Friday

It was a week of Fridays. Some weeks are like that, you’re forever on the edge of a weekend, but never quite there.

The first Friday that week was a Tuesday. I got fired from the programming job I’ve had for a couple years now. I wasn’t particularly surprised, companies are made of people, when the people change, the companies change. These things happen. But hey, if you ain’t got no job… it’s Friday. I walked down to the tienda and grabbed a Modelo. As you do. Maybe it was two. It could have been three. But no more. Their fridge is much colder than ours and they’re only thirty feet from the front door. Never buy more than you need.

The next Friday was Wednesday, Halloween.

It’s not much of a holiday down here and honestly, aside from some candy corn I brought down for Elliott, who has been obsessed with the stuff ever since he discovered it last year at Ron’s house, we were pretty much going to skip Halloween this year.

That said, the girls’ dance teacher wanted to take all the kids down the Parrochia/Jardin area after class on Halloween, where, apparently, the expats hand out candy. I thought, well isn’t that creepy of them. But then I’m always slagging the expats and I’ve been trying to do that less so I didn’t say anything. It turned out to be way creepier than even I had imagined, but the kids got to walk around town in their costumes and really didn’t care about anything else. They had a ball.

After the girls’ dance class was over all the kids changed into their Halloween costumes and Michelle, their teacher, the six or so other kids, their families, and the five of us all walked the half mile or so down to the Jardin. There, in exchange for candy, a bunch of older expats took pictures of the all the kids. Not weird at all. Uh…

I might not have thought anything of it if the expats had been taking pictures of all the kids in the Jardin, but they weren’t. They were taking pictures of the Mexican kids. That our kids were taken for Mexican was an accident of assumptions — since we were walking with a group of Mexican families, we must be Mexicans.

It got me thinking about why we all take all the pictures we take. The kids — regardless of nationality — didn’t seem to care, by the end they had buckets full of candy and for children, candy transcends all.

The next Friday was Thursday, Dia de Muertes. Despite the name, around here celebrating Dia de Muertes takes two days.

Day of the dead is a colorful holiday, lots of marigolds, elaborate family shrines, candles and, at night, fireworks. We went out wandering the town in the morning, watching people set up all the painstakingly handmade decorations. I hardly took any pictures though. The expats with their cameras in the Jardin the night before was still in my mind and then, unfortunately, we kept running across more people with cameras behaving badly. Normally I hardly notice expats or tourists, but for some reason they were all over the place for day of the dead, and behaving obnoxiously.

We watched people shoving cameras in the locals’ faces while they tried to make shrines for their dead, the parents they missed, the children they’d lost. And let’s be clear, it wasn’t “people” it was, in all three cases I witnessed, white males of a certain age. And it wasn’t just any locals. They sure as hell weren’t shoving cameras in the face of the guy covered in tattoos with a prominent 13 on the back of his head, no they were doing it to the grandmothers and grandfathers, the people who, again, were least likely to protest.

And I point that out not because the guy has gang tattoos, but because his tattoos make him photographically interesting, more so than a grandmother to my mind. But then he’s intimidating and the grandmother isn’t. Or so you’d think. But the only public act of violence I’ve seen in Mexico was grandmother beating a guy with her purse when he got in her way at a parade, so it’s not like old Mexican women are helpless.

Still, you have to wonder what makes people think it’s okay walk around shoving your camera in a grandma’s face, while she’s in the midst of a celebration designed to honor the dead. It’s rude any day of the week. And, after the experience in the Jardin the night before, I couldn’t help thinking — to what end? Why are we even taking all these pictures? To remember? Are our memories that bad? To show others? To impress our friends with… what exactly? How little you understand the culture that’s been kind enough to allow you to visit it? I don’t understand how anyone comes to think it’s okay to behave this way.

I do know where the idea for the image comes from though — National Geographic. But National Geographic photographers don’t get those images by rudely shoving a camera in someone’s face. Shoving cameras in someone’s face is something shitty photographers do — the people who take pictures no one will ever care about precisely because they have no empathy, no feeling, no soul, lack even the self-awareness to recognize that there is a soul. These are crappy selfies in which the self just happens to be outside the frame.

The people making art out of the beauty they see around them, the people whose images could actually end up in National Geographic don’t take pictures like that because there’s no beauty to be had that way. They don’t take pictures without permission, they don’t take pictures without first getting to know a person, even if only for a few moments.

On Dia de Muertes I watched shit photographer after shit photographer behaving like asses and I didn’t want to be like them, which is why there’s so few images in this post. I’m too shy to go out and meet people and ask to take their photographs, so I took the other sensible path — I put my camera away. The only pictures I have of Dia de Muertes are of me, my family, and few of the public decorations we saw while walking around.

I think that’s how Dia de Muertes is supposed to be anyway. It isn’t the huge party I thought it was. I always thought of it as a Mexican Halloween, but it’s not. It’s a celebration of your dead. Like everything in this country it’s about your family, your history, your people. There are public aspects to it, certainly fireworks and parties, but it’s primarily a more personal holiday. There’s an essay I really like, Let Me Die like a Mexican, which calls Dia de Muertes a “bittersweet reflection on love, loss and life well lived.” That’s very much what it felt like to me.

It’s also the day the dead come back to visit the loved ones they’ve left behind. That’s not metaphorical and it’s not taken lightly. Everything that’s done is done to make their journey back from the underworld more pleasant — the food, the offerings, the alcohol, it’s all for the returning family members. Any student of the world’s bardo literature knows that coming out of the underworld is no easy task. You’re going to want a drink afterward.

Walking around during the day I spent a fair bit of time contemplating how Dia de Muertes managed to survive the Catholic church. It’s the most overtly pagan celebration I’ve ever seen. Sometimes the older pagan ways are too strong to be denied I guess — what comes from below outlasts what is imposed from above. Surprisingly, the recent movie, Coco, does a pretty decent job of capturing what the celebrations here are actually like.

I, on the other hand, cannot do a decent job of explaining what Dia de Muertes was like because I decided I wasn’t invited. My dead are nowhere near here and I’ve got nothing for them even if they came. I’d never really thought about it until that night, but I’m a crap descendant in that regard. I’ve never done anything to honor the dead in my family, certainly nothing of the sort that happens on Dia De Muertes here. I don’t even think about them much if I’m honest. I didn’t even make to their funerals in most cases, what business do I have being out on day of the dead?

So I went back to our apartment. I sat in the little covered outdoor area between the two rooms, listening to the fireworks, watching the flickering colors in the window. I drank a Modelo. Maybe two. It could have been three. I mumbled something about it being Friday, and it was actually Friday by then, and I ain’t got no job. I ain’t got shit to do.