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Guy Courchesne
Joined: 10 Mar 2003
Posts: 9650
Location: Mexico City
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 Posted: Sun Nov 02, 2008 4:33 pm Post subject: |
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Day of the Dead festivities in the Zocalo, Mexico City. Certainly no loss of culture there, though I found the displays hard to view as there were so many people. Last year's displays were raised and large so that you could see them from everywhere.
Here are some pictures and a video...
http://www.teachers-international.com/wordpress/?p=127 |
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notamiss
Joined: 20 Jun 2007
Posts: 908
Location: El 5o pino del la CDMX
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| Posted: Wed Nov 05, 2008 3:48 am Post subject: |
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Here is an interesting article reporting on the work of Mexican historian and anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz. http://www.thenews.com.mx/home/tnfeature.asp?cve_feature=62
Some excerpts:
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"The Days of the Dead is not a pre-Columbian remnant . [or] simply the product of a mixture of two cultures, one Spanish and one Aztec, one Catholic and one pagan," Lomnitz said in a telephone interview [...]. "It is also the product of a history that occurred after contact," he said.
The Columbia University professor believes that in the 500 years since the Spanish invasion, the way in which Mexicans contemplate death and honor their dead has been in flux, with changes both on the indigenous side and the Catholic one and in the social and political environment.
[Lomnitz] also said the onset of Halloween from the United States�rather than undermine the tradition of the Days of the Dead�contributed to its revival because of a nationalistic reaction in the 1970s.
[...]
It is a Catholic holiday that Mexico shares with other Catholic countries in Europe and Latin America. But Mexico has developed the Days of the Dead "in an unusual, maybe unique way," he said.
[...]
Death becoming an element of Mexico's national identity occurred in the early 20th century, after the Mexican Revolution, Lomnitz said. Artists such as Jos� Guadalupe Posadas and Diego Rivera influenced that trend.
"There is the idea that there is a peculiarly Mexican way of living with death, and that is summarized in certain kinds of images," he said. "The most unique thing about its whole history is the fact that in Mexico a certain kind of familiarity with death was turned into a positive national characteristic."
Lomnitz said that the Days of the Dead tradition changed even in the last 30 years. He explained that in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, the middle and upper classes were not at all interested in the festivity�in fact they were "positively disgusted" by it.
Then, in the 1970s and 1980s the feast became very fashionable, and upper-class people became interested in and identified with the Days of the Dead.
"In the 1960s [and] 1970s the contrast between Halloween and the Days of the Dead becomes a subject of nationalist identification and nationalist anxiety," he said. "You didn't have that before. Nobody cared. They certainly didn't see the Days of the Dead as being very virtuous."
Anxiety about "Americanization" made the Mexican government ratchet up the Days of the Dead to such a degree that it began promoting it in the north of the country in areas that had never had the tradition, such as Coahuila and Baja California. "Many of those places got Halloween before they got the Days of the Dead," Lomnitz said. |
On the last point, I first heard about this first-hand from a friend in San Luis Potos�. He grew up with Hallowe'en in the 1960/70's, and to him, his family, and his fellow Potosinos, Hallowe'en had always been "our traditional festival" to them because that was what they grew up with. When "our Mexican" (read central and southern Mexican) Day of the Dead began to be promoted, it felt like a foreign custom being imposed because it was not part of their tradition. |
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