A Unique Response to Death: Day of the Dead Fiestas and Communal Articulations of Resistance

Philosophers such as Octavio Paz and Emilio Uranga theorize death grounded in Mexican circumstances to show an intimate relational dynamic with life. In their view, death is embedded in the everydayness of the living. Carlos A. Sánchez, in “Death and the Colonial Difference,” explains that the Mexican idea of death reveals much about the life and the situatedness of those who subscribe to the relational dynamic between life and death. Death is linked to the living, especially for those who are situated in inferiorized positions. In the accounts promoted by Paz and by Uranga, the historical and social conditions of lived experience provide the context for how death is conceived, and, subsequently, treated. They advance Mexican conceptions of death and provide interesting perspectives into how some colonized peoples are resisting narrow narratives of death. This is to say that their approaches do not grant the dominant assumption that death is merely a biological event or a life event ceasing the life of the individual. In this essay, I examine their critiques of dominant assumptions of death to elaborate on conceptions of death contextualized within historical and social entanglements, namely, a Mexican analysis of death. In particular, I utilize Paz's work on Day of the Dead fiestas to study communal practices and theorize the ritual dimensions of the life and death relationship. Through an examination of a Mexican approach to death, I contend that rituals of death help locate the non-dominant social logics that engender resistant activity and cultivate a distinct interconnected communal relation.To develop this position, I clarify the historical and social distinctions between Mexican and Anglo-American approaches to death and analyze literature promoting a Mexican view of death. Ultimately, I share a similar view with Paz, Uranga, and Sánchez who charge that there is a unique Mexican idea of death. However, to be clear, my interest in their work does not assume they represent the Mexican view of death (Brandes, Skulls to the Living). Rather, I am interested in exploring how their discussions of death, from a particular socio-historical situation, reveal ways in which colonized peoples refuse dichotomous narratives of death. Sánchez's work, in particular, provides valuable insights into the Mexican relation with death, particularly the role of coloniality/modernity with temporality. Lastly, as I return to Paz's own discussion of death, I refer to the sensibilities and practices relevant to the resistant dimensions of a Mexican relationship with death. An analysis of Paz's focus on fiestas offers a focus distinct from Sánchez in that it pays significant attention to the ritual dimensions of death and helps illustrate the resistant responses to hegemonic social norms. Thus, paying attention to communal practices, this essay emphasizes the relationship between death rituals and deviant activity to dominant modes of being.Scholars have noted a distinction between the logics involved in European and Anglo-American approaches to death and those of Mexican people. Emilio Uranga asserts that “[f]or the North American (el norteamericano), death is a reality that must be hidden, a phenomenon that is silenced and masked as much as possible so that it will not disturb, with its impertinence, the flow of a life that unfolds in radical dedication to [self]-realization and work” (qtd. in Sánchez 180). Paz shares a similar view of this concealment. He writes that “the word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips” (“Day of the Dead” 57). Paz describes death for the Euro-Anglo as one that is treated as a stinging topic to be avoided. In both Uranga's view and Paz's view, the Euro-Anglo phenomenon of death is not socially discussed or regarded as part of the daily lived realities of the subject. If we take their accounts as at least generally accurate, then for Anglos, death is something that is to be treated as separate from life.1In distinction, however, the Mexican attitude toward death is described as one that is intimate and vital toward understanding the Mexican's life, a point evident in Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude, a collection of essays concerning Mexican being and realities. Starting from an inferiorized status, Paz, like Samuel Ramos and other Mexican philosophers, theorizes being from concrete socio-historical realities, specifically mestizos, who navigate colonial/modern realities.2 In his infamous essay, “The Day of the Dead,” Paz argues for a relationship with death that is particular to Mexican lived experience, identifying a view of death that illustrates the intimate dynamic between life and death for Mexican peoples. For those who live the consequences of the colonial Spanish and imperialist US forces, Paz's conception of death reflects on Mexicans’ lived social circumstances and identifies how their deaths are implicated by continuous violence. Said differently, Paz examines death in relation to the lived realities and one's social circumstance. He writes that “death defines life; a death depicts a life in immutable forms, we do not change except to disappear” (“Day of the Dead” 54). He continues, to say “death, like life, is not transferable. If we do not die as we lived, it is because the life we lived was not really ours: it did not belong to us, just as the bad death that kills us does not belong to us” (“Day of the Dead” 54). As part of an intimate life and death dynamic, Paz viewed death as a mirror of life.Emilio Uranga shares a similar claim to the relationship between death and life in his essay “The Mexican Idea of Death.” He writes: “There is in the life of the Mexican a permanent disposability, a giving oneself to an imminent death. The certainty of a final end and the imminence of it constitute the axis of the life and death for the Mexican” (Uranga). There is a coexistence between death and life. The philosopher explains the Mexican view in distinction from the Euro-Anglo approaches, claiming: “For the Spaniard and for the North American, death takes away something, while for the German, it gives, but for the Mexican, it neither gives nor takes because there's nothing to take and there's nothing to give” (Uranga). The philosopher utilizes this distinction to assert that Mexican understandings of death do not assign meaning according to the individual as the termination of life or disclosure of something for humans. The sense of giving or taking away attributes to death renders death as a totality. For colonized subjects, he writes, “death is the only thing that the Mexican does not leave for ‘tomorrow’ because she knows that as today, tomorrow will continue to converse its radical sense of fracture” (Uranga). Thus, while the Anglo treatment of death is described as distant and avoided, Uranga's view holds that the Mexican faces death in the everyday, as part of an interconnected dynamic. This view, described as a Mexican attitude toward death, reveals a live relationality that motivates a particular discourse of death. This inter-relationality is an important difference between how US Anglos and Mexicans attend to death.Articulated from a site of difference, Paz and Uranga theorize an inferiorized social position that does not stem from the dominant norms of the colonizer. Their approach reveals a subject whose world sense does not conform to the dominant norms, but rather creates from a position that is resistant to the impositions. In other words, their conceptualization of death is one that is grounded in the social and historical dimensions of their lived situation, one that is distinct from the Euro-Anglo dominant norm. This is to say that enunciating death, from the subjugated position, attends to the particular socio-historical realities while simultaneously critiquing the dominant norms and powers that mask the distinctiveness. This is helpful to see the different contexts that inform the social attitudes toward death for those North of Mexico, namely, claims that the Anglos avoided the presence of death and attempted to minimize the role of death with life. Perhaps these were also Paz's observations while a visitor in the United States during his many political or professional obligations in New York, Chicago, California, and Texas. Paz distinguished Euro-Anglo and Mexican views of death through a multi-faceted understanding of death that included temporality and social logics. Thus, rather than providing a general account of death, he provides an articulation of death that discloses the temporal distinctiveness and teleological distinctiveness of Mexican realities that cannot be explained by a forward-looking understanding of death, a point Carlos Sánchez defends.Sánchez argues in his 2013 essay “Death and the Colonial Difference: An Analysis of a Mexican Idea” that the justification of a distinct Mexican view lies in the socio-historical dimensions of Mexican circumstances. Analyzing the lens of domination through coloniality, the essay refers to two camps, the historical and instrumental views of death, to assess the different interpretations and treatments of death. Sánchez asserts: To say that one's attitude toward death is instrumental is to say that death, my death and death in general, is something that will happen, it is an event of the future, always on the horizon and always a possibility. The historical attitude, on the other hand, is one which holds that death is a permanent presence of a perpetual recovery of the past annihilated. (168)Sánchez elaborates that time, as a differently functioning mechanism in Mexico, creates a response from the Mexican that cannot be understood through future-orientated logics involved in Euro-Anglo conceptions of time.To illustrate this point, he turns to decolonial scholarship on coloniality and modernity with works by Quijano and Walter Mignolo. According to Aníbal Quijano, the roots of modernity are closely bound to coloniality of the Americas and Caribbean islands in which the future of Europe and the European man are built upon. The legacies of colonialism, scholars Quijano and María Lugones explain, refer to the colonial-modern systems of power that sustain a continuity between colonial era and modern systems of dominance. Europeans established colonial regimes in interest of their political and religious development while imposing a social and epistemological order directed toward progress and linear temporality. According to Sánchez, it is modernity, “a market-driven, future-orientated, existential-political condition grounded in market capitalism and industrial production” (171) that further impacts the distinctions between the two approaches to death. Sánchez claims that in the historical attitude toward death, it is viewed as present and part of the Mexican's everyday existence. Here, Sánchez uses Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea's idea of a “limit situation” (see Sánchez 175–77) to articulate the multiplicity and contradictory logics dialogically engaged in a “double bind” (Sánchez 177). In particular, Sánchez writes that, for Mexicans and peoples of Latin America, there resides a temporal simultaneity in which “time does not progress toward the not-yet, but, rather, it remains anchored in the present and to the past” (173). These temporal norms are situación limite and are shared by peoples who express a close relationship with death, such as in the Mexican views of death. The Euro-Anglo idea of death, on the other hand, is regarded as an event, a personalized natural fact that terminates life. As an end to a life, death is treated as a taboo topic, avoided in discussions, and regarded only as a future occurrence.Offering an analysis of alternative approaches to Euro-Anglo relations with death is valuable to highlight a closer view of death and a logic that is not generated from the dominant position. For instance, Paz offers a conceptualization of death responding from a different social position that is also dehumanized by the dominant mode of operating. For peoples of Mexico, this includes the dehumanization during the Spanish colonial era, and in powerful modern era political, military, and economic countries like the United States, as well as the systems of power that are replicated and perpetuated by the Mexican government. The colonial-modern systems of domination are historical and social realities relevant to the narrative of death and one's way of interacting in the world. In this view, the Mexican, born of violent death through colonialism, and commodified as part of the modern project, is confronted with the emptiness of progress and modernization.Moreover, the temporal dimensions engage a sensibility that cannot be assimilated into the dominant conceptualization of death. Sánchez, in particular, clarifies temporal contrasts between historical and instrumental approaches, underlying important differences in socio-historical norms. However, a return to Paz's account helps to flesh out another distinction. In my view, the Euro-Anglo and the Mexican attitude toward death differ in their social practices related to death, an aspect that we can locate in Paz's discussion of fiestas and ritual activity. In what follows, I explore Paz's view of the relational interaction between life and death and theorize the role of communal practices that can help trace the resistance occurring from the colonized position.In Paz's “Day of the Dead” essay, he emphasizes the role of ritual. Rituals, for Mexican people, he explains, are frequent and significant, meant to allow people to commune and break away from ordinary affairs. Paz utilizes rituals in a couple of ways, where the first is to emphasize the distinctions between Mexicans and North Americans (the United States and Canada), and the second is to illustrate the ways in which the processes transform social spaces. The differential dynamics are a key intervention of Paz's work to clarify the so-called inner workings of the Mexican, especially as distinct from North Americans (Anglos) and Europeans. Through a discussion of rituals such as fiestas, Paz theorizes a temporal sense that eludes the Euro-Anglo sense of time, as I explained in my discussion of Sánchez's analysis. Fiestas, however, also lead us to another way of understanding the differences between the two cultures: the emphasis on individuality for North Americans versus the communal dynamic found in Mexican fiestas.Ritual, Paz explains, involves those activities in which people come together and enrich their sensibilities. Fiestas enable the ritualistic mode to renew and re-create ways of knowing, being, engaging, and relating. Paz writes that “the fiesta is by nature sacred, literally or figuratively, and above all it is the advent of the unusual. It is governed by its own special rules, that set it apart from other days, and it has a logic, and ethic, and even an economy that are often in conflict with everyday norms” (“Day of the Dead” 50). This is to say that fiestas, as ritual activity, are moments in which tensions, disruptions, and even cohesion can exist when peoples come together, communing in a space that dissolves the rigidity of dominant norms, including temporality, as Sánchez shows. In contrast, for the Anglo-American, the societal goals or interactions do not emphasize an interrelated communality. For instance, in his essay “Notes on the United States,” Paz writes that “American society, unlike all other societies we know of, was founded in order that its citizens might realize their private ends in peace and freedom, on the theory that the common good lies not in a collective or metahistorical end but in the harmonious coexistence of individual ends” (“Notes” 82). Said differently, the liberal ideologies and practices embedded in US society emphasize the individual and promote the well-being of the individual, even as they are in relation to others. By extension, for the Anglo-American, death does not make its mark as a shared cultural phenomenon, but as an event and experience tied to an individual's end of life. Framed through the aim of preserving life, death is masked, distanced, and individualized. Rituals of death for Mexican peoples are differentiated from those of the Euro-Anglo through the view of the individual and communal dynamic.Paz claims fiestas promote social relations that bring people out of the dominant ways of being and into a shared and open interrelatedness. Rituals such as fiestas involve three important features: they disrupt a linear movement of time, they enrich imaginations and sensibilities, and they maintain a space for communing with others (“Day of the Dead” 47). Fiestas as rituals of death illuminate the rich resistant and generative interaction that sustains an interrelated life and death dynamic. Death is treated as a mirror to life, and as a phenomenon that can reveal the lived realities of those in intimate relation with death. For Paz and many subjugated peoples, rituals help reveal the ways in which that relationship is present. This is to say that Day of the Dead fiestas suspend the dominant modes of operating that make death a distant phenomenon. In doing so, fiestas as rituals of death bolster the resistant possibilities by further revealing the tensions that are experienced by those situated in oppressive realities. For instance, Day of the Dead fiestas in Mexico and in the United States, particularly in Latinx celebrations, are ways in which communities dissolve the rigid boundaries between life and death, disregarding the systematized separation of the two (Romo; Venegas; Medina and Cadena). Furthermore, the social gatherings create a space that does not adhere to a conceptualization of death as oppositional to life or as inherently damaging to life. In particular, the fiestas deviate from dominant social treatments of death as negative and an end to an individual life, thereby treating death as an interconnected process that enables an interrelated communality.To conclude, the distinctions between a Euro-Anglo approach to death and a Mexican view of death are justified through a situated analysis that recognizes the weight of coloniality. Paz and Uranga provide insights into accounts of death that are from marginalized positions, thereby contributing to an important distinction between the Euro-Anglo and Mexican conceptions of death. These scholars, along with Sánchez, identify that the distinctions reveal a dominant norm that distances death, and a subaltern approach to death that intimately ties death and life. Such perspectives contribute insights to the recent rise of Day of the Dead fiestas in the United States and Mexico, especially in the face of capitalist endeavors to monetize the celebrations, such as Disney's film Coco, and Mattel's Día de Muertos Barbie dolls (Marchi). Theorizing approaches to communal-centered Day of the Dead fiestas can help reveal how rituals of resistance center alternative modes of relating with the dead and support ongoing efforts to combat commercialization.

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