Honoring the Ancestors and Preserving Living Traditions:

Días de Muertos en Xochimilco, Mexico

Words by T-Kay Sangwand

Sunset in the Xochimilco canals after días de muertos (2018). Credit: Leslie de León

Octavio Isaac López Váldez laying flowers on a family grave in the Santa Cruz Acalpicxa cemetery, Xochimilco (2018).            Credit: Héctor Ortega

Today I visit my great-grandfather, my grandmother, their in-laws, and my mother who are here in this cemetery. My grandparents taught me this tradition. They would also come to leave flowers [on the graves] on September 29 and on November 2 they would come to light candles [on the graves]. They told me that if we didn’t do this, then [our ancestors] would not visit. The moment that you leave them flowers you are mentally telling them that you are waiting for them at home. They know that we wait for them year after year with open arms with love and affection. In general, people who were Catholic as well as from other religions practiced this tradition of leaving flowers on the graves [on September 29]. I don’t really know if this is a Catholic tradition or a prehispanic one; honestly, we the people of Xochimilco are more governed by our prehispanic past and the mix of both cultures that resulted from the conquest and its evangelization.

- Octavio Isaac López Váldez, inhabitant of Santa Cruz Acalpicxa, Xochmilco.

Sugar skulls for sale in the Xochimilco market (2018). Credit: Alejandro Pompa Álvarez

Intro

Outside of Mexico, Day of the Dead is superficially understood and commercially sold as an aesthetic - sugar skulls, skeleton face painting, brightly colored tissue paper cut with intricate designs, vibrant orange flowers, and now, Disney’s Coco. As Octavio’s quote above indicates, días de muertos is not merely spectacle but also a highly personal, intimate and ritualized remembrance of one’s ancestors and loved ones. In Xochimilco, one of the southernmost burroughs in Mexico’s City sprawl, a group of youth wield community-driven archiving as an act of resistance to combat the commercialization and homogenization of Day of the Dead by documenting the specificity of días de muertos practices in their burrough, centering the remembrance and honoring of ancestors, and highlighting the artisans and their labor that facilitate the cultural practices around días de muertos so that these traditions do not fade from the community’s collective memory over time.

Días de Muertos Xochimilco team. Credit: Héctor Ortega

Who

The youth-led Días de Muertos Xochimilco project team consists of 83 people and is coordinated by two youth from Xochimilco,  Luis Carlos Mendoza Cruz and Víctor Rosas Bastida. The team also includes nine youth community liaisons from Xochimilco, an institutional sponsor from the National Institute for Indigenous Communities (INPI), an archivist (myself), a faculty member from the National Autonomous University of Mexico Department of Art and Design (UNAM-FAD), and 69 students from 4 universities across 10 different disciplines from the arts to the sciences who serve as facilitators for community events, photographers, transcribers, videographers, illustrators, and interviewers for the project.

Cemetery in San Luis Tlaxialtemalco, Xochimilco. Credit: Daniel Pérez Salvador

What

From September-December 2018, the Días de Muertos Xochimilco project team produced 89 hours of audio including soundscapes and 52 interviews with artisans who create and cultivate the products associated with días de muertos (i.e., cempaxúchitl flower, papel picado, sugar skulls, bread, candles); elders who shared local folklore and related how they’ve experienced días de muertos traditions over time as well as community leaders and scholars who provided additional historical and cultural context for these practices. The documentation also includes 40 hours of video as well as 3,100 images of días de muertos practices across the 17 neighborhoods and 14 native communities that comprise the burrough of Xochimilco. The resulting digital archive will reside with INPI and be shared through digital and physical exhibitions, print publications, and community events. While there are archival collections that contain extensive documentation related to días de muertos in Mexico (such as at the Museum of Popular Cultures Documentation Center in Mexico City), this is the first collection that focuses specifically on the diversity of practices within Xochimilco.

Trajineras in the principal canal of Xochimilco. Credit: T-Kay Sangwand

Significance of Xochimilco

Over the past nine months as a Fulbright Scholar based at the federal Ministry of Culture in Mexico City, I’ve collaborated with the Días de Muertos Xochimilco team to provide basic archival training and concrete archival support but also to research how community-driven documentation projects can be both successful and sustainable and how the resulting documentation can be shared in ethical ways that do not exploit the people documented or contribute to the hyper-commodification of the celebration. In 1999, UNESCO added Xochimilco to its list of World Heritage sites and in 2003, UNESCO proclaimed días de muertos in Mexico (officially called Indigenous Festivity Dedicated to the Dead) as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Additionally, Articles 57 and 58 of the Mexico City Constitution grants the native communities of Xochimilco the same recognition and rights as other indigenous communities in Mexico. For these factors, días de muertos in Xochimilco is a particularly rich site to explore the ethical complexities of documentation and access. While UNESCO recognition of sites and cultural practices can boost local economies and helps justify and indeed facilitate preservation efforts, there is also the risk of commodifying their “authenticity” resulting in a performance for outsiders and inhibiting the fluidity of living and evolving cultural practices. (The recently established Día de Los Muertos parade in Mexico City which is actually based on a James Bond movie is an example of this.)

Luis Carlos Mendoza Cruz (coordinator of Días de Muertos Xochimilco) interviewing the principal organizer of the celebration in Cacalote, Santiago Tulyehualco, Xochimilco. Credit: Víctor Rosas Bastida

Ethical questions

As with any archival collection, access to the Días de Muertos Xochimilco archive holds many ethical implications that are dependent on community norms as well as social, geographical, and political contexts. While INPI provides an institutional home for this project, INPI did not interfere with the day-to-day work of the project and explicitly stated that the project coordinators from Xochimilco should have complete discretion over what is documented and how the material is accessed.

The concern over hyper-commodification arose multiple times as we documented días de muertos practices across Xochimilco. Xochimilco is already a major tourist destination in Mexico City due to the still functioning prehispanic system of canals where you can hire someone to take you on a boat (trajinera) and float down the canals while blasting reggaeton music and sipping on micheladas. While this is an accepted part of life in Xochimilco, the youth project coordinators expressed wariness over Xochimilco’s días de muertos celebrations, many of which are familial and intimate, becoming a tourist destination; they cited the días de muertos celebration in Mixquic (a native community also in southern Mexico City), where families have had difficulty entering their cemetery because there are so many onlookers, as what they do not want to happen in Xochimilco. In order to mitigate potential hyper-commodification, the project coordinators from Xochimilco decided to provide print, not online, access to some of the documentation that is similar to what is depicted in Disney’s Coco and that may have commercial appeal.

Participants in celebration, Cacalote, Santiago Tulyehualco, Xochimilco. Credit: Daniel Pérez Salvador

One of the most unconventional días de muertos celebrations that we documented took place in the Cacalote neighborhood of Santiago Tulyehualco, a community far removed from the main center of Xochimilco. Over the past twenty years, large groups of men of varying ages dress up as women, supposedly as grieving widows, and parade to the cemetery with fake coffins and a live brass band. Residents join the parade, the streets are packed and the atmosphere is festive and reminiscent of Carnival. The men who dress up as women flirt with other men, and at least on this one night, gender and sexual fluidity seems more permissible than in everyday life. As we curated what content to share publicly, the project coordinators carefully selected documentation that captured the spirit of the celebration but that would hopefully not cause scandal or gossip for the individuals depicted, especially in a small town environment (despite Xochimilco being a part of Mexico City).

The digital archive for Días de Muertos Xochimilco will eventually reside institutionally at INPI but the youth from Xochimilco will retain intellectual stewardship over the collection; they will decide its content, its description and access to the materials. This will be the first jointly stewarded collection at INPI and provides a powerful precedent for future joint stewardships with other indigenous communities across the nation. Considering the historical theft and appropriation of indigenous culture (not just in Mexico, but worldwide), self-representation and community driven stewardship are important step towards cultural preservation and autonomy.  In the case of Días de Muertos Xochimilco, self-representation through community archiving combats the commodification of local culture for foreign consumption, strengthens the community’s social and cultural fabric, and serves as a powerful bridge across generations with youth leading the way.

T-Kay Sangwand is a Certified Archivist, the Librarian for Digital Collection Development at UCLA, and a 2018-2019 Fulbright Scholar based at the federal Ministry of Culture in Mexico City. She has previously facilitated international archival collaborations in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia through her work at the University of Texas at Austin’s Human Rights Documentation Initiative and UCLA’s International Digital Ephemera Project. She is also a resident DJ at dublab and hosts the monthly radio program, “The Archive of Feelings.”