Week 5 Miercoles

Day of the Dead preparations begin in earnest, while children in costume parade through the streets to celebrate Halloween. Mexicans like to talk about death, while British people try to avoid it, so some of the whole celebration is quite hard to stomach.

Trick-or-Treating children run round the houses singing a special song about being “angelitos” or little angels who have fallen from the sky. However, this is also the world for children who die young, which makes me a little uncomfortable about the whole thing, especially since some of them seem determined to become angelitos rather quickly by trick or treating on the highway.

Little altars are appearing all over the city, with pine needles, yellow flowers and candles. Mexicans believe that the dead return on the nights of the first and second of November to celebrate with the living – and even if most people don’t really believe that truly any more, they build altars to remember their dead.

The altars use pine needles as a carpet, with yellow marigold petals trailed to provide a strong smell to attract the dead through the house. They also have candles to light the way and food and other things that the dead person enjoyed in life.

Local schoolchildren are having an “altar competition’ in the Zocalo, dressed in traditional costume and heaping flowerpetals on their installations. I particularly like the Che Guevara altar, with beret, guns, and a knife sharing the space with the traditional bread of the dead.


However much fun the children are having mocking up their altars, most will have built one at home in earnest. Celebrating the dead is a serious business as well as a big party.

We visit Casa De Luna Maya – which is a birth and children’s centre – to sign Daisy up for baby massage classes. They have an altar for their own ‘angelitos’, children who have died in childbirth and early infancy. Each has a cake with their name on it on an altar with candles. It makes me want to cry. Paul finds it sad too, once he realises it is in fact an altar, rather than a bake sale. We are both relieved that he doesn’t ask how much the cakes cost.