For the last twelve years (give or take a pandemic year) Cailin and I have thrown a Halloween party. It’s a holiday party for our production company Bicephaly Pictures which celebrates our deep love for all things spooky. This year, with Mike’s brother’s wedding taking place the same day in Baja, we stayed a couple extra days in La Paz. This town celebrates Halloween on a level I have never experienced before in my life.
After eating our first “jate” (the La Paz version of hot dogs, wrapped in bacon, covered in mayo), we wandered through the dark empty streets, occasionally seeing a ghost or two but nothing too wild. We spotted a couple decked-out cars splattered with fake blood, some wrapped in yellow caution tape or with a bloody body part dangling out of the trunk.
Soon, more cars started lining up and we followed them down on foot towards the Malecón, the beach promenade that separates the Sea of Cortez from the street. It grew into an impromptu parade, stretching the entire three miles of Paseo Alvaro Obregon. Masked motorcyclists revving their engines while throwing candy into the streets, kids with blood-caked faces scrambling to catch it, mothers popping their skeleton-dressed newborns out of sunroofs.
The costume that kept coming up with the most frequency was a nun with demonic black and white face make-up. It’s not so much a tribute to the nun Valak from The Conjuring, a horror movie that came out in 2018, as much as it honors its more recent interpretation that blew up on TikTok. “La Monja de la Feria” is a carnival performer from a traveling fair in Durango who dances as a ride known as a tagada spins around her. The New York Times of course has a whole deep-dive analysis around its popularity with various professors of Latino performance studies weighing in. All I know is that it is indeed an addictive video, equal parts haunting and entertaining, and I have watched it on a loop ever since.
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When I didn’t think the festivities couldn’t possibly be topped, the following night we drove to Todos Santos for Día de Muertos or Day of the Dead. It’s a celebration to honor the spirits of loved ones who have died — one so grandiose that they must return to attend the party thrown for them. November 1st honors deceased children and infants, November 2nd is dedicated to adults who have passed. This year has held a lot of goodbyes, with family and friends who have transitioned to the next world. From old age, from overdoses, by suicide or still in the womb, from cancers and COVID-19. It was so life-affirming to be thinking of each of them while taking in the festivities.
A competition took place in front of the public plaza for the best Catrinas or Catrines. The Catrina was first originated in the early 1900’s by artist José Guadalupe Posada, a political cartoonist who drew satires of dandy-looking skeletons (calaveras) to remind people that even if they aspired to look like aristocratic Europeans while they were alive, they would all end up dead in the end anyways. The contestants paraded down the runway in front of a panel of judges, in elaborate costumes all made from recycled materials. The winner stayed in character the whole time, her costume a celebration to the Aztec queen of the underworld, Mictecacíhuatl.
Ofrendas or altars were everywhere, with elaborately framed pictures of the deceased. Drinks to quench their thirst, papel picado or traditional paper banners representing the wind, bread for sustenance, candles to light their way. In Mexico City, Kristine sent updates as she went to the largest flower market, where marigolds came in by the truckload. With her 10 year-old neighbor Miguel, they spent days building an altar to his mother who passed away last year at the age 39. She cleaned the building and lived with her five kids as a single mom on the first floor. The kids still live downstairs together and Kristine wrote, “May she have visited us over the past two days even in our deepest sleep and filled our building’s inhabitants, her family and especially her youngest, the adored Martin, with her endless love.”
The smell of marigolds or cempasúchil hung in the air, the fragrance said to attract souls to the altar. The flower is native to Mexico since pre-Columbian times, beginning with the Nahua. Back in New York Kishori also picked some up to decorate for Diwali, the festival of lights happening this weekend. Marigolds are tied to many Hindu celebration and rituals. They made their way to India as Spanish and Portuguese traders first transported them from Mexico more than 350 years ago. Archaeobotanist Jack Harlan marveled at the abundance of marigolds at the 1960 Dussehra festival in northwest India’s Kulu Valley, writing: “Marigolds were everywhere. Garlands were sold on the street, draped from tents, hung over doorways, worn about the neck.” Much like the costume of the demonic nun, India took a foreign import and made it their own, to the point that the remix has superseded the original source.
La Paz still held some signs of the first Category 5 storm ever to make landfall on the Pacific Coast of North or South America. Fifty-six boats lay akimbo in the water, slowly tipping more and more with each passing day and no way to get them out. Acapulco was devastated, where meteorologists saw what looked like a quotidian tropical storm turn into Hurricane Otis in a matter of hours. The storm’s transformation is still a mystery, a week later.
David Wallace-Wells writes, “You can see local and regional impacts of these “gobsmackingly bananas” temperature anomalies almost everywhere you look, but perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the world’s oceans. As of a few weeks ago, nearly 80 percent of the world’s oceans were experiencing heat wave conditions, and as the climate scientist Daniel Swain points out, we have never observed the arrival of El Niño in waters anywhere near as warm as these. That isn’t to say we need to toss out our whole understanding of El Niño’s effect on global weather patterns, he tells me, but, particularly when it comes to second-order impacts brought about via temperature gradients in the ocean and other more distant “teleconnections” in the climate system, we should probably proceed with some humility, mindful that there are no perfect analogues for the meteorological conditions of the present.”
Field trip: MARATHON SUNDAY! Come find me dancing/crying/cheering/eating bagels up and down Lafayette Avenue all day long.
Till next time,
ASK