Red and blue lights whirl in the dark. Mission Street at 25th Street in San Francisco is blocked off with police cars this evening. It’s for the dead.
Today is Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, and there is drumming out on the streets while people are spilling in and out of the Mission Cultural Center. There are street vendors selling skeletons made of wax, skeleton posters, Mexican hot chocolate and marigolds outside the center’s door. It is crowded outside and even more crowded in the center because today is the opening gala with performances and artwork for Dia de los Muertos, a ritual celebrated by the peoples of Latin America, more popularized by Mexico. This ancient Aztec ritual is a time for people to remember, honor and worship dead ancestors and the cycle of life, death and rebirth. Dia de los Muertos is held one week up to November 2nd. But the reflections of this culture and celebration through art will remain at the center until mid-November.
There is loud tribal drumming coming from the lower level of the center and its deep accentuated thumps are clearly heard from a humid and crowded upper level. The center is filled with a lingering smell of candles and marigolds and along the walls of the upper floor are works of art, representing a ritual that celebrates death and remembers ancestors who have passed from the earth.
There is an elevated grave and it is covered with white tiles. On the grave, there are a few old black and white photographs, two decorated white skulls, a black skull, a picture of Virgin de Guadalupe, another Virgin Mary made from black wax, and a picture of St. Anthony. There are many strips of bright and colorful pieces of paper and on them are prayers written in English and Spanish.
On the floor surrounding the grave, there are orange marigolds in seven vases and lit candles in tall jars. A white fence surrounds the sides of the grave and there are colorful flowers made from bright pink and purple tissue scattered on and around the grave. Fake green plants lay on the floor at the rear of the tomb. On the wall behind, Mexican proverbs are written over a large, bright-pink paper. “Anything bright,” Alicia Cruz-Hunt says, lures the spirits visually.
Cruz-Hunt, a co-creator of this piece, is wearing huipiles, a traditional native garment. Her huipiles has black polka dots on the trim of its orange-red sleeves. She wears a flowing black skirt and a pair of black boots. Her hair is pulled back and her petite, golden-brown face is painted over snow white with black shadows, like a skull.
Her husband, Ryan Hunt, is nearby and dressed in dark clothing and skull-face makeup. The couple worked on it, cutting and preparing wood, tissue and tile-covering and arranging items such as flowers, pictures, and skulls, for several weeks in the garage of their Potrero Hill home using portions of their home altar and with memories of past celebrations of Dia de los Muertos in Mexico.
“I wanted to represent the visit to the cemetery, which is an important piece in both Central Mexico and Southern Mexico. The visit to the cemetery is very important as a part of the celebration,” says Cruz-Hunt, a few days before the gala.
She is alert and smiling as she talks with people that look at her work. And this altar does what she intended, to remind others of what it is like back home in Mexico. Brenda Arreola, originally form Baja Mexico, takes a long moment to look at Cruz-Hunt’s work.
“Every year on this day we’d go and visit my grandfather or my grandmother and my uncles and take food and drinks and cigarettes and you leave everything there for them. It’s part of our culture. It just a reminder that not to forget the things that you do back home, the things that your grandparents did. Now we are learning that we can do them here.”
Cruz-Hunt remembers the celebrations in Mexico that she incorporated to create this gravesite altar.
In 2001, Cruz-Hunt’s visits her parents’ hometown, Jalco, which is about a day and a half drive from the border. It’s about 6:00 a.m. and she is waking up to the smell of her mother’s chilequiles, tortilla chips topped with tomato sauce, cheese, onions and cilantro. Her mother had been cooking the night before, since the family will spend nearly the whole day at the cemetery on November 1st for Santos Inocentes to honor relatives who died in their youth, and then on November 2nd for Dia De Los Muertos to honor dead ancestors and relatives.
In the last week of October, the people of Jalco had been preparing: offering prayers to their chosen santos, or saints, at the church, fixing their ancestor’s tile or marble graves, filing in faded tomb inscriptions, sweeping around the gravesite, burning excess brushes, and buying sampasuchi, or marigold flowers. Marigolds, Cruz-Hunt says, lures spirits through scent.
Jalco is a ghost town on any other day since many have migrated to the United States to work but since her parents had retired, they’ve returned to live here. Jalco is their birthplace. Many who have roots in the town return just for this celebration. And by the end of the week, the whole town smells of sampasuchi, says Cruz-Hunt.
The rainy season is over and Cruz-Hunt is wearing a tank top, a skirt, a hat to keep the sun from beating down on her face, and flip-flops. Her tias (aunts), mother, and father have all decided who will carry flowers, food, and candles. They’ve already determined which relative to visit first.
Cruz-Hunt and her family begin the one-mile procession on a narrow cobblestone street toward two hills, which make up the town’s only old and new cemetery. They’ve decided to visit her father’s sibling’s graves first; his sisters died when they were children.
Cruz-Hunt’s father, a short man who wears large glasses, is driving a small black truck ahead of her. In the bed of the truck are flowers, food, and some family members who can’t make the steep climb ahead. There are many people behind her carrying food on their heads. As she proceeds to the top of the hill, she sees the poorer houses made of tin and cardboard close by, then the rooftops of homes that are a bit farther off in the distance. The walk reminds Cruz-Hunt of the time when she was seven years old and it rained during Dia De Los Muertos. She broke her flip-flops from slipping on rocks. So she celebrated that day barefoot. She hopes not slip again today.
By the time she reaches the top of the hill, she can see a panoramic view of the hills and valleys filled with lush tropical trees and shrubs. At the top, she bids a farewell to other families who had walked and talked with her, as they have their own family graves to visit.
She enjoys having to look for the graves of her dead young tias. Each family member has a different idea of where these ancestor’s graves are located, and it has them moving in different directions. “Wasn’t it over here,” she would hear one family member say. “No I think it is over here,” another responded, as they weave from tomb to grave. But during their search, she notices as her family stumbles upon a grave, a story emerges. “I remember that family. That’s right, she died of that,” Cruz-Hunt’s mother says. Cruz-Hunt also notices that some graves have not been visited. No one has maintained it. She also sees poorer graves, the ones with wooden crosses with carved names. She sees expensive graves that are made with marble.
A family from town has brought a Mariachi group up to play a las Mananitas for a dearly departed nearby. And when Cruz-Hunt and her family find her tia’s grave, she stands in front of it and her family is gathered around, either sitting on the tombstones of other graves or sitting on a cement bench that her father bought for visits like these. Her father begins the story of how his younger sister died. Cruz-Hunt notices a change in her father’s voice and face. It’s softer. And she hears him tell the story as if he hadn’t told it before. He tells the story like he hadn’t told it last year. But he tells it again and she sees him almost as a child again, reliving the actual moment: “We were at home and she was coughing blood,” Cruz-Hunt remembers him saying.
She spends a few hours at this gravesite as her family members pitch in a story of their own. This is what she likes the most. The stories. And all the while, she eats tamales, chile and cheese wrapped with maize. Hours later, after her family finishes this hill, they will descend into the valley then climb up the next hill to visit more relatives and ancestors.
Jalco gravesites have pictures of saints, the Virgin de Guadalupe and crosses- characteristic of these town people’s Catholicism. In addition, Cruz-Hunt says they pray to their ancestors. They also punish saints, or turn the saint’s pictures upside down on the grave or altar until their prayer has been granted. The fake flowers are also characteristic of Jalco and these flowers stay long after everyone cleans up the next day.
A year later for Dia de Los Muertos, Cruz-Hunt and Hunt visit Oaxaca, a large, urban town in southern Mexico. In Oaxaca, the tradition is at night and the procession starts at the center square near Santo Domingo church. The streets are narrow but paved and the lights don’t go out as often as it does in the small provincial town of Jalco. The procession is slow and it gives her more time too look at lights, brightly painted colonial homes and the altars at the clothing and jewelry stores along the streets. People strike drums, shake rattles and dance around her.
At the Oaxacan cemetery, it is pitch dark but candles illuminate the graves. There is one gravesite she notices. It has no cross, but instead, a sculpted angel with lights that dramatically light it from underneath. In this region, she notices a more indigenous feel with this ritual. She notices the black pottery and white sugar skulls, which represent those ancestors who have died. With some of the skulls, the mouth is open. She learns that the people of this region use these skulls to mock death.
“That is how they perceive death. They don’t shy away from it. They are not afraid of it,” she says. Cruz-Hunt also smells copal, incense made of solidified tree sap and it is characteristic to the region, which practices traditional medicine by curanderos, or folk healers. She sees far less religious articles than she sees in back in Jalco. But the intent is all the same. These town people celebrate death and honor their ancestors.
Back at the Mission Cultural Center, a band is setting up and there are more people now. The music downstairs that can be heard is no longer drumming to a tribal beat, but one with more flow to move the hips. People in pairs stop to look at Cruz-Hunt and Hunt’s piece, then point at certain objects, and quietly speak with each other with the objects they see on the gravesite altar.
Cruz-Hunt doesn’t consider herself an artist, at least not in the sense of how artists at the center, in her observation, conceptualize their work with a political or social base. Cruz-Hunt and Hunt’s piece is far more traditional compared to Bound by Roots, Separated By Color, which has cutouts of a city as a background, several television monitors that show Virgin de Guadalupe in various video editing processes, and candles to honor Malcom X and Tupac.
Her eyes widen and she smiles because her work reminds others of their own Dia De Los Muertos. “It is such a beautiful celebration, how people individually honor their family members. A lot of energy goes into creating something beautiful,” Cruz-Hunt says.
