Hi everybody,
We organized our trip to Mexico in such a way that we were in Mexico City for the celebration of the Day of the Dead, something that I had always wanted to see and experience. Since the tour of the country began, everywhere we have seen the typical altars and decorations of this celebration because, although it takes place on November 1st and 2nd, everything is decorated throughout the month of October.
The Day of the Dead is a celebration that honors the dead and coincides with the Catholic celebration of All Souls’ Day. It has its origins before the arrival of the Spanish. These origins date back to the time of the indigenous people of Mesoamerica, such as the Aztecs and the Mayans. The rituals that celebrate the lives of the ancestors were performed by these civilizations for thousands of years. A common practice was to keep skulls as trophies and display them during rituals of death and rebirth.
The festival that became the Day of the Dead in Mexico fell on the ninth month of the Aztec solar calendar, which was in early August and was celebrated for a full month.
When the Spanish arrived in America, they were scared by these “pagan” practices of the indigenous people and in an attempt to convert them to Catholicism, they moved the festivities to the beginning of November to coincide with All Saints’ Day, which is the day after Halloween.
Something that I love is that the Day of the Dead is something that is celebrated with joy. It is a beautiful way to honor those who are no longer without feeling sadness for their departure, a way of thinking and believing that there is a time in the year when they visit us again and families, living and dead, meet again. It is also a way of not being afraid of death.
During the days of the celebration, you can see people with make-up on their faces and everywhere there are stalls where they put make-up on you. Men normally do skull makeup and women do the Catrina makeup.
The Day of the Dead festivities were presided over by the god Mictecacihualt, known as “The Lady of Death” and which currently corresponds to the name “Catrina”.
San Andrés Mixquic is a town very famous for the celebration of the Day of the Dead and we organize ourselves to go in the morning to Xochimilco and then to Mixquic. Mexico City is very large and generally, you have to take several public transports to get to the sites. To go to Xochimilco, we took a subway and then a train; then, we took two buses to get to Mixquic.
When you arrive, what you see is a sea of people, mostly locals. There are countless junk food outlets: French fries, chicken wings, hotdogs, corndogs, corn, and so on. There is a lot of movement of people and a madness of different music playing everywhere. There are also a lot of decorations, and they are all taking photos.
I was delighted in that madness of people. I put on my Catrina makeup, and we tried a bit of all the food. Then we got in line to see the Mixquic cemetery. That was really crazy!
In the cemetery it was a mixture of the marching bands, the locals who are next to the graves of their loved ones, the locals who are going to visit for tourism and the foreign tourists that are visiting. Lots of people and lots of noise. I think of the people who were there visiting the graves of their relatives and I think it would be better to close the cemetery to outsiders and thus leave those who are visiting their relatives to do so in peace.
Then it started to rain and at 6 in the afternoon it was time to see how to return to the hotel. The return was a madness that I will tell you in another moment. In total, it was a fabulous day with many people, a lot of hustle and bustle and a lot of laughter, and fear for what we had to go through on the way back.
I think the celebration of the Day of the Dead is something very beautiful that is worth living.
Here is the link to my YouTube channel in case you want to see better how our passage through Mexico City was during the celebration of the Day of the Dead.