Davíd Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America, and June Carolyn Erlick, Editor-in-Chief, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America discuss Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).
David Carrasco:
It's really a day, a time of remembering the people that we have lost and want to remember and grieve. And in our own practical way through this ritual, meet again.
June:
David Carrasco is the Neil Rudenstine professor for the study of Latin America at both the Anthropology Department and the Divinity School at Harvard University. Welcome, David. A lot of people here in the Cambridge Somerville area are gearing up for Halloween, but there's another holiday that goes right along with Halloween, which is the Day of the Dead.
David Carrasco:
That is a celebration, a family celebration, a community celebration that is growing in significance and practices, and not only in the United States, but also in Mexico and in Latin America. And we can talk at some point about that. The Day of the Dead really is, you can translate that phrase at the time of the ancestors and the day, the time, the life of the dead, but the dead who are accessible to us at this time of year, especially in Latin X cultures through the construction of altars and offerings that become places of invitation for the spirits and the personalities of our ancestors to come back to the terrestrial level of the cosmos and not only be together with other spirits, but with us, the living who remember them.
June:
Hmm. This sounds a bit like a sad holiday. Is it a sad holiday?
David Carrasco:
Well, it's a sad holiday that is mixed with remembrance and color and gratitude. You know, Mesoamerica, Latin America, is really a place of dualism of dualities of looking at life and death, looking at poverty and also cultural riches. And the Day of the Dead is about that. The Day of the Dead is more like a cry than a sadness, but the cry of Mexico and the cry of Latin people is a cry, not only of sadness, but of affirmation, of sometimes that expression of power and hope for change. So the idea of the Grito or the cry both has a kind of lament, but there's also an affirmation. And the Day of the Dead is about both that lament and that affirmation that you can see through the color and the way in which people celebrate.
June:
Traditionally, the Latin X community around Cambridge has celebrated with an altar at the Peabody Museum.
David Carrasco:
So the Day of the Dead is really organized around home altars or community altars. And these are places where people commemorate put up photographs, they put up the food of the dead, but also put color and are places for the meeting between the living and the dead. What happened at the Peabody Museum was very fortunate for me. When I first came to Harvard in 2001, Ruby Watson, who was the head of the museum at that time, invited me to meet with some staff members and they wanted to know how to put together some sort of exhibition. So we worked together and I explained to them what was the history and the meaning and the purpose of the Day of the Dead. And very fortunate for us, the museum staff went over to Somerville and they found two Mexican artists there. And these artists came over to the museum.
David Carrasco:
We all met and together, we designed this marvelous altar, Ofrenda, that's in the Peabody Museum on the third floor. And which has become the most attractive exhibition of anything else in the Peabody Museum, especially during the week of the Day of the Dead.
June:
Could you describe one of the recent altars to us?
David Carrasco:
Sure. Well, first of all, the Peabody Museum altar is really an imitation pyramid, but this pyramid, this imitation pyramid with its little levels is itself an imitation grave or an imitation little mausoleum. And it's got, first of all, tremendous color, it's very colorful. It has what is called papel picado, this is very flimsy paper that represents the ephemerality of life. And this paper has images of skeletons with jewels, skeletons with food, skeletons riding bikes, in a sense giving you an uplifting sense of the afterlife.
David Carrasco:
Secondly, the altar always has food. It always has the food of the dead. That is, typically you find out what is the food that the people who were deceased that year or who you're remembering, what did they like best? And so there is tamales or tequila, or some carne asada or fruit that is put on the altar or imitation artistic representations are put on the altar. So there's always the food.
David Carrasco:
Thirdly, there is photographs. And when you come to the Peabody Museum and you see that there's many photographs that are on the altar. Typically in a family's home, you'll have photographs of members of the family and extended family who have passed away that year. And then there's also little art works. And some of these artworks have a sense of humor about them. They may be sugar skulls with the names of people who deceased that year, and sometimes there's religious objects, quite often crosses, images of the Virgin of Guadalupe or other virgins, of Jesus. And so when you come to the Peabody Museum and you see the great altar we have there, you'll see this color, this symbolism and the Peabody altar is outstanding because it also has some beautiful ceramic objects.
David Carrasco:
Let me just tell you about two of them. One of them is a jeweled skull. It's a skull with flowers coming out of it, and ceramics. And then there's the tree of life. And on the tree of life, there's not only plants and birds, but also little skeletons, that combining that dualism I talked about before.
June:
I've seen other altars at the Peabody Museum that seemed to bring in contemporary things.
David Carrasco:
Sure. There's always two other altars. One of them is, both of them are temporary. One is usually made with the input of children from one of the local schools like Amigos, where the children writ these calaveras, which are these poems, which usually have a sense of humor and some sort of joking to a family member who's passed on. And there's also other of these images, I told you, skulls, virgins, Guadalupe, and other of the Catholic virgins. But also there's sometimes the animals, dogs, for instance, who were a part of the Day of the Dead. And then in the other altar, that's very interesting, that's always created, has to do with the work of one of the courses that William Fash and I teach at Harvard called Montezuma's Mexico. And Montezuma's Mexico, Then and Now, we have students who contribute imagery, sayings, little pieces of artwork that is then given to this terrific staff at the Peabody Museum who work on Day of the Dead led by Diana Xochitl Munn herself is a Mexican woman who helps us put together this altar created by the students. And usually, in terms of contemporary meanings, this altar has a theme, a theme of the contemporary world. People who have died in COVID, people who've died in a terremoto or people who have died from gun violence. And every year there's usually photographs of these people alongside of these other colorful symbols that I've mentioned.
David Carrasco:
So June, let me just give you some of the messages that have been left, some in different languages, but I've translated them all here from visitors to the Peabody Museum so you can get a sense of why the Day of the Dead has become a gift from Mexico. One of them says, "Amore God bless y gracias to Ben E. King, John Coltrane, Lady Day, Octavia Boss, James Baldwin, and Freda Kahlo."
David Carrasco:
Another one says, "You died seven years before I was born. Mom says it was from alcohol and cigarettes. I do not blame you for going. Thank you for my mom. I'm proud of the daughter you left for me." Isn't that wonderful? There's another one that says, "To my mama and all the mothers, thank you for everything, for existing. And finally, grandpa, I'm sorry that my Spanish was never good enough to have a deep conversation with you. I wish I could have known you better. Your actions and love showed that you were a great man. You taught my father so much. Thank you." These are the kinds of messages that are left every year. I think this shows really what the Day of the Dead is about in a very living and verbal way.
June:
Thank you for sharing that with us. You mentioned before that the Day of the Dead celebration is becoming even more popular in the United States and in Latin America. Could you tell us about that?
David Carrasco:
Sure. You know, it's interesting that two things, two films of recent years have increased the interest in Day of the Dead in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. One of them was the James Bond movie, Spectre, in which it opens with a incredible scene of thousands, a hundred thousand Mexicans doing Day of the Dead celebration in the Zocalo of Mexico. And this was a beautifully orchestrated Day of the Dead celebration that has then in developed in Mexico of greater marches and gatherings of people. So they took that influence from that film and they've made it their own. They've gone far beyond the imagery that came out in that film. But the other, the film that's had the greatest impact is Coco, this film that came out a couple of years ago, a marvelous animated film about the Dia de Los Muertos.
David Carrasco:
And as a result of that, many more Mexican children and people in Latin America and in this country, they have gotten access through that film to what the Day of the Dead is all about. It's magic, it's other-worldliness. And the message of that film is very simple. It's really that as long as you remember, the dead, they're still alive in the other world, and they will come back during the Day of the Dead celebration to be together with us. And so it's really about remembering and not forgetting these people who gave us life and our antepasados who were also present with us during this time.
June:
I find that I think of the Day of the Dead as a traditional Mexican holiday. When I lived in Columbia, people celebrated the first and second of November by going to their relatives graves, and perhaps having a picnic there. But there was none of the altars or flamboyance, or would you say that these two films are changing the way that the Day of the Dead is celebrated in Latin America?
David Carrasco:
Well, I think so, but that would be a good project for one of our graduate students to do some journalistic work, just to see, but I'm really glad you brought up this idea of the visiting to the cemeteries. I should've mentioned that earlier. That's fundamental in Mexico where people go to the cemeteries as I have during Day of the Dead. And first of all, there's a great preparation that takes place a month before. People begin to gather the cempasuchitl flowers, these Marigold flowers. They begin to prepare to go to the cemetery, clean the graves. And on the night of the Day of the Dead, they go there and you can go into the cemeteries today, especially in the evening. And you'll see many Mexican families who are there with candles, sometimes with music, with food, and they may sit there all night together.
David Carrasco:
And there's wonderful artwork, photographs of some of these cemeteries where that people have gone back to actually be close to the place where the deceased person has been left and remember them. I remember being once in one of these graveyards in Oaxaca, and I just happened to get to know briefly one of the families. And I talked to one of the young women that was there, a woman in her twenties. And I said, "Well, why are you here tonight?" She said, "I'm just here to spend the evening with my grandmother. I want to think about her and be here." And there was whispers and kind of a quiet respect. So that's fundamental also in many parts of Mexico. And I think it's growing somewhat in this country.
June:
Do you have any stories about how it's growing somewhat in this country? What have you seen? What have you heard?
David Carrasco:
One of the places where you find growth in the United States is on college campuses. And what you see at Harvard, for instance, and other universities, many of the universities is as the Latin X students learn about this and other students as well, they start to put up their own ofrendas and altars around the campus? We see this in other professors courses here, Professor Maria Luisa Parra's students. They put up a big altar on campus. Other students, they put them in some of the dorms and it's the way in which Latin X people are saying to themselves and to the campus, we have a lineage and we have an origin story and our origin story and our lineage, it was not an east/west story. It doesn't come from the Puritans or the people in Virginia. It came out of Latin America. It's moved north.
David Carrasco:
And when it has come, the beauty of this memory of a different origin story and a different way of mourning and also celebrating the lives and the lineages we come from. So I've seen it not only on this campus, but many other campuses. And during the Day of the Dead period, I get invited to talk in many places and I find on other campuses and other communities that the Day of the Dead is growing in its attraction, its beauty and its meaning. I call it one of the gifts from Mexico and let me tell you why. At the Peabody Museum every year they have set out some little pieces of paper and pencils with a basket and invited people to write little notes to the dead in their families and children come and people come, I tell you, June, we have thousands of these notes and I've had a chance to examine these notes. And they're in all the languages of the world.
David Carrasco:
These messages are in Korean, they're in German, they're in Slovakian, they're in Russian, they're in many Asian and European languages that on this night, the Day of the Dead, during this week, the altar at the Peabody Museum is for all the ancestors who come to be there. And this is the gift of Mexico to invite all of these people in as a result of this tradition that comes from our roots.
June:
This year is a special and tragic year in terms of deaths from COVID-19, yet at the same time, we've been forced into kind of a collective isolation in which we can't gather around altars except in family homes. Do you have any suggestions? Do you think this is a very significant Day of the Dead? And do you have any suggestions on how we should celebrate it?
David Carrasco:
That's a great question because the question itself brings up again, the profound and tragic, terrible seriousness of this COVID pandemic because on the one hand, Day of the Dead celebrations would be a great opportunity for us to honor and remember these people. But on the other hand, because we are social distance and we can't go to the Peabody Museum and other places like that together, it's difficult in order to do this. But what people could do would be to, all over the place, get together and say that we're setting up home altars, which is really the basic way you do it. You set up an altar in your home, you get the papel picado together, you get some flowers, you get the photographs, you get the food, you put in messages. And you remember these people who have been taken from us so quickly and in many cases without good cause at all because of the way it's been conducted. So I think that this is a very powerful year to do this and we should try as much as possible perhaps through our Zooms, to put up altars and to share them with one another.
June:
Thank you so much. You've been listening to David Carrasco, the Neil Rudenstine Professor for the Study of Latin America at Harvard's Anthropology Department and the Divinity School. Thank you for your time.