Keeping memories alive, reconciling the natural fear of death with acceptance of its inevitability, celebrating the lives that make every death meaningful, All Souls’ Day, or Dia de los Muertos, has enjoyed an astonishing surge of popularity in Mexico since 2000.
All Saints’ Day (November 1), All Souls’ Day (November 2) and the Celtic prequel of All Saints’ (Hallows’) Day, Hallowe’en (October 31) celebrate the dead and usher in the harvest throughout Christendom. There is much speculation and many a theory about the indigenous roots of the Day of the Dead in Mexico. One popular idea is that it can be traced to Aztec worship rituals for Mictecacihuatl, “Lady of the Dead,” Queen of Mictlan. According to Aztec legend, Mictecacihuatl was sacrificed as an infant and married to Miclantecuhtl, king of the underworld, which she was allowed to leave once a year to return to the world of the living. The Aztecs celebrated Mictecacihuatl’s return with death festivals and traditional dances, to honor her for her protection of the bones that created life and to seek protection for those who died.
Extravagant all-night graveyard celebrations and watches take place in many parts of Mexico, such as Patzcuaro and Oaxaca. Many families take the opportunity to remember deceased loved ones by taking flowers to their graves. Home altars or ofrendas are set up in homes where fervent Catholic faith encourages the belief that souls materialize to eat Bread of the Dead and drink tequila. Nowadays, even non-believers decorate their homes with ofrendas to celebrate the season and remember loved ones. Public altars for celebrities or beloved figures in a business or school are featured, keeping these traditions alive.
The skeleton image was enhanced by lithographist Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), whose creepily playful late nineteenth and early twentieth-century drawings in turn inspired the elegantly dressed skeleton, known as a “Catrina,” among the crowd in Diego Rivera’s 1946-47 mural, Sunday Afternoon Dream in the Alameda.
One reason for the surge in popularity of the Dia de los Muertos is UNESCO’s 2008 inclusion of the Mexican Day of the Dead in the “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” Another reason is modern advertising that transforms traditional practices into pop culture. Flowers for gravesites, food and beverage for dead and living, sugar skulls, and decorative cut paper are traditional elements, but there has been a recent proliferation of goods and services: manufactured costumes, professional Catrina face-painters, party venues, and knick-knacks manufactured in China. The 2017 Disney/Pixar film Coco increased international awareness of the festivities, romanticizing them with nostalgic stereotypes of Mexican life and culture.
There is another more sinister reason for the upsurge in the popularity of the Day of the Dead: a surprising increase since 2001 in the number of adherents to the cult of La Santa Muerte. La Santa Muerte is a female deity evolved from much older images of the Grim Reaper with a touch of the Virgin Mary. The faithful in this cult represent a cross-section of Mexican society, but it has become especially popular among drug dealers and other delinquents, who, with a mix of Catholic ritual and magic formula, request her blessing in life’s trials and tribulations as well as in their dubious enterprises. Although Catholic hierarchy deeply disapproves of the cult, many followers consider themselves devout Christians.
Along the streets where canals once carried water from Lake Texcoco into ancient Tenochtitlan, a soul-chilling sound can sometimes be heard, the voice of a woman shrieking and wailing,
“Ay! Mis hijos! ¿ Donde están mis hijos?” (My children! Where are my children?)
Some say they have seen a woman in white floating along those streets. Some say she is the soul of indigenous Mexico, lamenting the loss of her descendants to European assimilation. Others tell this horrifying story of a woman whose spirit cannot rest because, in a moment of rage, she did the unthinkable.
A beautiful Aztec woman and an aristocratic Spanish soldier fell in love. Separated by class and race, they couldn’t marry, but they had three children together. She was a devoted mother, and she and the children waited happily for visits from the handsome warrior. After a time, however, the visits became less frequent, and the woman heard reports that her Spanish lover had returned from a voyage to Spain with an aristocratic Spanish wife to establish his standing in the colonial society of New Spain. He loved his Aztec concubine, but he had agreed to an arranged marriage so he could secure his fortunes and his status in the New Spain’s colonial society. Devastated, she took their three children to one of the canals and drowned them. Realizing too late what she had done, she jumped in and drowned herself.They say she still walks the streets where the canals used to flow, wailing eternally through the dark windy nights for her lost children.
According to the American Anthropological Association, more than 200 women kill their own children every year in the United States alone. Stories of such mothers awaken the primordial fear of every mother’s power over her children. The unquestioning and unavoidable trust of an infant for the mother can be terrifying to a grown-up child who realizes that his own mother should not have been trusted with a helpless infant. La Llorona embodies the mythos of that fear. The story of La Llorona has passed from generation to generation, with different versions throughout Latin America. The details vary, but the heart of the story remains the same: a loving mother has killed her children and cries out for them in the night.
As I attempted to comply with a Curriculum Director’s mandate to display the DesCartes objectives in my seventh-grade English classroom and to include them in my lesson plans, I found that life was just too short to calmly and quietly work out my frustration with these lists, which are devoid of coherence about what I wanted to impart to my students.
I had been instructed to post an unreadable and incomprehensible chart on my wall, so that mere children who needed guidance even for straightforward text could “determine their individual goals for ‘Academic Progress’.” I had faced many challenges in my long career, but this one threatened to bring me down.
Most of the cited Des Cartes objectives are worthwhile, even useful. I actually use them in my lesson planning, though I usually get them from my mental files rather than a headache-inducing chart. In actual classroom practice, though, the skills are both over-analyzed and over-simplified. A thorough breakdown of basic skills can be very helpful in diagnosing idiosyncratic reading problems. Most kids get those skills early on, but a few, for example, might be so focused on deciphering letters that they don’t make the leap to meaning for word recognition, even though the word is familiar. I get that. They need extra help.
Now, though, I’m faced with 100 little minds waiting to be guided toward the doorway that leads to Real Life. There is little time or need in this situattion to do leisurely analysis and breakdown of pedagogical research and contemplation of endless statistics.
Writing “We are learning to identify the setting in a literary passage” on the board and repeating those words may be good practice and will, no doubt, get me a better evaluation when I am observed. It is not, however, equal to teaching the skill. A swimming coach might say, “We are learning to do the backstroke.” She could have a chart illustrating the strokes, but until the learners have an opportunity to practice in water, learning will not happen. Likewise, mastering the stroke in a heated lane pool does not guarantee that they will be able to do it in a lake, a turbulent river, an ocean, icy water, or flood waters. If they want to swim in those conditions, they will need to practice in them.
A language curriculum beyond the alphabetic and phonetic groundwork should start, even in pre-school, with a collection of high-quality worthwhile texts, not scaled according to a lexile abstraction, but according to interest and value. Lexile numbers and test scores are useful data in compiling short lists of texts for particular readers, but interest and value are non-negotiable. Life–even a 12-year-old’s life– is too short to spend on bad prose and even worse poetry just because it illustrates some pedagogical point. As there can be different contexts for testing a swimmer’s backstroke, there are many contexts to test a reader’s ability to identify settings in literary texts. We must return to letters, sounds, syllables, words, phrases, paragraphs, and the host of complexities that enter into bringing meaning to a text. The only way to develop these skills, including the acknowledged target skill, is experience. In swimming and reading, coaching is helpful, but the skills can be mastered without overt instruction. They cannot be mastered without practice.
DROP EVERYTHING AND READ at Colegio Americano de Torreón (Mexico). Students bring a favorite book on designated DEAR days. The Principal announces, “Drop everything and read.” Kids and teachers happily comply as our carefully crafted “objectives” take a back seat to: “I want them never to lose their love for stories, fiction and non-fiction.”
My first objection to the NWEA DesCartes Objectives is the divorce of content from objectives. My second is that they put the cart before the horse. Here is a comparison chart of my objectives for my students and a few of the stated DesCartes objectives (including some irreverent annotations):
ME
NWEA DESCARTES
*I want them to learn to keep usable notes and practice papers (aka homework) in an organized, retrievable format.
*I want them to acquire a shared vocabulary that will enable us to converse about texts–things like noun, verb, figure of speech, plot, setting.
*I want them to grow in independence and confidence when they confront unfamiliar texts. I want them to develop skills to unlock words and phrases on a page–skills like identify the part of speech, recognize context clues, use a dictionary and other look-up tools intelligently, recognize an allusion and acquire some tools to explore the breadth and depth of its meaning
*I want them never to lose their love for stories, fiction and non-fiction.
*I want to share with them some things I know and be honest with them about how and why I have retained those things: I skim and look at illustrations before I read. I usually prefer to see the movie before I read the book. I know how to find specific information really fast. I like to read the last page before I begin reading.
*I want them to lose their fear of language, to play with it, to see its absurdities, and to meet people like Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, and G. K. Chesterton, who amuse and inspire, delighting in the sounds, nuances, and just plain fun of language.
*I want them to lose their fear of writing, to learn that the heart and soul of what they put on paper is far more important than how “correct” it is or whether they used a proper “writing process” as they wrote it.
*There are lots other things, like wanting them to learn how to be good, honest, compassionate human beings and how not to fall into the traps of drugs, sex, and wasted lives, but those fall outside the realm, I suppose, of strictly pedagogical objectives.
*Uses structural analogies to decode unknown words. (I’m not certain I can do this or even exactly what it means, but I’ve been reading since I was 4.)
*Uses syntax (word order) to decode words.
*Identifies meaning of words from context.
*Uses semantics to decode words.
*Uses context to choose the correct meaning of words with multiple meanings.
*Uses prefixes to determine word meanings.
*Divides words into syllables correctly. (A skill that I myself have never perfected and have never missed very much. But I’ve read Don Quixote in the language of Cervantes and Hamlet in the language of Shakespeare.)
*Divides multi-syllable words into syllables. (Okay. Andwhat other kinds of words can be divided into syllables?)
*Classifies a literary text as a story, poem, or play. *Revises sentences to improve more word choices.(Mmm…like the choice of the word improve in that sentence?)
*Makes inferences about literary text.
*Analyzes author’s purpose. (Like, say Sir Geoffrey Hill’? <—GRATUITOUS NAME-DROPPING I was Geoffrey Hill’s secretary, chief baby sitter and assistant cat-sitter in Boston before he moved back to England and became Sir Geoffrey. I typed his work, talked with him at length about it, still can’t make very intelligent inferences about it, though I do have vague notions of purpose for some pieces. Even he didn’t remember the purpose of some. .
In case you were wondering, or even if you weren’t…There are remnants in Spanish and in the memories of older generations of a time when five meals a day were usual in Spain and Latin America: DESAYUNO, ALMUERZO, COMIDA, MERIENDA, and CENA, in that order. Nowadays in Mexico, it usually comes down to DESAYUNO about 6-7 a.m., COMIDA (sometimes called ALMUERZO) at 2 p.m. and CENA after 9 p.m. The merienda is almost archaic, but the word hangs on in the MERENDERO, where you can grab a taco, a sandwich, and a soft drink, or some traditional bread with coffee or chocolate for an afternoon-to-early-evening snack.
