BajaNomad

Dia De Los Muertos

vacaenbaja - 10-25-2014 at 08:46 PM

From Thaddeus R.T. Brenton's BAHIA Ensenada and Its Bay


" It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for
the dead, that they may be loosed from sins."
II Machabees.


"Spare, O God, in mercy spare them!
Lord, all pitying, Jesu blest,
Grant them thine eternal rest. Amen."

13TH Cent. Mass for the Dead.


"In our town it is considered lucky to start some project on

the Day of the Dead, for we have just praised all the saints,

bedecked the abodes of the departed, prayed for their souls,

and set them and ourselves quite right with eternity. So,

it seems a very propitious time to start a book about the

bay, for everything in our town revolves about the bay:

its tremendous history, its unbelievable beauty and, not

to be counted in any tertiary manner, its great yield of the

wealth of the sea into the stomachs of our poor and the

profits of our well-to-do.

Our Bay is called Bahia Todos Santos, or All Saints

Bay, and therefore the first of November is rather impor-

tant here, that day being the Feast of All Saints. The eve

of that feast, All Hallows, or Hallowe'en in Stateside

language, was dramatically observed by nature this

year. We had a beautiful electric storm, with broad

sheets of lightning behind the tall black cut-outs of the

southern mountains and real Wagnerian thunder rolling

down long, peaked Punta Banda, losing itself in the black

oily sea. The rain screamed and clawed at our flat Mexi-

can roofs. All the half-wild dogs in the hills barked

incessantly. In spite of the fact that the Mexican version

of Hallowe'ën merely has the souls of the little dead chil-

dren come back for playthings and goodies, I am sure

that all demons, sorcerers and witches were brewing a

lot of hellish nonsense on top of those unknown crags

where the little half-naked Indians who are left pressed

themselves onto earth, praying to long-feared pre-

mission gods not to destroy them utterly. Here, as usual,

the electricity went off, the plumbing gurgled and

growled, a few leaks complained, and the black beetles

and sow bugs of the hills tried their best to get in under

the cracks beneath the doors. The strange acrid smell

which is Mexico, compounded of many basically un-

pleasant things but actually rather homey to an afician-

ado, reeked about the place, and finally, after a few cat

and dog fights on my front porch, I fell asleep, to rest

until the bell clashed by the Franciscans at the Parro-

quia woke me for the Mass of All the Saints"

TO BE CONTINUED

[Edited on 11-1-2014 by vacaenbaja]

[Edited on 11-1-2014 by vacaenbaja]

Dia de los Muertos PART 2

vacaenbaja - 10-25-2014 at 11:05 PM

I have always loved Hallowe'en. As a child, I think

it meant as much to me as did Christmas,. I guess the

reason was that you could dress up and parade about

without being ridiculed. Or maybe it was the superna-

tural element. And long years before I made my submis-

sion to Rome, I went to Anglican Communion on All

Saints Day. Very often I was the Only communicant

there. I loved to hear the reading of the hymn:

"For all the saints who from their labors rest,

Who thee by faith before the world confessed.

Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest.

Allehuia, allehuia."

With many strange regional and foreign experiences. I

have kept the feast and the eve over the years, but last

night's particular manifestation was truly singular.

At this All Saints Mass, conditions in the parish

church were much as usual. Our pastor, Padre Ekis, was

cross and mandatory, slapping his sandals with vigor, and

the lay brother who takes up the collections and clangs

the harsh bell looked as patched, and I am afraid bespot-

ted as usual. The friar who served the celebrant wore a

disgracefully torn and tattered surplice, and there was a

wedding, as there almost always is. Padre Ekis looking

most forbidding marched (Hrrump! Left, right, uno,

dos, tres, cuatro ) down the center aisle to meet the bridal

party, and then they all returned to the altar to the strains

of that redoubtable War March of the Priests, which our

questionable organ interspersed with a now-and-then,

barely recognizable, bar from Lohengrin. The groom, in

a heavy black woolen suit, and the bride's mother, in

black, sweated copiously. The poor little veiled, white-

shrouded bride was so duenna-ed by sixteen bridesmaids

in every conceivable get-up that she hardly seemed to

have a part. The chain was adjusted about the shoulders

of the now kneeling bride and groom, and after much

discontented growling and snarling from Padre Ekis, it

was all over, and they all surged out to an orgy of abra-

zoing and squeaking on the porch steps. And so the Holy

Day of Obligation was fulfilled. Now we can await to-

morrow, the Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.

TO BE CONTINUED

Dia de los Muertos Part 3

vacaenbaja - 10-29-2014 at 12:41 AM

This morning, November second, everyone visited a

church, for everyone has his dead. The altars were

draped in black, the brown candles festooned with

crepe, and the catafalque, a coffin-shaped structure, was

covered with a black pall and surrounded by the six

funeral floor-candlesticks. Most of the women were in

black, with mantillas. Everyone was very reverent, albeit

most businesslike in the discharge of varied religious

duties; Mexican Catholics always are. People were light-

ing votive candles, making the stations, progressing up

the aisle on their knees, arms outspread in memory of the

Crucifixion; and generally going about the rites of

appeasing the unknown with their usual serenity. Lovely

Mexican people. How simple is faith to them.

I did not go out to the modern, currently used ceme-

tery this year, but I did spend most of the day in our old

campo santo ( holy ground ) , no longer open for burial,

which entombs the members of the cast of our past

drama. Such old-family Mexican names as Ruiz, Gaste-

lum and Zarate mingle with the long expatriated British

surnames of the muertos of the English period. The

splendid German pioneer Hussong name carries beneath

it the simple and loving English words: Mother and

Father. On some stones there are plain, good Jewish

names. There are Christians crosses engraved with lovely

Chinese characters.

I walked to the old campo santo, roughly some

twenty blocks from my casa. Avenida Juarez was festive.

This was a holiday; people were coming into the city by

the old jalopy-loads. Rural Mexicans love to gad on the

slightest pretense. On the Avenida I saw one old car with

twelve people in it, most of them in diapers. I met a little

café au lait cherub, about six, riding a white burro, the

smallest burro I have ever seen. The cherub wore a dirty

little shirt extending just below his armpits--and no

pants! Except for the little tattered camisa he was as

naked as the proverbial jay bird. And this was a city of

flowers. We hardly ever see them in abundance, but

today every street corner offered washtubs of chrysan-

themums and marigolds ("flowers of the dead") for sale.

Every tienda, to say nothing of every walking child in

town, vended wreaths and sprays of paper and plastic

flowers. There must be something in the Mexican make-

up that affects color sense; the shades and the combina-

tions in these artificial floral arrangements, as in all other

color problems in this country, completely baffle and

rather repel an outsider. Perhaps through the inherited

subconscious the ancient Aztecan artistic sense has some-

thing to do with the Mexican idea of brilliance and lumi-

nosity. After all, most of the people here came originally

from Central Mexico, and they are Indian inherently.

The paper and plastic extravagances take the place of the

lovely cut-out tin flowers formerly sold on the streets

throughout October and November to the plaintive chant

of "Flores por los muertos, Flores por los fieles difuntos."

( Flowers for the dead. Flowers for the faithful departed.")

TO BE CONTINUED

Dia de los Muertos PART 4

vacaenbaja - 10-29-2014 at 11:34 PM

Last Sunday as I was going down Avenida Ruiz very

early in the morning, I met a little old, gnarled country-

woman, wrapped in the traditional black rebozo, shawl,

and carrying the most remarkable object I have ever

seen. It was a large crown, the frontlet made up of small

mirrors, all overarched with tall outward curling plumes

made of thousands of tiny dyed chicken feathers wired

and sewed so cleverly that it appeared factory made.

The little feathers were of fantastic red and green and

yellow tinges, and the whole thing looked too Aztecan

to be true. The old campesina had probably worked on

this one crown in all her leisure time during the past

year, and she was out to sell it to someone who wanted to

make an elaborate offering at a grave at Dia de los

muertos. Plastic, paper and old tin flowers can go hang!

The muerto who got that crown on his earthly abode

today will probably creep out tonight and do a jarabe

tapatio.

Now again on my way to the campo santo. As I ap-

proached the huge incomplete Guadalupana Santurary,

I met little groups of black clad women. members of

sodalities and of the Third Order of Saint Francis, on their

way to the shrine to pray for the dead on this holy day.

The leader of each group wore a red, white and green

sash, like the badge of an order of chivalry, and of course

the women of the Third Order had their knotted ropes

around their waist. I went inside the santuario for a few

moments and watched them most reverently get at their

devotions in front of the sinister catafalque, while to their

left a plaster saint clad in a brown woolen Franciscan

habit glared lugubriously at a human skull held in his

synthetic hands. The birds and bats flew about, cheeping

and squeaking in the most intimate fashion, and a few

very bored dogs wandered in and out on the desultory

pattern of their day.

TO BE CONTINUED

Dia de los Muertos PART 5

vacaenbaja - 10-30-2014 at 10:16 PM

The "old" cemetery is not really very old; it is less

than a hundred years, I estimate. Yet how photogenic it

appears. Do you remember the graveyard where Ophelia

was buried in Sir Laurence Olivier's Hamlet? Well, it

looks just like that. The older Mexicans buried their dead

in the ground, but built above each grave a little ornate

house of adobe bricks, stuccoed it and left it, hollow, to

look like a real tomb. Now many of these structures have

have fallen into utter decay or become open shells through

which goats wander in and out. Other old graves were

surrounded with baroque wooden fences, and of course

these are partly collapsed. Then there are low , flat table

tombs, often with pictures of the deceased embedded

under glass in their surfaces.

This historic cemetery, except on this day of the

year, is allowed to lapse into a disgraceful state of neg-

lect. Neighbors tether their goats and burros there, chil-

dren have rope swings in the occasional trees, and van-

dals paint large green "putas" on the table tombs. But

for some days now an old man has been hired to prune

down the growth, burn off the brush and rake up the past

year's accumulation of tequila bottles, cerveza cans and

goat and burro dung. This morning the descendants of

the dead, the scions of the founding families moved in

with scrub buckets and brooms. Such a drubbing as the

old tombs got. Sellers of flowers, fanciful and real, of vigil

lights, and of all manner of food and drink, settled their

little booths around the broken down, ruined adobe

walls. All day and half the night the old families tidied

and visited, ate and drank and lit their lovely ancestral

lights.

TO BE CONTINUED

Dia de los Muertos PART 6

vacaenbaja - 11-1-2014 at 07:25 AM

Here on the Bahia we have lost many of the quaint

practices followed in the back country and in the interior

of Mexico. We do not have the paths of marigold petals

leading the town elders on personal visitation to each

house in which there has been a death during the past

year, an official call during which food is offered to the

departed shade, and conversation is made as if the little

ghost were actually visible. But in Ensenada the observ-

ance is still a strange blend of Catholicism and the an-

cient Indian religions. Gourd-bowls of food are set out for

the dead. Marigolds, the flores de muertos, are every-

where. The living consume tons of miniature coffins,

skulls, cross-bones and calaveros ( skeletons ) of highly

colored spun sugar, and eat plump angelitos of egg-

bread, with wings of scarlet sugar. There is a hearty. fes-

tive smell of tequila, aguardiente and mescal. Don't be

surprised to see families with a full luncheon or dinner

for themselves and friends laid out tastefully ON a tomb!

There may be triquitraques, firecrackers, to scare away

devils ( if the padre is not around ) . Gringos sometimes

think this is quite barbaric, but and exploding cherry bomb

is no more pagan than the tolling of a church bell during

a funeral procession--which practice was originated for

the very same purpose. The whole routine of the Day

of the Dead is no mockery of death , but a simple accep-

tance from the people who have known la muerte long and

intimately, and the spirit of the Day of the Commemora-

tion of All the Faithful Departed is still centered in the

old prayer: "Grant them thine eternal rest."

Tonight I take my field glasses and look down at the

shimmer of the lights, lamparas votivas, for the dead.

the sight is very eerie and otherworld. it reminds one

that the muertos who have had a jovial, normal day with

those still among the living must now, like Shakespeare's

"0ld mole, " burrow back to whatever limbo or purge-

torial region they perforce meanwhile inhabit until that

day of utter grace when they, totally cleansed, shall

mount into the Beatific Presence.

Tomorrow the goats and the burros will be repas-

tured, the cactus will re-sprout, the tequila bottles and

cerveza cans will shower, and the old bones will lie in

their usual homey place again. All the little tiendas, with

their mangoes and guavas, long sugar canes, beloved

pitahaya apples and jars of luminous gaseosa, will be

gone. But around the Bahia we have observed the holy

and wholesome rite of praying for the dead--that they

may be loosed from their sins.""

FINIS

[Edited on 11-1-2014 by vacaenbaja]

[Edited on 11-1-2014 by vacaenbaja]

DENNIS - 11-1-2014 at 12:49 PM

Thaddeus R.T. Brenton's BAHIA Ensenada and Its Bay


Cool. I think I used to have this book from 1961. Anyway, I found it again on Amazon used books....7 bucks delivered.
Thanks.

güéribo - 11-2-2014 at 07:43 AM

Enjoyed the reading. Thanks for posting.

BajaBlanca - 11-2-2014 at 07:50 AM

Very good reading!

Pompano - 11-2-2014 at 10:21 AM

Good reading, indeed, I agree with Blanca and all. I have the book in my bookcase, right next to an old hard cover of Frazer's 'The Golden Bough' and other witchcraft, demonology, exorcism, and occult material. Always interesting to explore Baja's (Mexico's) cultural beliefs and customs...and any country's for that matter. Gives one a better perspective into that country's accepted thinking.

And....with the current Halloween activity, tis the time for it!