The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico

To learn more about Mexican culture and one their biggest celebrations, the day of the Dead, I took a couple of books out from the library. 'The Skeleton at the Feast: the Day of the Dead in Mexico' by Elizabeth Carmichael and Chloe Sayer gives a deeper insight in to the particular festivities and traditions that surround this day and how people choose to celebrate.


Two traditional paper puppets of skeletal musicians as sold in urban markets in central Mexico for the Day of The Dead.


(detail from a papier mache tableau made by a mexican family in 1989. The work, homage to the artist Jose Guadalupe Posada was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City.)

Mexicans are known for having an unusually positive attitude to death.
Octavio Paz, in a passage from "Labyrinth of Solitude' (1959), describes the so-called special relationship with death:

To the modern mexican death doesn't have any meaning. It has ceased to be the transition, the access to the other life which is more authentic than this one. But the unimportance of death has not taken it away from us and eliminated it from our daily lives. To the inhabitant of New York, Paris, or London death is a word that is never uttered because it burns the lips. The Mexican, on the other hand, frequents it, mocks it, caresses it, sleeps with it, entertains it; it is one of his favourite playthings and his most enduring love. It is true that in his attitude there is perhaps the same fear that others also have, but at least he does not hide this fear nor does he hide death; he contemplates her face to face with inpatients, with contempt, with irony: 'If they're going to kill me tomorrow, let them kill me once and for all'


Hollow sugar skulls on sale for the Day of the Dead in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato.