as it is in the previous, so gaining access to him proves prohibitive. Fortunately he runs into Héctor, a lost soul who once knew de la Cruz in life, and who offers to help Miguel in tracking him down. In exchange, Miguel must promise to place a picture of Héctor on the family mantle, so that he may finally be permitted to cross over to the land of the living on the Day of the Dead and visit his daughter.
Over the course of their adventures that night, Miguel comes to discover that it is actually Héctor, and not de la Cruz, who was the long-lost great-great-grandfather in question—that his great-grandmother Coco is in fact Héctor’s last living daughter—and that Héctor was partners with Ernesto de la Cruz early in their careers. At last it comes out that de la Cruz secretly poisoned Héctor and stole both his songs and his guitar when Héctor was on the verge of returning home to his family. In the end, de la Cruz’s perfidy is exposed by hidden camera before a massive stadium full of skeletal spirits awaiting his annual performance on the Day of the Dead, who then turn on him en masse; Héctor is reconciled with his dead wife and family; and Miguel returns to the land of the living, where he helps his infirm great-grandmother Coco recall her father Héctor by singing the film’s signature song “Remember Me,” which thus allows him to finally cross over to the land of the living and visit her. The overall tone of Coco is a moralizing one, heavily emphasizing the importance of familial reconciliation. The film is brightly-colored, exhilaratingly detailed, energetic, brisk, with an upbeat soundtrack, and was justifiably popular on both sides of the border.
Nevertheless, as enjoyable as the film may be, several elements of it remain deeply problematic, viz: the film makes no direct allusions to either Roman Catholicism or even ancient Aztec religion, thereby erasing two very major components of Mexican culture and history from the nation’s most idiosyncratic of holidays. There is no Jesus Christ, no Virgin Mary, not even a Mictecacíhuatl for that matter, nor any other sort of governing deity or system of divine reward or punishment (as shown by the fact the Ernesto de la Cruz remains unexposed and unpunished in the afterlife for so long); it is an oddly agnostic vision of the afterlife. The ramifications of this strangely non-religious necropolis are hinted at but never fleshed out, particularly when it is revealed—and this is a major plot-point within the film—that if everyone in the living world finally forgets who you are, then you disappear from the next world as well.
Héctor and Miguel behold one such figure disappear in the shanty-towns of the land of the dead (clearly modeled on the shanty-towns of undocumented migrants to the U.S., but more on that in a moment), as Héctor plays the man his favorite song one last time before he vanishes. When Miguel asks where he went, Héctor shrugs sadly, “Nobody knows.” The strange possibility of an after-life for the after-life is raised but never explored. Moreover, the troubling implication here is that the forgotten in this world are literally erased—just as the rest of Mexico’s indigenous populations, languages, and histories have been viciously erased in the long, violent centuries since the Conquista.
The presence in the film of animal familiars—stray cats and dogs who, upon crossing the boundary into the next life, transform into giant, winged, rainbow colored beasts that assist the dead in their journeys—is the closest the film ever comes to imbuing a sense of the supernatural into the land of the dead. Otherwise, the afterlife behaves like a rather mundane modern city, complete with public transit, stadiums, domiciles, shanty-towns, and more significantly, border patrols.
For in order for the denizens of the afterlife to visit their families on the Day of the Dead itself—and this is also a pivotal plot-point—they must all pass a Border Patrol, where their faces are scanned to determine if anyone has placed a photo of them up on a shrine. Those without living family to honor them are prohibited from entry, as having incomplete documentation; indeed, when Héctor is first introduced, he is being denied passage by a border agent, so he attempts a brazen run for the bridge to the land of the living, which in the film is a fantastical overpass made of traditional Marigold petals. However, Héctor quickly finds himself sunk into the petals, unable to reach the bridge, while the “legal” visitors pass him by easily on foot.
Although the scene is played for laughs, the implications are terrifying: ICE could only dream of such technology! Here are not the porous borderlands of the U.S./Mexican frontiers that have ever entangled with each other since the Treaty of Guadalupe—a region where language, culture, and populations are freely exchanged despite the sternest attempts of walls and border militias to stem the flow—but rather a total, omniscient, omnipresent surveillance state that absolutely controls and restricts any and all possible movement. Here, undocumented immigration is not only legally forbidden but a physical impossibility! Even more troubling, this state of affair is presented not as nefarious or ominous, but matter-of-factly—an in-universe plot-device—as simply the way things are and ought to be. The border patrols are never challenged nor abolished in this film; and as with the border patrol in real life, the existences of millions are casually and callously snuffed-out by cruel circumstances completely outside their control, as whole populations are at the mercy of the casual whims of those on the other side of the border. Needless to say, as popular as this film was in Mexico, the border patrols presented here are a disturbing power fantasy of the United States.
I do not wish to come off as a total crank; I myself still quite enjoyed Coco, as obviously did a great majority of people on both sides of the border. Nevertheless, the film still feels like less a Mexican film than a very brief checklist of the only things most Americans actually know about Mexico: Day of the Dead, Mariachi, and Border Patrols. Per usual, the U.S. does not actually engage directly with the Day of the Dead, but merely fetishizes it and compartmentalizes it, as it already has with death itself. However, it is the contention of this project that the Day of the Dead represents so much more, that the festival is not so much a call to remember the dead (as it is presented in Coco), but rather it functions as an important reminder that the dead will not let you forget them—and what is more, that the influence and legacy of the dead will continue to be felt in spite of all attempts to suppress, silence, and erase them.
As does Celtic Halloween, for that matter.
Disputed Histories
For Halloween and Day of the Dead are not just twin Autumnal festivals centered around the return of death; as noted earlier, they are also historically associated with indigenous and immigrant populations fighting for survival against exterminating colonial regimes. The Day of the Dead for its part is frequently presented as the vestigial remains of an ancient, pre-colonial Aztec festival honoring the goddess Mictecacíhuatl, the deity who rules over Mictlán, the underworld. As the story goes, though Aztec civilization was decimated to a near unfathomable scale by the Spanish Conquista (according to many reports, the population of the Aztec capital shrunk from 25- to 1-million within a span of mere years), the festival itself continued among Mexico’s surviving indigenous and mestizo populations—albeit now in heavily-Catholicized form, so as to make it more palatable to the invaders.
For its own part, Halloween is commonly presented as a Gaelic transplant to North America imported over by the Celts: the Scots, the Welsh, and most especially the Irish fleeing in the wake of the Potato Famine. According to legend, these Celtic immigrants had in turn adapted Halloween from the ancient Gaelic Samhain (roughly pronounced “Saw-win”), a pre-Christian festival observing the season when the boundary between this world and the Otherworld became permeable, when the supernatural Aos Sí cross over and must needs be propitiated in order to ensure the survival of the living through the coming winter. In these popular narratives, these festivals are not merely relics but forms of resistance, wherein it is less that the imperial powers have absorbed these holidays than it has grafted themselves onto these holidays, in a manner that belies the supposed hegemony of the imperial powers.
Such historical readings are not without precedence: Susan Schroeder in Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica has noted how much the pre-conquest Aztec elites evinced a surprising level of continuity within the Spanish colonial system, even as late as the nineteenth century, thus challenging the narrative of total Aztec eradication by the Conquista. Similarly, R. F. Foster emphasizes in Modern Ireland the astonishing persistence of local Celtic landownership between pre-1600 Ireland and the post-plantation projects of King James I, belying the narrative of total Irish displacement by the English settler class. In both cases, it is less that the original population was displaced by the colonizers than that the colonizers were of necessity forced to merge with a pre-existing order that refused to ever be completely subsumed.
Indeed, all of the West’s major holidays come from some form of grafting: Christmas was adapted from the Roman Saturnalia, Easter from a Spring Equinox festival, and etc., always betraying how Christianity’s ascension in the former Roman Empire came only from glomming onto pre-existent religious festivals, not displacing them. One can read a similar grafting onto Halloween and the Day of the Dead, which are also often presented as ancient indigenous festivals co-opted by Catholicism; as such, they can serve as examples of indigenous persistence within a colonial system that could never supplant them, only graft itself onto them, always giving the lie to the total erasure of native peoples. For that matter, these festivals’ insistence upon the memory of the dead, the joyous assumption that the dead are present for the festivities, and their general refusal to allow their disappearance to be finalized, can also be read as another sign of indigenous resilience against all attempts to exterminate them entirely. That is, is something fundamentally resistant about these two deathly holidays.
But suffice it to say, these precolonial survival narratives have been challenged by a number of scholars as a little too neat and tidy. To begin with the Day of the Dead: Elizabeth Carmichael and Chloe Sayer, in their still-popular 1992 study The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico, marshal together an impressive array of pre-Columbian artwork in order to affirm the pre-colonial origins of the Day of the Dead. They argue that any Catholic elements associated with it are but the result of natives covertly disguising their religious practices from prying conquistador eyes: “Later, there were certainly conscious efforts to incorporate remnants of native religion, and ‘hide’ them beneath a cloak of Christian practice” (33). Although they admit that “To what extant these pre-Hispanic festivals and their associated rituals were transmuted into the Christian festivals remains a matter of keen debate” (33), they ultimately side firmly with the pre-Columbian reading of Day of the Dead’s origins. As Rogers also sums up the story:
“…commentators routinely emphasize its pre-Columbian origins in the cults of the dead that abounded among the Nahua-speaking peoples of central Mexico. The anthropologist Hugo Nutini has identified seven annual occasions during which Mesoamericans worshipped, celebrated, or made sacrifices to the dead, underscoring the importance of the dead as intermediaries between humans and the gods. He has also noted those occasions, such as during the festivities of Tepeilhuital, when images of the dead were placed on family altars and food was offered to them, much in the manner of the ofrendas so central to the Day of the Dead. […] This literary evidence, supported by archeological findings, is often taken as strong evidence that pre-Columbian practices were simply annexed to the festival of All Souls’; sometimes with the connivance of Franciscan friars who wished to encourage the rapid conversion of the indigenous population to Christianity and to soften the coercive character of their mission.” (178-179)
This narrative, that the Day of the Dead came about from an engrafting of the Spanish Catholic onto the Aztec Indigenous, has remained the most popular one. Of course, Rogers clearly questions these assumptions, warning that, “Mexican scholars disagree over the influence of these ancient festivals upon the popular practice of” Day of the Dead celebrations. He further cautions that “an overemphasis on the continuities with the pre-Columbian past can easily elide the fact that there are also striking similarities between the rituals of the Day of the Dead and the early modern observance of All Souls’ in Europe” (180). He catalogues for example how:
“Yellow flowers of mourning were common to both sixteenth-century Spain and Mexico. Ossuaries of skulls were part of the medieval rites of the dead, as were the animated skeletons of the danses macabres that graphically represented the ubiquity and inevitability of death. In the old Castilian province of Zamora, moreover, ofrendas and banquets were a customary aspect of funeral rites. In Barcelona, food stands routinely sold seasonal sweets called panellets dels morts on All Saints’ Day. A variety of other cakes and sweets also formed part of the festive fare in Catalonia, Sardinia, Portugal, the Azores, and Haute-Saône in France, just as soul cakes were widely distributed in preReformation Britain.” (180)
For Rogers at least, the most distinctive features of Day of the Dead—the skulls and skeletons, the ofrendas, marigolds, and macabre imagery—are best explained not from some pre-colonial continuity, but from the heavy influx of European Catholicism imported by the Spanish invaders. That is, Day of the Dead does not disguise itself as Catholic, but simply is Catholic in origin.
Brandes in particular has been a frequent and vociferous skeptic of any sort of pre-Columbian origin story for the Day of the Dead. He argues:
“It is a truism almost to the point of being a cliché to state that a fusion has occurred in Mexico between pre-Conquest and European civilizations and that the roots of contemporary Mexico should be sought in pre-Hispanic times. However, when dealing with a number of aspects of Mexican society and culture—and perhaps most often with those concerning ritual and religion—the assumption that they are of indigenous origin is either insufficiently examined or not examined at all. The study of the Day of the Dead, with few exceptions, has fallen victim to this intellectual negligence.” (275)
To counter-act that “intellectual negligence,” he re-examines many of these same examples of pre-Columbian artwork, arguing that the numerous art-works cited by Carmichale and Sayer are either too dissimilar artistically from modern Day of the Dead motifs, or have been over-represented in importance, especially given their minor prominence in the archeological record. What few examples of genuine pre-Columbian skeletal art we do have, he further claims, are located entirely too far away from the frontiers of the Aztec empire to have possibly had much meaningful influence upon the Day of the Dead’s later development.
Rather, Brandes offers a counter-chronology, one that records the earliest known records of Day of the Dead-type celebrations appearing only in the 1740s, and even then only within isolated pockets of New Spain; that it was officially censured by the clergy and aristocracy throughout the 19th century, but only due to the lawless behavior of its drunken revelers; and that it only ascended to its present elevated status in the 1970s thanks to state-sponsored tourism by the Mexican government (although Brandes’s timeline is complicated by the fact that many of the family-owned Day of the Dead stands that populate Mexican open-markets each October claim lineage back to at least the 1910 Revolution). Though the Day of the Dead is frequently championed as uniquely Mexican, Brandes claims that its central skeletal motifs were never fundamentally distinct from the macabre imagery imported over from a late-Medieval, post-Black Plague Europe. Even the ofrendas so often bandied about in defense of a pre-Columbian origin are seen by Brandes as purely European inventions, arguing that they are too dissimilar in form and function from their purported Aztec equivalents:
“For one thing, Mexicans today make sculpted breads and candies specifically to be presented as gifts and offerings. During the Day of the Dead, candy images are named after particular living people, to whom they are given as a kind of humorous token of affection. All these sweets are eventually consumed. Sahagun’s Aztecs, by contrast, made food offerings to the amaranth figurines, which were themselves treated as holy objects (although they were apparently eaten after ritual purposes had been served). Moreover, sculpted food images today do not differentiate among people according to how they died or the manner in which their body was disposed, as was the case in pre-Columbian times.” (277-278)
According to Brandes, the ritualistic functions of sculpted food among the Aztecs were simply too different from those of the Spanish to be comparable; the former made edible figurines as sacral offerings to deities, each in the form of how the deceased passed away, while the latter make them primarily as gifts to loved ones, with no inherent sacral agenda, and no differentiation made for how the deceased died. Rather, Brandes believes the origins of the ofrendas can be much more satisfactorily explained by the practice of offering breads and sweets on All Souls’ Day, which was already extant throughout the Iberian Peninsula well before the Conquista: “The presence of European analogues casts doubt on pre-Columbian roots to the Day of the Dead in Mexico” (285), he concludes blandly.
Yet though he is relentlessly critical of Carmichael and Sayer, he nonetheless still ends up echoing their own ambiguity when he admits that the issue is by no means settled in either direction: “There can be no doubt that anthropomorphic foods were a significant part of pre-Columbian sacred tradition in the Valley of Mexico” (280), he confesses, even going so far as to qualify himself with, “It would be hard to deny that the Mexican Day of the Dead does have a prevalent, though not exclusive, Spanish origin” (287; emphasis added). He allows that not everything about Day of the Dead can be explained by Spanish Catholicism alone. Further complicating matters is the fact that, though Brandes remains deeply skeptical of a pre-Columbian origin, he is still boosterish of an anti-colonial reading of the festival. Back on the topic of ofrendas, Brandes also notes that in their present form,
“…the casket and cadaver are eaten, the sugar and colored icing-along with the death they represent-melting in the consumer’s mouth. Can there be a clearer image of the denial of death, or, to put it another way, the assertion of life? Is there a more concrete way of acting out a fantasy that the processes of death could be reversed or made to disappear altogether? Of course, the consumption of dead bread, or any bread for that matter, is itself an act that is certain to stave off death, not only symbolically but biologically.” (292-293)
Both symbolically and biologically, the consumption of sweets, according to Brandes, is an act of defiance among the indigenous: against death itself certainly, but also against the colonial forces that sought to either starve them out, or to enslave them on the sugar plantations that produced the sweets in the first place. This defiant reclamation of the sugar that funded their colonization can itself be read as a form of indigenous resistance, no matter from which continent the Day of the Dead may have ultimately originated.
It remains a point of contention as to whether Day of the Dead enjoys pre-colonial Mesoamerican or strictly Medieval European roots; yet it is intriguing to note that this exact same narrative of postcolonial resistance—and ensuing controversies about the overweening influence of Catholicism—have repeatedly marked the study of Halloween as well. Sir James Frazer in his landmark 1890 study The Golden Bough for example helped to canonize the belief that Halloween was “the night which marks the transition from autumn to winter seems to have been of old the time of year when the souls of the departed were supposed to revisit their old homes in order to warm themselves by the fire and to comfort themselves with the good cheer provided from them in the kitchen or the parlour by their affectionate kinfolk” (Rogers 32). This tradition, that Halloween is ultimately rooted in a pre-Christian Gaelic festival known as the Samhain, remains the most popular narrative (indeed Brandes, for all his Day of the Dead skepticism, still off-handedly assumes that Halloween is descended from the Samhain as well).
However Rogers, echoing other researchers, argues that, “This anachronistic description of a Celtic festival should make us wary, for it seems probable that Frazer confused the rites associated with All Souls’ Day with those that preceded it. In fact, there is no hard evidence that Samhain was specifically devoted to the dead or to ancestor worship, despite claims to the contrary by some American folklorists” (32). For that matter, according to some sources, the notion that Samhain was specifically a festival of the dead was only first popularized in 1786 thanks to the sloppy anthropology work of Charles Vallancey, who erroneously attributed the holiday to a non-existent Celtic deity known as “Balsab […] for Bal is lord, and Sab is death” (Morton 9), a claim that has since been repeatedly debunked. Similar attempts to root Halloween in the ancient Roman festivals of Lemuralia and Pomona are heavily disputed: the former because Lemuralia occurred in May not October, and the latter because the Pomona does not appear to have ever actually existed. Ultimately Rogers, like Brandes with the Day of the Dead, is unwilling to locate Halloween’s origins any earlier than the Medieval period.
But his claim is not unanimously shared; Lisa Morton, perhaps the most prolific scholar of Halloween alive today, still insists upon a Samhain origin for Halloween. She argues that:
“Samhain’s existence […] is unquestionable, and some time in the mid-eighth century, Pope Gregory III moved the feast of the martyrs to 1 November, the date of Samhain, and indicated that it was henceforth to be a celebration of ‘all the saints’; a hundred years later, Gregory IV ordered universal observance of the day. Was the date moved to 1 November […] in an attempt to co-opt Samhain, which the Christianized Celts were slow to give up? A famed nineteenth century Irish religious calender, the Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee offers intriguing clues: later English translations of the entire for 1 November give the day as ‘stormy All-Saints day,’ but the oridinal Irish text plainly shows ‘samain’. The Church provided another argument in favor of the 1 November date being chosen as a deliberate Samhain replacement when, around AD 1000, it added the celebration of All Souls’ Day on 2 November […] The official explanation given for the new festival was that it would offer the living a chance to pray for the souls of the deceased, especially those in Purgatory; however, it seems more likely that the gloomy, ghastly new celebration was added to cement the transformation of Samhain from pagan to Christian holiday.” (18-19)
Her detailed account maps onto the most widely popular theory that the Gaelic Samhain was Christianized into All Hallows Eve. Indeed, as Stephen Sayers also argues, the whole reason why All Saints Day was originally moved from February to October in the 11th century was “simply to disguise Samhain, which was itself concerned inter alia with the role of the dead amongst the living,” that in fact it was possibly “the influence of Irish clerics to Pope Gregory III that began this process. They would know more than most people about the grip of Samhain on western populations” (Sayers 22; emphasis added). For Sayers, Halloween is not only the Samhain in disguise, but it may very well have been the Irish clerics specifically who disguised it in the first place!
However, Robert A. Davis still rejects a Samhain origin for Halloween, arguing that “the only intact Christian Celtic calendar to have so far been discovered—the second century Coligny Calendar from Gaul—makes no mention of Samhain and shows clearly that the pagan Gaul said that the New Year began at the winter solstice” (Davis 29-30). But even that statement is complicated by his own assertion that “ethnographic data […] shows no instances whatsovever of pre-Christian Halloween-style beliefs or practices in any early Welsh or Scottish material, except in areas of heavy Irish migration” (30; emphasis added). This feels like an important qualification, since it is Irish migration to North America that is most often credited with saving Halloween from extinction.
And the holiday needed saving indeed; although Halloween thrived throughout Great Britain well into the early-modern period, it began to be suppressed during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century (mainly by the English Puritans, though the Anglicans had a strong hand in it too), along with all things else that smacked of “paganism” and “popery.” The Protestants were highly successful—in part because, after the failed Gun Powder plot of 1605, Guy Fawkes Day arose on November 5th to siphon off all the carnivalesque proclivities of October 31st. Morton notes that “in 1647, Parliament banned all festivals except Guy Fawkes” (25), which in any case was merely a fait accompli, for Guy Fawkes Day had already been crowding out Halloween for decades. The Autumnal festivities of bonfires, reveries, and mayhem shifted firmly away from the more Catholic Halloween to the decidedly Protestant—and therefore more Patriotic—Guy Fawkes Day, thus helping cement the citizenry’s nationalistic allegiance to the prevailing Anglo-Protestant regime.
Meanwhile, across the pond in colonial New England, the Puritans also repressed and discouraged Halloween celebrations as a matter of course (albeit less for reasons of Patriotism than sheer anti-Catholicism). It was the Celts alone who saved the festival from total annihilation, preserving the medieval traditions of Halloween in the Gaelic fringes of the British Empire—that is, in rural Ireland and Scotland (where Robert Burns even helped canonize the holiday in his popular 1785 poem “Halloween”). There, they kept the dimly-lit flame alive until Halloween eventually found a new home in the nascent United States, as it was imported among the waves of Irish immigrants escaping the Potato Famine of 1845-48 (Rogers 67). As Lesley Pratt Bennetyne tells the rousing tale, “The Irish had precious little to pack with them in the way of wealth or belongings, but they did manage to bring their old-world October 31st celebration. Wherever the Irish went—Boston, New York, Baltimore, through the Midwest to Chicago and beyond—Halloween followed along” (x). In this new American empire, Halloween would not only survive but thrive—returning from the dead itself like the ghosts it celebrated—until it could re-conquer the British Isles with a vengeance on the coattails of U.S. cultural imperialism.
It is thus with a touch of historical irony that certain 21st century English citizens complain that Guy Fawkes Day has become increasingly eclipsed by American-style Halloween, as though Guy Fawkes Day hadn’t once eclipsed Halloween throughout the bulk of Great Britain. Like a revenant rising from the grave, Halloween has returned to exact a symbolic debt on behalf of those ancient Gaelic festivals—and populations—whom the British empire had long sought to displace and exterminate. As with the Day of the Dead, whether Halloween’s origins can be traced back one millennium or two may matter less than the fact that its sheer persistence belies the supremacy of the empires that strove so long to eradicate these populations entirely.
The Labyrinth of Solitude
It is no accident then, that Ireland and Mexico specifically have been the ones to preserve Halloween and Day of the Dead, and for similar anti-colonial reasons. As noted in the Introduction, they have not had the luxury of ignoring the dead; inasmuch as they both border massive Anglo-centric superpowers that dwarf both their own economies and populations, they have needed all the allies they can get. As such, the Mexican and the Irish can, must, and do approach the realms of the dead with a much more intimacy, warmth, and cavalier insouciance than the English. Such, anyways, is what Octavio Paz famously argued in his 1950 essay on the Day of the Dead in The Labyrinth of Solitude:
“The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips. The Mexican, by contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love. True, there is perhaps as much fear in his attitude as in that of others, but at least death is not hidden away: he looks at it face to face, with impatience, disdain, and irony.”[1] (57).
Now, The Labyrinth of Solitude has certainly come in for plenty of well-deserved re-evaluation and criticism over the decades. Brandes especially has criticized the collection for its role in cementing the problematic myth of the “morbid Mexican,” as though Mexicans were somehow uniquely stoic in their approaches towards death: “Given the enormous popularity of Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz’s views on death have been disseminated, reproduced with minor transformations, and accepted to the point where they constitute a kind of intellectual orthodoxy. This orthodoxy has a foothold in both Mexico and the United States” (273), and it is just that orthodoxy he calls into question. “After all,” he states matter-of-factly, “there are certainly few Mexicans who actually yearn to die, who face illness and death with rigid, fatalistic stoicism and who fail to distinguish life from death” (131). For of course Mexicans fear death as much as the rest of humanity, it is embarrassing to have to remind ourselves otherwise—though with this one notable exception: “Mexicans, in fact, some times do seem to disdain death, play with death, and confront it directly while still holding it at a distance. It is just that these attitudes do not predominate. Rather, they are largely confined to a particular time of year: the Day of the Dead” (138). According to Brandes, Mexicans merely play-act at stoicism towards death, and that only on this one day of the year.
Yet though Brandes is right to take Paz to task for his many over-generalizations, I fear he then swings too far in the other direction, flattening all cultural attitudes towards death in the name of some vaguely-defined common humanity. Although I agree that this stereotype of the “morbid Mexican” can be patronizing, condescending, and colonizing, I am still not willing to dismiss it out of hand completely; because though he is a highly skilled anthropologist, he is not a literary specialist, and the literature that these nations produce tells a different story entirely, which I will delve into in the following chapters.
But before proceeding, let me also propose that it may be possible to read Paz as not only attempting to be descriptive, but perhaps pre-scriptive: that is, he is not merely describing a purported difference between Mexico and the major metropoles of imperial powers, but propounding a potential strategy for resistance against the same. For when Paz claims that the Mexican “looks at [death] face to face,” this implies that the New Yorker, the Londoner, the Parisian, etc., does not, that death in these other imperial capitals are “hidden away.” A place that the major imperial capitals cannot look at directly is not a place that the Mexican or the Irish can afford to overlook either—and moreover, can become a place of refuge wherein the colonized can also be overlooked and hidden away from empire as well. In that regard, Paz is not over-generalizing at all; as detailed in the Introduction, the tendency in the Anglosphere in particular has been to look away from death indeed. The Day of the Dead—and by extension Halloween—do not just happen to be about death, but their unique focus upon death is core to their resistance against empire.
On The Carnivalesque
It is inevitably tempting, in any discussion of how festivals can resist power, to cite Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin and his term Carnivalesque. In his introduction to his study Rabelais and His World (written in 1940 but not published till 1965), Bakhtin famously compares the official feasts of the nobility against the comic festivals of the peasantry in Medieval Europe: “the official feast asserted all that was stable, unchanging, perennial: the existing hierarchy, the existing religious, political, and moral values, norms and prohibitions. This is why the tone of the official feast was monolithically serious and why the element of laughter was alien to it” (9). By contrast, the parallel and complimentary comic carnival “celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order” (10), complete with a crowning of the king of fools, riotous feasts, profanation, eccentric behavior, dancing, drinking, sex, the erasure of social boundaries, familiar and free interactions between all classes of peoples, a temporary reversal of hierarchies with masters serving slaves and slaves lording over masters, and etc. Ever since Bakhtin, carnival has had a subversive air about it, possessing something joyfully hostile to the established orders.
Bakhtin’s descriptions of medieval carnivals cannot help but put us in mind of Halloween and Day of the Dead as well. The Samhain, for instance, has been described by at least one historian as a time “when the normal order of the universe is suspended” and becomes “charged with a peculiar preternatural energy” (Rogers 34). In Medieval times, Halloween itself became known as a “season of misrule,” of inversions of hierarchies, wherein “choristers became boy bishops and urban leaders were temporarily usurped from power by mock-mayors and sheriffs in a ritualized topsy-turvy world replete with ‘subtle disguisings, masks, and mummeries’” (Rogers 39). Even in our own day, the costuming associated with Halloween carries on this same tradition of role-reversals, suspended hierarchies, and exploded social norms, “when the normal order of the universe is suspended” in favor of an alternative world wherein identities and social roles are no longer fixed and defined, but fluid, irreverent, and transgressive. (Certainly the renowned gay Halloween celebrations of the Castro district in 1970s San Francisco, for example, worked within the same transgressive and liberatory traditions of early Halloween).
For that matter, historian William Beezley has likewise suggested that “the Day of the Dead has conventionally offered ordinary people the opportunity to express their dissatisfactions with political leaders and to voice their grievances” (Rogers 189), and that by means of its carnivalesque elements. “The Day of the Dead, like Carnival, always presented a threat to the official political and religious establishment,” Brandes also argues, who further claims that, “during the colonial era, the Spanish rulers attempted to tone down, if not entirely eradicate, the popular celebration of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days” (363). He cites historian Pedro Viqueira, who records how during the festival’s rise to prominence throughout the 1700s:
“The nocturnal visit which village men, women, and children made to the cemeteries, the festivities and drunkenness that took place there, could only scandalize and above all horrify the illustrious elites, who looked to expel death from social life. This fiesta, which drew boundaries between the living and the dead and partially inverted their roles, showed up the presence of death in the midst of life in an era in which the elite of New Spain […] tried to forget its existence.” (363)
Viqueira goes on to note that in October of 1766, the Royal Criminal Chamber (Real Sala del Crimen) prohibited both alcohol sales and attendance at cemeteries after nine in the evening for the entire month, such was the threat to civil order that Day of the Dead purportedly posed. Regina Marchi has further argued that this same subversive spirit infuses Day of the Dead celebrations in our own present day, claiming that: “Chicanos utilized the holiday’s focus on remembrance to criticize dominant U.S. power structures by creating altars that raised public awareness about socio-political causes of death disproportionately affecting Latinos and other people of color” (283). Contemporary Day of the Dead celebrations in the U.S. have even become sites of Pan-Latin American organization and activism, inviting immigrants from all across Central and South America to integrate in their own All Souls Day traditions into the festivities, which in the 21st century have been marshaled together to memorialize migrant deaths, Labor abuses, Indigenous genocide and repression, and to critique U.S. military interventions abroad.
There is even something subversive about the sheer fact that both holidays are celebrations of the dead—for if death holds no terrors, then on that one night a year the powerful have no effective apparatus by which to terrorize and pacify the general populace.
The grotesque and the bodily are also key components of Halloween and Day of the Dead—as they are in Bakhtin’s Carnivaleque:
“…the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on the various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, and defecation. This is the ever-unfinished, ever creating body.” (26)
The grotesque and exaggerated bodies of the Carnival represent a form of excess and life-generating growth that transgresses the limits and boundaries set by the established hierarchy. Similarly, the flamboyant and frequently sexualizing costumes of contemporary Halloween, with their emphasis upon “the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus,” encouraging a body “which exceeds its own limits in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking”—along with all those Day of the Dead skeletons all in exaggerated poses of singing, eating, romancing, dancing, drinking, even defecating—are also in tune with the old carnivalesque spirit.
As is the very theme of death itself, treated with such lightness, frivolity, and humor on both holidays: “Moments of death and revival, of change and renewal always led to a festive perception of the world” (9) writes Bakhtin, for this celebration of death is paradoxically a celebration of life, wherein “The people […] also die and are revived and renewed” (12). The degradation of the body is celebrated, precisely because “To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something new and better” (21). This statement is especially applicable to the literal act of physical degradation and decomposition in death; and October and Fall is naturally the most ideal time for carnivalesque degradation in preparation for a subsequent rebirth in Spring: “People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations” (9). Overall, this subversive Carnivalesque element has been associated with Halloween and the Day of the Dead since their earliest recorded appearances.
However, any bullishness for Bakhtin’s carnivalesque must inescapably come to terms with the fact that Bakhtin’s carnivalesque never actually overthrows the established order at all, at least not as he originally conceptualized it: “the official feasts of the Middle Ages […] did not lead people out of the existing world. On the contrary, they sanctioned the existing pattern of things and reinforced it” (9). Carnival may have been an affirmation of life that inverts the established order, but it was also a sort of safety valve that ironically re-affirmed the existing hierarchy by means of its very subversion. Halloween especially has not been exempt; it sadly goes without saying that there is nothing inherently subversive about festivals. The transgressive Halloween costumes that were so important to queer communities in the late-20th century also served as a cover for white-supremacist hate-crimes against African Americans in the early-20th.
Even the sexualization of Halloween costumes I was willing to defend but a moment ago, far from feeling life-affirming today, are nowadays but another instance of the endless commodification of women’s’ bodies—degrading them not into rebirth, but mere merchandise—just as the holidays themselves have already been degraded not unto joyous renewal but into crass commercialization. Long after their supposed Christianization around All Souls Day, these two festivals have been circulated even further by late-period capitalism as mere festivals of mass consumerism, no more “authentically” Mexican or Irish than, say, Cinco de Mayo or St. Patrick’s Day–excuses only for intoxication, not liberation.
Rather than subverting neo-colonial hierarchies, these holidays largely just reinforce them, as their massive production of disposable costuming, decorations, and kitsch are supported and sustained by the most appalling exploitation of Third World sweat-shop labor, and that by means of the most wasteful and environmentally destructive manufacturing processes. It is today axiomatic to note that these holidays are both now largely consumer driven affairs, pale facsimiles and simulacrums of whatever ancient festivals they are purportedly descended from, borderline parodies of the historical traditions they ostensibly represent, the very type for superficial engagement with another culture—or with death itself, for that matter.
These same market forces have also thoroughly purged from collective memory the postcolonial survivance narratives that have been attached to these festivals; for even if they are genuinely ancient in origin, the Conquista is no more on the minds of most Day of the Dead celebrants than is the Samhain or the Famine during Halloween—and that is arguably by design. As Idelbar Avelar writes in The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning, “[m]arket logic absorbs even the documentation of disappearances and tortures as yet another piece of the past for sale” (22). As he argues it, the past in our modern economies—even our most atrocious past—must either consent to become but another product for sale, or be erased entirely from memory to make way for what will.
Now, Avelar here writes primarily about the complicity of the post-dictatorial Republics in South America’s southern cone—Chile, Argentina, and Brazil—in perpetuating the neo-liberalizing projects forcibly imposed by their late-20th century dictatorships. Nevertheless, his model can also be effectively applied to post-Revolutionary Mexico and Ireland, wherein large-scale, violent attempts to extricate their nations from the demands of Anglo-dominated economies in the early 20th century (the 1910 Revolution and the 1916 Easter Rising, respectively) have largely just resulted in more of the same. 1910 and 1916 have become just another piece of the past for sale. As Dane Kennedy has argued, “When the violence and disorder that preceded the transfer of power prevented imperial authorities from claiming good will and gaining a graceful exit, they did their best to erase such unpleasantness from public memory through the destruction of documents and deliberate acts of forgetting” (3). The unpleasant origins of Halloween and Day of the Dead have also been erased from public memory, “deliberately forgetting” the Famine that brought Halloween en masse to the United States in the first place—as well as the genocidal Conquista that gave Day of the Dead its current formation—and overall commodifying death as simply another set of products to push come October.
Even those modern calls for a revival of the carnivalesque are inevitably tinged with a certain melancholy; as G.K. Chesterton writes at the end of his 1909 study George Bernard Shaw:
“We call the twelfth century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age the love of life was evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist age pleasure has always sunk so low, so that it has to be encouraged. How high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. How low human happiness sank in the twentieth century our children will only know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people that it is a duty to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. It is strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men to a banquet with spears.” (Chesterton)
For Chesterton, the twelfth century produced such a literature of asceticism precisely because everyone enjoyed themselves too much; whereas the modern period produces so many calls for hedonism precisely because we no longer know how to enjoy ourselves; we preach optimism only because we are all so miserable. As it was near the turn of the twentieth century, so it still is in the twenty-first: The various festivals and parties of contemporary England and Anglo-America all too often feel forced, like an obligation, rather than a release, wherein if we ever actually enjoy ourselves it is almost purely by accident. In practice, English and Anglo-American subjects get so little practice with proper festivals the rest of the year—our carnivalesque muscles atrophy from so little exercise—that we have to cram in all our festive impulses into the last quarter of the year, which leaves us feeling neither rejuvenated nor liberated, but only exhausted. Festivals in these readings have become but a shadow of their former selves, as cheap and disposable as the costumes and kitsch, and little more.
Borderlands
Yet still this pair of festivals remain, glaring aberrations that, in their own quiet way, stubbornly foreground the presence of the dead within a globalized economic order that is otherwise invested in forgetting them entirely. If, as Avelar has argued, death itself is often absorbed and repackaged for sale by market logic, then perhaps the inverse can also be true: that market logic can perhaps be absorbed and reformulated by death. For example, in spite of their near-total subordination to the market economy, these two particular festivals’ peculiar focus upon free gifts and goodwill offerings—whether through trick-or-treating or ofrendas—cannot help but hint at what a different set of economic relations might look like: ones rooted not in austerity and efficiency, scarcity and surplus, but rather in excess and liberality, gift-exchange and fellowship. Like the revenants that these two holidays call forth from the dead, the gift-exchanges of Day of the Dead and Halloween gesture, in their understated ways, towards a pre-modern set of economic relations.
Indeed, Jean Baudrillard in 1973’s The Mirror of Production has argued that Western thought has largely misunderstood the agricultural rituals of so-called “primitive”, pre-modern societies, incorrectly categorizing their rites as mere “magic” that helps guarantee a successful harvest, as though “Magic is basically only insurance on the productive forces of nature” (81). Rather, Baudrillard claims that the aim of labor in these purportedly primitive societies is never production for its own sake—indeed, the very category of productivity would be alien to them—but rather equilibrium and fellowship: “Primitive man does not chop one tree or trace one furrow without ‘appeasing the spirits’ with a counter-gift or sacrifice. This taking and returning, giving and receiving, is essential” (82-83).
Traces of this taking and returning, giving and receiving, can still be located in the trick-or-treating and ofrendas of Halloween and Day of the Dead—which were also a pair of pre-modern agricultural rituals held at the climax of the harvest not to ensure productivity, but human fellowship. This pre-modern economy of gift-exchange is but one of the many hidden ghosts still haunting our shadows, no matter how stubbornly our current economy strives to bury its memory under a mound of disposable kitsch, waste, and landfill. They return from the dead to implicitly challenge modernity’s hegemony, even if for only one night a year. In this sense then, however ancient their origins may or may not be, the Day of the Dead and Halloween may be our most modern holidays of all.
In the Introduction, I discussed how in Anglo-centric societies, the dead have typically been either defined as horrific or dismissed as illusory. The various skeleton figurines for sale every October across Mexico then, all in pseudo-comic poses of the quotidian, perhaps appear so macabre to so many Anglo-American eyes because these sorts of memento moris are not supposed to exist at all without appearing horrifying. Halloween likewise foregrounds the fact of death rather dramatically within a market-dominated culture that usually prefers to elide that fact altogether—and all of Halloween’s Styrofoam tombstones, cotton spider-webs, rubber masks, kitsch and plastic cannot quite trivialize the awareness of our impending mortality, nor sanitize the absolute fact of death. Yet it is worth emphasizing that neither Halloween nor Day of the Dead are morbid or melancholy; they are holidays—Holy Days—celebrations. It is only when economic relations become more important than human relations that both death and life retain their terrors.
As these two holidays continue to dance around each other and draw ever closer across the porous U.S.-Mexican borderlands and on the supermarket counters, there is the implicit promise that they can continue to collaborate closely together, to preserve an alternative space (even if only briefly each year) even amidst the present global economic hegemony, a place where colonial and neocolonial economies are no longer the only logic that can possibly exist, the sole voice that speaks, but where there can now exist a cacophony of voices that can potentially speak over it, disrupt it, challenge it, overwhelm it, and thereby effect a liberation not of markets but of peoples, all peoples, no matter where they might be found along the similarly porous borderlands between death and life.
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[1] “Para el habitante de Nueva York, París o Londres, la muerte es la palabra que jamás se pronuncia porque quema los labios. El mexicano, en cambio, la frecuenta, la burla, la acaricia, duerme con ella, la festeja, es uno de sus juguetes favoritos y su amor más permanente. Cierto, en su actitud hay quizá tanto miedo como en la de los otros; más al menos no se esconde ni la esconde; la contempla cara a cara con impaciencia, desdén o ironía.” (22) Translation by Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash.