Dia de la Muerte

For the past few weeks the parents of the students at Jane and Riley's school have been meeting to discuss and plan for Pantheon Loyola, the Day of the Dead celebration at the school. This celebration is very important to some of the catholics in Mexico, for some more than Christmas. For others it's just a tradition. On November 2nd, people crowd the cemeteries (pantheons) to leave flowers, gifts and food for the deceased. The school plans this celebration every year and the students prepare a tumba (tomb or crypt) to represent a famous person. In the past they've done musicians, actors, etc. This year they focused on Mexican heroes, mostly from the Revolution.

Anyway, here is the tumba from Jane's group:

Riley's group:

Also the parents of each grade got together and did a stand to tell about various states in Northern Mexico.

3rd grade (tercero) did Nuevo Leon:

4th grade (cuarto) did Sonora:

We worked on each of these stands and tombs for many hours (mostly the parents) and on the day of the event (Thursday) lots of parents spent all day at the school getting ready. I was able to help only a little on each one, but was glad to get to know some other parents.

At the actual event, Jane's group was supposed to sit by the tomb and pretend to be the mourning family of the deceased. That lasted for about un momento. There was food and halloween junk for sale and I finally got one of my favorite Mexican foods, tamales.

Jane got her hair painted pink.

The high school students designed and made a picture out of colored sawdust for the ground in front of the stands. I saw them working on it and it was painstaking. They would get a handful of the sawdust and press it into a stencil they had made. Then when the stencil or section was done, they would spray it with water and put a board over it to stand on and press down. The finished artwork was probably 5 X 15 meters in size.

The whole festival was very labor intensive, but I gained an appreciation for Mexicans ability to work hard and talk a lot.