It was supposed to be the Day of the Dead, but it turned out to be the Nearly-All-Week of the Dead. Long before real Hallowe’en, Oaxaca’s balconies were draped with life-size skeletons in crazy poses. Even a bench sported a couple of skeletons in conversation, the white one with a moustache tenderly putting his arm round the pink one.
They do death differently in Mexico.
And what a way to do it! Market stalls are piled high with skulls, some made of sugar with brightly coloured icing for eyebrows, others coated in sesame seeds with misshapen peanuts for teeth.
On October 31, the serious celebrations begin with a Day of the Dead breakfast: hot chocolate, sweet bread, and a banana-leaf-wrapped parcel containing chicken in a spicy chocolate sauce. By 10pm we, along with most of Oaxaca, are at the main cemetery, some four miles out of town. There, stilt-walkers arrive in garish costumes, having tottered all the way from the centre. Outside the cemetery, the atmosphere is redolent of an August bank-holiday fair: packed with crowds, the street contains fairground rides and cheap stalls with tacky plastic prizes.
Inside is weirder still. The walls are honeycombed with tombs, a lighted candle in each recess. The graves are decorated with marigolds, lilies and candles. In the far corner is a stage from which a torch singer, dressed in Morticia Addams make-up and ghostly robe, belts out a cabaret number. Then a troupe of actors dressed as angels performs a slapstick comedy, hitting each other over the head with balloons.
It is as if you can feel the pagan Mexico thrusting its way up through the crust of Catholicism.
You sense this most powerfully in the indigenous Indian communities. We move on to the cemetery in Xoxocotlan, an outlying Indian village. There the ground is bright orange, even in the middle of the night, for the carpet of marigolds, spiked by beer and Coke bottles, is so brightly lit by candles. Around each intricately decorated grave sit the relatives of the dead person, eating, drinking and chatting for all the world as if this were a normal family picnic.
There’s a carnival feel to the way the Mexicans approach death, a sense of delicious expectation that the spirits of your loved ones will return to visit you if you tempt them with an offering of their favourite tipple. The atmosphere is not grave at all. For, if you believe that your ancestors are present in your everyday life, why should you be gloomy in remembrance of them?
The Mayan Indians, who predominate in Mexico’s Chiapas and Guatemala, are highly spiritual and nominally Catholic, for the Spanish conquistadors imposed their religion on the indigenous people just as they imposed everything else. Every cemetery is a thicket of crosses; every village contains a church. The casual eye might mistake this for Catholic piety. But the Maya, who craft colourful masks to sell at market, have turned Catholicism into a mask of its own. From the outside, each church looks like a standard Spanish place of worship. Go inside, though, and you often discover that it is being used instead as a Mayan temple.
In the church of Chamula, up in the mountains of Chiapas, the pews and altar have gone and the floor is carpeted with pine needles. Candles burn all over the floor. Dotted about are families who have paid a shaman to cure them. He feels the ill person’s pulse and then conducts the appropriate ritual: passing eggs in a pattern over their body, sacrificing a chicken and then spitting firewater or Coke over the dead bird, chanting prayers and lighting coloured candles.
The sight is as pagan as it is heartening. After more than 300 years of oppression at the hands of Christians, these people have co-opted the religion and reclaimed it for themselves. The churches have no priests and conduct no services. The Indians don’t read the Bible. The Vatican has sundered relations with them. But they are still deeply religious people. For them, Jesus is the God of the Sun, and Mary of the Moon. The saints represent more minor Mayan gods.
The Mayas’ main worry is that modern evangelism is trying to replicate the conquest that Catholicism attempted in the 17th century. Evangelical missionaries are gaining hold in Mayan villages, and demanding that converts relinquish their traditional beliefs.
It would be a tragedy if they succeeded. These indigenous people have fought so hard for so long not to join the Western world. As we saw on the Day of the Dead, Mexico and Guatemala are enriched, not impoverished, by their pagan beliefs. If the brutal Spanish conquerors failed to extinguish these noble people, surely the modern world should be broadminded enough to allow them their difference. You can’t help thinking: why can’t the Church just leave these people in peace?
Dig this buried treasure...
When I spoke of paganism lying just below the surface in Mexico, I wasn’t aware of how literally this was true — until we took a bus journey to the Guatemalan border. On our right lay a spine of absurdly conical foothills, like the overlapping triangular mountains you see on the horizon in children’s drawings. Closer up were smaller hillocks, also surprisingly symmetrical. One was not even triangular, but trapezoid, with sloping shoulders and a flat top.
The bus driver gestured casually in their direction. “That’s an archeological site,” he told us. The triangular hillocks, it turned out, were actually Mayan pyramid temples, overgrown with grass and trees. Talk about buried treasure. What a shame the Mexicans can’t afford to excavate it.
Shocking bathrooms
When we embarked on our trip, we knew we might encounter all sorts of possible dangers. There were the natural ones: hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides, volcano eruptions, shipwreck. There were the man-made ones: robbery, violence and bus crashes. And there were the medical ones: tropical bugs and stomach upsets.
What I hadn’t bargained on were Mexican bathrooms. Twice so far, our bathrooms have contained naked electrical wires. Can you imagine the epitaph? “She fried in a Mexican shower.”
maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk
