Unlike Western societies which fear enormously death and the dead, we, the descendants of the inhabitants of Mesoamerica/Middle America – we consider ourselves “sons and daughters of the Corn” – look at relatives, who were physically taken away from us, as being spiritually still among us. And we do it with great reverence because they are the most remote part of our extended family and we are the seed that perpetuates their lives. Therefore, on All Souls’ Day, we wait eagerly on “nuestros muertitos” (our beloved departed): we prepare some delicacies for them, we sing to them and feast for them because they are our root and the guarantee of our heritage as peoples with a specific history and identity. It can be said that we joyfully share our life with our dead people, or rather, they live in us because they gave their lives for us.
The daily experience of the peoples of Mesoamerica is that life exists because there is death. Being sown on the fields, the corn dies like all the other seeds to give birth to a new generation of plants. In our myths, the present day human beings are made from the bones of our forefathers and, in turn, we will sow our lives for the future generations. Time exists because the sun, God’s major symbol, sets every evening so that a new sun may rise on the next day, and in this way, we have the weeks, months, years, centuries and millennia. Thus, death is a part of the human existence and of the cosmos; and we must not be afraid of it. It will come at the fixed moment to crown our life’s journey.
Our indigenous forefathers of Mesoamerica were very conscious of the vulnerability of our human existence, because they knew very well how brief the earthly life bestowed on us was. We are like flowers which embellish the fields a few days and then wither the next. The important thing, however, is that they have fulfilled the reason of their existence. The same happens to us. Rather than the number of years we live, it is how we live our years that matters – being able to transcend time to fully join the great Giver of Life, Ipalnemohuani. That’s why ancient people believed that “we were born only to wait for the moment of our death,” because by dying, we complete the cycle of our existence and we enter life in its plenitude. That is the sense of the term “petatearse” which, at present, only means to die but earlier it referred to the ritual of wrapping the dead person in a mat and then cremating him/her so that he/she could depart with the Sun, the perennial fire of life. The current devotion to the souls in purgatory, with the images of souls in flames, reminds the simple people more of that ritual of the petatearse than the purification needed to enter heaven.
It can be said that as the descendants of the first settlers of this continent now called “America,” both indigenous and mestizos, we have basically inherited the same life-sense and the same practices regarding death and ancestors. In this way, we conduct our lives in our changing societies and within the Christian Churches from which we have taken our way of being and acting. That’s why, on All Souls’ Day, in all the cemeteries of Mexico and Central America, as well as in the Andes, Amazon, Guarani and Mapuche areas of South America, we keep on feasting to honor, as God orders, those who preceded us in these lands.
