3/7/23, 2:22 PM Death in Mexico Means Something Different Now - Public Books

DEATH IN MEXICO MEANS SOMETHING DIFFERENT

NOW
3.1.2023
LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

BY HUMBERTO BECK

A
fter the Mexican Revolution ended in 1920, the country began the construction of one
of its founding myths: an ideology of death, exemplified in Día de los Muertos, “the day
of the dead.” The idea of Mexican death fulfilled a particular function within the
framework of the new regime’s official ideology: hiding, through a process of
sublimation, the real collective trauma provoked by that mass experience of revolutionary
violence.

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In recent years, however, two substantial phenomena have opened a deep gap between
this official mythology and the concrete reality of death as a collective experience for Mexicans.
First is the global diffusion and appropriation of the Mexican iconography and
mythology of Día de los Muertos, in a process led by the US. This process has taken multiple
forms, from the rise of “Catrina makeup” among young people around the world to the
transformation of the Day of the Dead festivity, as in the Pixar animated film Coco, into an
object of the global entertainment industry.

The second reason for the transformation of Día de los Muertos is the massive and
unprecedented expansion of crime and violence—especially murder—throughout the national
territory over the last 15 years. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared a new “war
on drugs” in 2007, actively involving the armed forces in the fight against drug cartels, the
rates of violence in Mexico have continuously increased. This unstoppable wave of terror has
claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. To date, there have been about 400,000 homicides and
100,000 desaparecidos (missing or disappeared persons). The violence has disrupted the
cultural meaning of death for millions of Mexicans and broken the key assumptions that
legitimized its national mythology.
In the aftermath of this catastrophe of collective suffering, death in Mexico no longer
means the same thing as before. The ideology of “Mexican death,” with its festive and scathing
overtones, simply no longer corresponds to the reality of the daily horror, immediate or latent,
in which a major share of the national population now lives, constantly threatened by the
possibility of being murdered or disappeared.
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Over the past 15 years, then, Mexico has been plagued by violence without a narrative,
alongside the internationalization of Mexican iconography of the dead. And these twin
phenomena have put, so to speak, the final nail in the coffin of the Mexican idea of death.

In his essay The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz, Mexico’s foremost poet and essayist, mused
on the tragicomic relationship with death that, in his opinion, defined the country’s national
character. At yearly festivities of Todos los Santos and Día de Muertos, celebrated on
November 1 and 2, respectively, Mexicans of all social backgrounds celebrate the
contemporaneity between the living and the dead. Relatives visit the tombs of their loved ones
and build colorful altares de muertos at home where pictures of the deceased coexist with
ofrendas containing their preferred foods and favorite belongings.
These festivities are milestones in the building of a buoyantly rich Mexican cultural
tradition. From the humorous calaveras—death-themed limericks—illustrated by José
Guadalupe Posada and Diego Rivera’s depiction of “La Catrina” to skull-shaped caramels and
pan de muerto, an exuberant gallery of images, textures, flavors, and sounds have accompanied
the fundamental premise of a “special relationship” of Mexico with death, to the point of
identifying it with the marrow of lo mexicano (“that which is Mexican”). Books ranging from
Roger Bartra’s The Cage of Melancholy to Claudio Lomnitz’s Death and the Idea of Mexico have
explored how this “nationalization of death” is expressed both in popular culture and in state
appropriations of that culture. The composite effect was the creation of a “Mexican idea of
death” enshrined as a fundamental mechanism of the official image of Mexico and
Mexicanness.
In addition to appropriations by the postrevolutionary Mexican state, the festivities are
also living witnesses of a longue-durée continuity of both pre-Columbian customs and the
Catholic rites and traditions brought about by Spanish colonization in the 16th century.

THE VIOLENCE OF MEXICO’S WAR ON

DRUGS HAS DISRUPTED THE CULTURAL
MEANING OF DEATH FOR MILLIONS OF
MEXICANS AND BROKEN THE KEY
ASSUMPTIONS THAT LEGITIMIZED ITS
NATIONAL MYTHOLOGY.


Unlike a century ago, when widespread loss of life due to revolutionary struggle was
successfully integrated into an official account of the facts, the present violence in Mexico is

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without a narrative that would give it a semblance of meaning.

The seeds of this change had been sowed years before. The Tlatelolco massacre of
October 2, 1968, is an example—the Mexican army and police forces murdered tens, if not
hundreds, of people in order to repress a student protest movement. Yet not until the 21st
century and the beginning of the current crisis of violence did the ideology of Mexican death
begin to truly mutate, perhaps even dissolve.
In this century, the concept of death in Mexico has been overwhelmed by unassimilable
experiences. New massacres, such as the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa
teacher training college in 2014, have extinguished, by force of impunity and horror, any
remaining legitimacy that ideology had. There are also the desaparecidos, missing persons whose
families have been deprived of mourning as a form of the symbolic integration of loss, and the
femicides, which project the threat of violent death on a majority group, women, for the mere
fact of their sex and gender.
Moreover, according to anthropologist Rita Segato, crimes such as homicides of
hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, on the US-Mexico border, are intended to transform
death into a language, even a sort of spectacle. Such atrocious acts present a performance of
terror expressing the control both of men over women and of a mafia over a territory. Their
ruthless explicitness darkly mirrors, as in a nightmare, the commonplaces of the official culture
of death in Mexico.
Because of its inconsistencies and contradictions, the discourse of the “war on drugs”
can’t perform any legitimating function. The practical consequences of waging this war have
ranged from the futile to the paradoxical: drug consumption has not decreased, and today the
country is more dangerous and crime prone than before.
Perhaps the work of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, characterized by an
uncompromising reflection of the brutality of violence, embodies the closest contemporary
equivalent of what Posadas’s lithographs might have represented a hundred years ago. No
comedy is possible in the face of these horrors.

The internationalization of the Mexican images of death would not have been possible without
the mediation of the US, whose popular culture has been the platform for this worldwide
projection. The effects have been so powerful that among Mexicans themselves the festivities of
the dead now resemble more and more North American and global appropriations. Mexicans’
way of imagining their own culture has begun, in a certain sense, to be part of that other very
Mexican predisposition: “Americanization.”
Perhaps the principal example of this change has been the recent creation of a mass
“Day of the Dead parade” in downtown Mexico City, not as a spontaneous initiative born of a
homegrown culture but as a deliberate imitation of the fictional parade depicted in the James
Bond series film Spectre, from 2015, after the city’s administration realized the idea’s potential
for international tourism.
Is this “Americanization” a reflection of the reality of Mexico as a partner (for more
than a quarter of a century) of NAFTA (now USMCA)? Is it an expression of Mexican reality
as a country that is becoming more “North American” than “Latin American”? Or is there
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another way to see this transformation? Could it be part of a broader historical process—
identified by historian Miguel León-Portilla—involving the expansion of Mesoamerican
civilization beyond its pre-Hispanic borders (roughly the geographical area from central
Mexico down to Nicaragua) toward the northern parts of the continent, as an unanticipated
effect of Mexican and Central American migration to the US?
A shocking criminality and the diffusion of traditional Mexican images in the stream of
global entertainment have erased any trace of a “special relationship” between the national
culture and death. This “special relationship” functioned for almost a century as a filter, a sort
of masquerade, for the Mexican population to avoid immediate encounters with trauma and
fatality. With the forms of this mental disguise worn out, the third decade of the present
century has inaugurated a new era of national culture, in which Mexico and death have to look
at each other face to face, without the mediation of the distorted mirror of ideology.
 
This article was commissioned by Bécquer Seguín. 

Featured-image photograph by Valeria Almaraz / Unsplash (CC0 1.0)

#HISTORY #LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION #MEXICO #POP CULTURE #VIOLENCE

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