Dia de los Muertos

One of the biggest differences between foreigners here and local Guatemalans – you know, aside from height, skin color, and the ability to balance objects on their heads – is the way they dress. Backpackers, with a few exceptions, tend to travel light, bringing only a week or so’s worth of clothing. Things get dirty quickly and stay dirty for a very long time. The majority of Guatemalans, however, always dress to impress. My Guatemalan house mom gets up at 4:30 every morning to get ready to leave by 6. Men mixing cement by hand will often wear slacks and dress shoes. Rural women vending tortillas, chicken or veggies on the street will have their ornate traditional Mayan dress on display. Despite having limited resources, the Guatemalans still seem to value their appearance.

This past weekend, Day of the Dead celebrations were in full force. My Guate-family invited me to join them in their annual trip to clean and adorn the graves of lost ones in the cemetery. I thought that if there was one day for me to dress up in Guatemala then this must surely be it. After all, we were going to pay respects to the dead; I might as well look respectable.

Wearing the only button down shirt that I brought and my khaki-ish pants, I walked out of my room moments before we would leave. I was shocked. Paty’s two sons – Javier, 6, and Diego, 3 – were dressed in t-shirts and board shorts. Even Paty was dressed down to jeans, sneaks, and an OK t-shirt. Her sister wore stylishly torn jeans and a white top and her brother-in-law wore a label tee and jeans as well. Abuelita, Paty’s mom, wore her long skirt and beige old lady stockings, but I’m pretty sure she wears that same outfit to sleep. I couldn’t believe it; for the first time since I arrived in Guatemala, I was the most dressed-up person in the room.

We walked outside and there was joyous pandemonium in the streets. The Cemeterio General is just across the Cuarto Calle and today the usually fast-moving street was turned into a parking lot. We joined in with the crowd and headed towards the gate. There were ice cream vendors navigating through the heaps of people, ringing his cow bell. Vendors sold mixed packages of fresh fruit. Everyone seemed to be dressed as casually as my Guate-family. Kids smiled and ran around in the streets. Their parents and relatives appeared light-hearted as well. For a day that I thought would be somber and tranquil, spirits were incredibly high.

The Parque Calvario sits at the entrance to the cemetery and it is a sad excuse for a park. It is a small triangle island in a sea of heavily trafficked streets. There is a run-down basketball court that is now used to hold nightly soccer matches and a few aged pieces of playground equipment. This weekend, however, the streets were blocked. In place of the cars and chicken buses that would be passing through, there was an entire street fair. Vendors peddled burnt MP3 CDs of Michael Jackson and pirated DVDs, there were churro and fried chicken stands filling the air with their delicious, oily scents, and there were even small, motor-less, hand-moved carnival rides. Everywhere you looked there were flowers and wreaths, beautifully colorful and colorfully beautiful.

Inside the cemetery, the grounds are broken up into three sections: upper, middle, and lower class. Yes, that’s right. Even after death there are still class distinctions. When you walk into the cemetery, you feel like you are walking into a tiny city of the dead. The huge above-ground tombs are meant to hold entire families, but a few exceptionally rich individuals have a micro-temple all to themselves. The graves in this first section are ornate with pillars and columns and all sorts of other extravagant features to make sure you know that, even in death, they are still richer than you. I forgot the exact number, but to keep your body in this part you have to pay upwards of Q10,000 every 12 months. Fail to pay and you will be evicted. Yes, I’m serious.

We skipped right through the upper class section with Paty’s family. Instead, we headed to the grave of Paty’s father who was killed twenty years ago in a car accident; he was 51. Like theother graves in this section, his grave was nice and simple. No bells and whistles here; just standard cement box with a nice plaque on the front (missing two letters from his last name).Javier and Diego tugged on Paty’s leg until she gave them a couple Q to get two ice cream cones. As they ran down the hill, you could see the sadness on Paty’s face. Her eyes seemed lost inside her head, replaying memories that I could not possibly imagine. Before long, however, she was smiling and laughing again as she watched her boys play with Hannah, my American housemate.

After Paty’s family finished cleaning the grave and decorating it with flowers and candles, we moved on to the grave of Abuelita’s father. As we walked along, the cheerful sounds of a live Marrimba band accompanied our steps and filled the entire cemetery with its warm tones. As the family paid tribute to another family member, I sat down and tried to make sense of the scene around me. Kites filled the sky like a school of jellyfish, their tentacles squiggling in the water. The specter-looking pieces of paper peacefully floated and watched over the kids who were holding their strings, some standing on the ground and others on top of 10 ft tall grave stacks. Vendors walked by offering water, ice cream, and other little snacks; it felt more like a music fest than a celebration of the dead.

We had one more stop to make in the cemetery before going back home to feast. We walked away from the middle class area into the lower class section. The difference was immediate. Whereas the land in the two higher-class areas was level and well kept, the land in this last section was illogically hilly and overgrown with weeds. The people we passed carried machetes to clear away the brush covering their deceased loved ones and their clothes were farm-worker dirty. The graves themselves were nothing more than a little tombstone head and a small concrete casket halfway burred in the ground. We headed to about as far and remote as you can get in the cemetery and found a grave that was well out of sight from the nearest pathway.

The next day I would ask Jaime, the El Nahual director, if he thought the Day of the Dead was a happy day and he would immediately say yes; in fact, he would not really seem to get why I didn’t understand that. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I was imagining something like afuneral procession, everyone dressed in black and a reverent silence. I don’t know. But whatever it was, it was not what I found.

It was a day to remember the dead, but it was not a day for mourning. After Abuelita and Lorena, Paty’s sister, finished cleaning the remote grave, Javier and Diego finally got to have a go with their newly acquired kites. As the kids failed miserably to get their kites to take flight, the entire family broke out into a roaring laughter. Every time the kites would dive bomb into a bush, the laughs came pouring in more and more. It was amazing. It was amazing to watch Paty’s attitude change so drastically in only an hour, to watch her go from reliving probably the most painful memory of her life to living so fully in this moment with her children. It was impossible to avoid the inevitability of death on this day, but it was also as if that didn’t matter. It was as if everyone standing in that cemetery, flying kites and decorating graves only let the bitterness of loss made life taste that much sweeter. It was as if that everyone believed that life was something worth celebrating, even in the face of death.