vacaenbaja
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Dia De Los Muertos
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]
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vacaenbaja
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Dia de los Muertos PART 2
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
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vacaenbaja
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Dia de los Muertos Part 3
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
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vacaenbaja
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Dia de los Muertos PART 4
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
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vacaenbaja
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Dia de los Muertos PART 5
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
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vacaenbaja
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Dia de los Muertos PART 6
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]
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DENNIS
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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.
"YOU CAN'T LITTER ALUMINUM"
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güéribo
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Enjoyed the reading. Thanks for posting.
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BajaBlanca
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Very good reading!
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Pompano
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Mood: Optimistic
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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!
I do what the voices in my tackle box tell me.
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