Mexican-born Amy Celorio Ayala, 23, lived in Vancouver for 10 months. While learning English at a private college, she was able to experience, and even enjoy, Halloween. But when she returned home she noticed that the North American holiday is over-shadowing the importance of Mexico’s Día de los muertos (Day of the Dead).
Amy Celorio Ayala.
Photo courtesy of Amy Celorio Ayala
“Día de los muertos is something deeper. It’s a great way to see death as different and as a new road, not about monsters and witches,” says Celorio Ayala.
Traditional celebrations of Día de los muertos happens on Nov. 1 and they are meant to celebrate family and friends who have died. Altars with pictures, water, food, and seasonal flowers are set up to honour the dead, and it gives the living a place to pray for loved ones.
“We also go to the cemetery to visit our families that are dead,” says Celorio Ayala, “but it’s not in sadness. You just remember them with love.”
Celorio Ayala says that celebrations of Halloween are over-shadowing the dialogue that Día de los muertos can bring about death. She is well aware, and regrets, that the traditions and intentions of Día de los muertos are not being passed down to her generation.
“Teenagers, or people of my age, don’t put a lot of effort to continue with these types of traditions. They are thinking about too many other things,” she says.
But Ayala Celorio is hopeful that people of her generation, and even Mexicans living in Vancouver, will find some time and space to continue to enrich Mexican traditions that, already, have deep roots. Astrid Hadad, a cabaret diva-comedienne and performance artist from Mexico, will be giving some people an opportunity to do just that.
Hadad will be in Vancouver for two nights with her band Los Tarzanes at the Vogue theatre to celebrate Día de los muertos. Her show will be filled with many traditional elements of the Mexican holiday, but with a contemporary twist that addresses serious social issues in a humorous and entertaining way.
“Día de los muertos is an occasion for me to express my ire towards those who keep us from freely enjoying our short stay here on earth, both in Mexico and around the world,” says Hadad.
She agrees with fellow Mexicans, like Celorio Ayala, that Halloween decides to celebrate death in a way reminiscent of scary movies, and is concerned about how it’s affecting Mexico.
“This vision of death is also gaining ground in Mexico, but deeper roots still abide,” says Hadad.
Through her show Hadad wants to help reconnect Mexicans, and show others, what Día de los muertos really means. Instead of doing it in a folksy way, she aspires to recreate the practices and help people find new ways of honouring death, while letting her love for Mexico and her people’s generosity towards the living and the dead carry her.
“It’s our way to show them [the dead] that they live on inside us, as we will live on after our death,” says Hadad. “It helps us remember that we are but a link in a long chain.”
Astrid Hadad
Photo courtesy of Gwen Kallio
Día de los muertos celebration with Astrid Hadad
Vogue Theatre
Thursday, October 25 & Friday 26 October, 8:00pm
Tickets: $45/$37 (plus charges)
www.voguetheatre.com
604-569-1144
Details: www.mundomundo.com
With files from Monique Kroeger
Día de Los Muertos is a beautiful celebration of our loved ones. I experienced it for the first time just after beginning my studies at Seattle University in 1994, organized by one of our professors from Latin America. Each student was given the opportunity to speak about a deceased loved one, whose picture had been placed on a table with flowers or other adornments. That year they held it on Nov. 3, which happened to be the 7th anniversary of the sudden death of my dear first wife, Heidi, who died suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm in 1987. This Día celebration was a truly unforgettable experience.