Día

Our Lord of Looking Good in Flowers

One of my favorite holidays is Dia de los Muertos, for which San Antonio went all-out this year. San Anto (my workplace) had a modest celebration of its own, coupled with the expansion of our office space and our quarterly artist festival/block party. My job was to decorate the altar (above) and run the cookie decorating table.

Wahoo!

But what I really want to post about is the celebration at La Villita, a small merchant village located along the river walk downtown. San Anto had a pop-up shop there over Muertos weekend, so luckily I had the chance to check out the festivities.

The big ol' lanterns were my favorite.

Here comes the procession.

Large skeleton puppets marched too.

Incense-swinger leads the way

Altars in honor of passed on loved ones are essential to Dia de los Muertos.

Save mother earth.

The gentleman at the bottom didn't seem to be part of the show, but he was dancing his booty off nonetheless.

Samuel Vasquez and Raquel Zawrotny: "The altar is not only in honor of past loved ones, but also a celebration in how they are immortalized through us and are never really gone. This altar is about the great mystery of life and death through the use of mythological and folkloric imagery found throughout the world."

Part of what I enjoy about Mexican art is how explosively colorful it is. Working at an arts organization in a primarily Hispanic neighborhood means that many of the events I have the privilege to be part of are explosively colorful, too.

I've heard tell this year that homes in poor neighborhoods are bright colors because that paint is cheaper and better deflects sunlight. I don't know if it's true, but I also ran across an article (lost to me at the moment) positing that the color white is associated with cleanliness and professionalism, and that this crosses over into perceptions of social class. The affluent arrange their homes in white - clean, tasteful, safe; whereas the poor live in bright colors, perceived as garish, loud, and chaotic. The American dream is not usually heard as including an orange picket fence.

There's a tendency among white Americans to think of ourselves as having no culture. We're boring, white-bread, "basic" - the latter of which I learned from my roommates (as in, "drinking pumpkin spice lattes is so basic!", speaking of white chicks who patronize Starbucks en masse during autumn). Other cultures are "colorful". People, especially women, become "exotic". I used to be grateful my dad was Cuban because it made me feel less boring than my Anglo classmates. My mom's family may have deep roots in the white South, but at least my dad came from somewhere different, somewhere ethnic. (No matter that his family is also white, descended largely from white Europeans in Cuba, and lived a life of leisure with black servants before leaving the country on a vacation visa.)

Thinking of yourself as the "basic" people makes everyone else, by definition, un-basic. When white is the canvas - the blank slice of bread - everyone else becomes the paint you help yourself to for decoration. It puts white America as the center of the universe, and white Americans as the normal, standard type of human, upon which everything else is a deviation. I hope you can tell there's a danger to thinking this way. What results when you think of your neighbor as a quaint, primitive, or misguided "version" of human? Cultural exceptionalism affects the way American society deals with other societies, down to film and fashion and day-to-day interactions among people - often for the worse. Have you ever noticed it yourself?

Lest you think I'm unusually penetrative, I have my sociology classes to thank for these insights. It's just something I was thinking about when looking back at the photos I've been sharing.

For further reading: Cultural Color Differences: Mexico & USA

Until later,

Caro