Catrina

By Victoria Scher

Brightly painted homes dot the hillsides of Guanajuato and splash against the gray cobblestone roads and cathedrals in Puebla. Weavers in Chiapas dye fabric by hand to embroider tropical flowers onto pillowcases and blankets. Devotees to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, prefer to see her image cloaked in the colors of the flag, the colors of food stalls in markets. Merchants in Mercado Merced in Mexico City have a strategy for making their tomatoes look a more vivid red and their chiles an enticing green: they place colored plastic over lamps that project the colored light onto the produce.

If life in Mexico writes poems to color, death in Mexico bows deeply to all that wilts and the beauty which remains steadfast. There exists a special bread for the dead—pan de muertos— which appears on street vendors’ carts beside the Fall pomegranates and the early mandarins. Families buy and eat it for dinner with a cup of hot chocolate throughout the entire month of October. An ode to the dead, the dense sweet bread fills the stomachs of the poor and the rich alike. I buy a few pieces at Superarma, the highpriced chain grocery store in my upscale neighborhood. It’s sweeter and softer in the open-air markets, where women hawk their homemade versions to passers-by. The bread is buttery, sugar granules glistening against the toasted outside. Pan de muerto originates with the Aztecs, whom the Spaniards discovered celebrated the passing of their queridos to Quetzocoatl’s great heavens on the universal prayer day for all departed souls.

The day my family buried my grandmother, in the same cemetery in which her parents lie sideby-side, and seven brothers and sisters scattered throughout, a trio of musicians played odes to the dead. A guitar, an accordion, a violin. Standing in the midst of gravestones, the trio allowed their instruments to wail, accompanying with voices on only a few special songs: on this day, Cielito Lindo becomes a song about heaven rather than the literal blue sky. Fake flowers, the petals dyed blends of pink, red, and purple jut out of the ground the undertaker watered with sweat as he broke the earth. It is a desert graveyard—not dead because of the people lying beneath headstones, who are very much alive and singing with the trio, although we cannot hear them. It is a desert graveyard because the earth refuses to seep in the water that falls every June, July and August. This land was once submerged—the peaks of the rocky mountains shadowing my home long ago lay lonely in darkness, far from the ocean’s surface. I know this because I find fossils of seashells half-buried near cacti and rattlesnake holes, and my friend’s father, an archaeologist, narrates the story of the desert through the perspective of a seashell encased in rock millions of years old.

Inside Mexican homes, families dedicate altars to their deceased loved ones. My boyfriend’s grandfather keeps a picture of his son, gone these last two years, in the kitchen by the stove. He cooks meals of chicken and rice with fried bananas and drinks cans of Pepsi, eating with one working daughter during the week and sharing with his full family of children and grandchildren on weekends. He is a serious man, full of old-fashioned advice about the tasks men and women should learn to do and a sharp tongue for those who commit the stupidities of youth. He stops by the black-and-white image of his son once a day to share a greeting.

Larger-than-life skeletons stroll through Avenida Madero, the heavily-trafficked pedestrian street in Mexico City which leads to the sinking Cathedral. The walking skeletons are the smiling side of death. The Grim Reaper also lives on Avenida Madero, a stone-still figure cloaked in black on street corners and the centers of plazas. The peak of his hood stands pointed, and I can’t see a face hidden in the depths of the hood. “Our destiny,” the side of a box reads in black ink. A can lies by the Reaper’s feet, a few coins gleaming at the bottom. I waved at the Grim Reaper once, and he waved back.

The walking skeletons, or the Catrinas, wear frilly, floor-length dresses appropriate for a tightlaced Catholic wife of an old Mexican político. Wide-brimmed hats adorned with crow’s feathers shade their faces from the sun. The Catrinas parade up and down Calle Madero all year long, their numbers increasing in October as the Day of the Dead approaches, charging just a few centavos for a picture taken with them.

Mexican artists have taken to portraying the Catrina, the national symbol of death and the Mexican Day of the Dead. Catrina was envisioned by the lithographer José Guadalupe Posada in the late 1800s. Created initially as a satire of the stereotypical Porfirio Díaz upperclass woman, Catrina did not become the national symbol of death until painters like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco incorporated her into their busy scenes of Mexican life. Diego Rivera’s mural “Dream of a Sunday in Alameda Park” depicts every kind of Mexican life in one popular Mexico City Park. The white upper-class gentleman walking armin-arm with a woman holding a parasol. The brown middle-class mestizos—mix of indigenous and European—flying kites, sharing picnics, feeding bread to pigeons. The indigenous family standing on the fringes of the portrait, looking on. Catrina smiling obliviously, mixed in with the crowd.

I once went to an art exhibition of Catrinas engaged in a variety of daily tasks. Skeletons dressed to go out on the town, pink circles on their cheeks and false eyelashes glued above gaping eye sockets. Catrina lounging on a hammock, a lemonade beside her, a laptop perched on her lap, the many bones of her fingers poised to type emails and poems. A smiling Catrina sitting at a coffee shop reading a novel. Catrina in a blue apron, her fingers wrapped tightly around a watering can held lovingly over a pot of daisies. A polka-dot bikini clinging to her bones as she poses for a picture holding a margarita and wearing sun glasses. Earrings somehow dangle from Catrina’s ears, despite the lack of cartilage to latch onto. Catrina sits on the ground with her legs crossed, practicing yoga, serenity somehow apparent on her face even without eyes and muscles that extend and retract with emotion. Love letters in a basket for Catrina. My mom gave me a birthday present last year: a tile of a Catrina sitting on a park bench, skeletal birds and leafless trees surrounding her. She wears a pink-and-purple dress, much like the kind I wear in the summer. Waiting for Mr. Right, it reads at the bottom.

My grandmother’s altar holds a bouquet of Hershey’s kisses, a can of 7-UP, a bottle of tequila, a portrait taken of her in Hotel Victoria in Chihuahua City circa 1929. It seems meaningful the Hotel Victoria was the elegant setting of dances throughout her young womanhood, and that her best portrait was taken at the base of the hotel’s grand staircase. Sixty years later I was born, and she was the first to cradle me in this life. The Hotel Victoria burned sometime in the 1970s.

I feared death in an unrealistic, debilitating manner for twelve months of my life. The fear came on swiftly, one day when I realized relationships end and it is normal to part ways forever during life. My grandmother physically gone, my first love disappeared. For about one year both incidents seemed similar; I never spoke to either again, and I couldn’t tell if time led me closer or farther. Then, I desperately needed to know where I would go, how the Earth began 4.6 billion years ago when pitch darkness cloaked the mountains of my hometown. Scientists say the depths of the oceans, where sunlight cannot reach but we suspect puny, sucking creatures to live, remain more mysterious than the planets. Our skin covers the frightening whiteness of our bones so we don’t have to see bareness each day. Catrina wears her costumes in great fun and earnestness, death a lighthearted play for her after the existential seriousness of life. She can live out the roles she always intended to play and never had time, so her wardrobe is as full as I desire my own closet to be in this life. Cocktail dresses for parties and weddings, light summer dresses for the desert heat, wool sweaters for the northern freeze. I can’t stand seeing the Grim Reaper in front of the metro station closest to my apartment—Our Destiny doesn’t strike me as funny. I wave, trying to cross an abyss.

The altars line the main student walkway for a mile at the National Autonomous University of Mexico City. For about a decade now, the University has encouraged students to make their family altars public, creating at once a cultural museum and a heartfelt tribute to the University family. Students of this university are family and their loved ones by extension. The altars fill an entire avenue on Ciudad Universidad with flowers, photographs, personal items, and the abundant treats of this Earth— mangoes, candy bars, cans of soda, tequila, papayas. I visit one November 2nd, a day before I’m to fly to Cancun for a week-long break. Lifesize and miniature Catrinas are everywhere: live ones grinning at me as I walk through the rows of altars, fake miniature models standing among bouquets and personal items in the displays.

It is a brisk night in Mexico City. Ciudad Universidad lies in the southern reaches of the city, a forty-five minute metro ride from my apartment in the Roma neighborhood. We hold hands as we wander the altar-lined walkway, stopping at altars that seem to contain a distinctive attraction. On one an entire graveyard is mapped out with miniature gravestones, tiny bouquets of flowers lying at headstones, and bands of musicians standing in clusters just feet from one another. An altar dedicated to genocide victims holds post-its with prayers of peace. Everyone is invited to write a message. A collage of nameless Holocaust victims forms the background—no Catrina is present. The political messages are surprisingly few along the walkway, considering Mexico’s most prestigious university historically forms the nation’s most important political activists. Most altars are personal, thousands of stories contained in photographs, coded messages, food, colored paper and grinning Catrinas—all lost to me and every other visitor. Poems always hold a meaning for the writer, but what we, the readers, take away changes from person to person. We bring our personal stories to the altars, and even if we cannot know the facts behind the altars’ dedication, in this way we all partake in each other’s death.

Cemeteries fill on November 2nd, the Day of the Dead, the way department stores crowd during clearance sales and Mass on Christmas Eve draws freshly-enthused Catholics. I do not wish to romanticize death in Mexico. I can cry at the thought of my skin wrinkling and thinning, eventually decaying until I am bones. I admire the way Catrina discards the existential burden, and I view her presence as a popular movement to celebrate life and death, which cannot exist one without the other.