Día de Muertos in Oaxaca
Graves & Graveyards
Page Outline
Halloween Night in Xoxocatlan Cemetery
Tight packed crowds fill the streets heading into the cemetery.
Merchants sell everything from snacks and toys to clothes and colored rocks.
Nobody objects to the living stopping for street food …
…but the better sort of person sits around the family grave and turns his thoughts to memories of the departed.
Candles and flowers and a few food offerings were traditional. Skeleton manikins are apparently a new development
Since the dead visit their home altars on Día de Muertos, it is a little unclear —apparently to everybody— what they are doing in the cemetery as well.
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All Saints in the Municipal Cemetery
It is easy to be impressed with the wealth displayed in Oaxacan graves. A family grave can hold four or five people, who may be moved to a potter’s field if the grave rent is not paid to the city on time.
“Sand paintings” are usually outside the cemetery, where there is more space. Putting one on a tomb is efficient, but rare.
The little cubes are decorative candles.
This shooting gallery is among the distractions set up just outside the cemetery. A buck made is, well, a buck.
The elaborate lettering under this mural inside the cemetery reads: “Heart that loves, heart that kills.” Go figure. (And yes, each figure is sitting on a date glyph from the pre-Columbian 260 day calendrical cycle. Go figure some more.)
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Background Design: Artisanal Paper, Francisco Toledo
