It’s the day after Dia de Muertos and I am partied out for a while.
If you don’t know about it, Dia de Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is a Mexican holiday on November 1st and 2nd, honoring deceased loved ones by blending Aztec beliefs with Catholicism in a 2-day celebration where families invite their loved one’s spirits to return for a joyful reunion. The celebration includes parades, music, and traditional dances and foods, all emphasizing that death is a part of the human experience to be embraced rather than feared.
It is not just a Mexican holiday. Over 40,000 people gathered in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles to celebrate, and in other part of the US with large Mexican populations, similar, smaller celebrations were held. And of course, Disney immortalized the celebration in Coco, the movie.
Other countries that celebrate Dia de Muertos include Peru, Guatemala. El Salvador, the Philippines, Haiti and Bolivia.
The symbols of Day of the Dead include happy skeletons (calacas) and skulls (calaveras), Caterina, a fancy-dressed female skeleton figure taken from 1910 political cartoon lampooning the rich, and the Xoloitzcuintli (Xolo), or Mexican Hairless dog, which is believed to guide souls in the afterlife.
The celebration here in Ajijic actually started the day before – not with Halloween (although kids trick or treat), but with the celebration of the Virgin of Rosalia, the patron of a local Chapel of the Rosary, built between 1650 and 1690 and rebuilt several times. The celebration included Banda Estrellas Del Lago, which plays loud original compositions in which most of the instruments are on a different key, but seem to work together as people danced. While the Banda Estrellas Del Lago played a few dozen yards away, a local community group set off a Castillo, a forty-foot tall steel-framed “castle” with rotating arms and spinning wheels driven by skyrockets. The effect is loud, bright, a bit dangerous (a piece of the Castillo flew off (as it was designed to do) and landed in a nearby food tent almost starting a fire, (which it was not designed to do).
The next day Dia de Muertos continued. Since Ajijic is a heavy music town there were marching bands, parades, rock bands, mariachi, folk dancing, and even kids’ comedy songs.
Day 1, November 1, was for the Angelitos– the children – and featured a parade of little ones – and some not so little – dressed as white satin angels and Catrinas. After the parade, the larger/older Angelitos’s mounted stage and sang to mostly 70’s American music, which is popular in Mexico. The folkloric dance group Xicantzin followed them with traditional music. And of course all the clubs and bars were rocking with local bands.
On November 2, two stages were going from early in the afternoon to late at night, one in the main plaza of the town and the other on the Malecon – the park along the lakeshore. At 4:00 p.m. Ballet Folklorico Ixcanstzin strutted their stuff on the Malecon stage after Lola Tequila thrilled the huge crowd with her sometimes funny, sometimes caustic, and always beautiful singing.
They was followed by a contest for the best painted and dressed Xolo dog on the Malecon stage, and then a concert by the CREM choir – a very high-powered local school for children and adult singers. Crowds flocked later to Mr. Marbles, a local hard rock group, and then kept on dancing to the pop band Mary’s Island ( 150,000+ streams on Spotify and growing), both in the Plaza stage.
The highlight of the night was on the Malecon Stage where one of Jalisco best mariachi’s Mariachi Rel Axixic, was joined with one of Jalisco’s (and Mexico’s) best mariachi schools, the Pedro Ray Escuela de Mariachi. With over 30 artists on stage the crowd of over 1000 on the Malecon were treated to a unique performance that will likely never be duplicated. Which is why I am partied out.
Patrick O’Heffernan
