by Pablo J. Davis
We’re in the brief interval between Halloween, widely celebrated in the US, and the festival known as ‘Día de los Muertos’ or ‘Día de Muertos’ and associated primarily with Mexico, though it’s observed in different ways throughout most of Latin America. It’s a good time to think about cultural similarities and differences.
La Calavera de la Catrina, the brilliant creation of Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada, has been the icon of El Día de Muertos for a century now.
Many in the US think of the ‘Día de Muertos’ (Day of the Dead) as the ‘Mexican Halloween’. But is it really so? Does the one ‘translate’ to the other? Just as the Spanish word ‘amigo’ (or ‘amiga’) and English ‘friend’ may be side-by-side in bilingual dictionaries, yet tend to mean quite different things to the people using them – and the same can be said for familia/family, fiesta/party, and countless other culturally significant word pairs – so Halloween and Día de los Muertos may share certain symbols, and the time of year, but are markedly different phenomena.
The (often unsuspected) differences between what many people think of as equivalent holidays is not quite what is meant by the term ’false friends’. The latter term refers to words that appear to the foreign speaker to mean one thing, due to their similarity with a familiar word in her language, but that in fact mean something different. An English speaker, on reading in Spanish that ‘Gómez sufrió repetidas injurias a manos de Pérez’, may imagine that Pérez repeatedly assaulted Gómez, causing him physical injuries; when in fact, Spanish ‘injuria’ means insults, lies, slander, and other sorts of verbal attacks. False friends can be tricky, but ultimately are fairly easily caught and corrected by speakers with good mastery of both languages.
Not so cultural phenomena. There the differences are more subtle, may not even be captured by the bilingual dictionary. Most English speakers, for instance, more readily use ‘friend’ where a Spanish speaker tends to use ‘compañero’ or ‘colega’, reserving ‘amigo’ or ‘amiga’ for a closer relationship. In other words, ‘amigo/amiga’ is a harder title to earn – we can think of it as perhaps socially more ’expensive’ – than is ‘friend’. No criticism of either culture meant here: it’s simply a cultural difference, an important one that can cause hurt and misunderstanding when not perceived by one side or the other.
What does all this mean for Halloween and the Día de los Muertos? These two holidays, seemingly close equivalents if not downright interchangeable, map very differently onto the two cultures. Halloween is largely about defying and even mocking death, about neutralizing its terrors by rendering them theatrical. There is a kind of daring play involved, a dancing around the macabre.
In Mexican (and, more broadly, Latin American) culture, el Día de los Muertos is something else entirely. One celebrates, remembers, honors, one’s deceased loved ones – parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles – it’s common to hear people speak of ‘mi muertito’ or ‘mi muertita’ (my beloved dead one) for a deceased father or grandmother, spouse or sibling. Ancient, pre-Columbian and pre-Christian traditions of ancestor worship and love were intertwined, over the colonial decades and centuries that unfolded after Contact and Conquest, with the Christian calendar and rites to create something new: scholars of religious history and culture refer to ‘syncretic’ religious practices. Thus the celebration of the Día de los Muertos came to coincide with All Souls Day, or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, on the Christian calendar.
The ramifications of ritual involved in this festivity are elaborate and complex. The baking of cakes in the form of skulls and skeletons, the making of skeletal figurines often fully dressed and adorned with hats and other accessories, the fashioning of altars bearing photographs of beloved dead and containing offerings to them, the creation of satiric verses, and a rich graphic tradition of death-related iconography (most famously in the work of José Guadalupe Posada, whose ‘La Catrina’ is above left) are just some of the flowerings of festive practice that the Día de los Muertos has given rise to.
Though there are some cultural-religious practices elsewhere in Latin America that have some commonalities with El Día de los Muertos – for instance, the cult of ‘San La Muerte’ (Saint Death) in the Guaraní cultural zone of northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and Paraguay, deeply rooted in the populace but rejected by the Catholic Church as pagan practice – there is nothing quite like the centrality of El Día de los Muertos in Mexican culture.
Still, wholeness and acceptance in the face of mortality, and the imperative of sustaining connection with loved ones no longer living – the heart of Mexico’s Día de los Muertos – form a thread that runs through much of Latin America’s cultural map. Argentina’s Atahualpa Yupanqui (1908-1992) expressed this idea as beautifully as anyone ever has. Half a century ago, in his memorable anthem, ‘Los hermanos’, the singer, guitarist, composer, and folklorist wrote:
Yo tengo tantos hermanos I have so many brothers and sisters
que no los puedo contar. that I can’t count them all.
En el valle, la montaña, In the valleys, in the mountains,
en la pampa y en el mar. On the pampas and at sea.
Cada cual con sus trabajos, Each one with his work,
con sus sueños, cada cual. with her dreams, each one.
Con la esperanza adelante, With hope before them
con los recuerdos detrás. And memories behind
. . .
Y así, seguimos andando And so we go on,
curtidos de soledad. Hardened by loneliness
Y en nosotros nuestros muertos And inside us, we carry our dead
pa que nadie quede atrás. So that no one is left behind
Yo tengo tantos hermanos I have so many brothers and sisters
que no los puedo contar . . . that I cannot count them all . . .
In the end, interpreting cultural phenomena across languages challenges us to a subtlety of understanding even beyond what translation usually demands. Things that look the same can be fundamentally different.
Copyright ©2011-2013 by Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.
This essay originally appeared at http://interfluency.wordpress.com in October 2011. It is being republished this year with an accompanying Spanish translation.