Pixar has long been known for their state-of-the-art animated films, from Toy Story to Finding Nemo. More recently, a beautiful, heart-warming film, Coco, has introduced an international audience to an annual Mexican ritual to honor the dead, Dias de Muertos, or the Day of the Dead. In the movie, a prepubescent boy, named Miguel Rivera, discovers his great-great grandfather played a guitar that resembled that of the famous pop singer, Ernesto de la Cruz. In his quest to discover the manâs true identity, he is thrust into the netherworld of the dead, where he undergoes a great adventure to retrieve his long-lost and forgotten ancestor.
The fictional narrative of the film introduces the audience to the practices and rituals that are familiar to the Mexican people. Altars to deceased relatives honor the dead with photographs, decorations that include Mexican marigolds, intimate possessions and ofrendas, offerings of favorite food and beverages of the deceased (Brandes, 2009). The Mexican people celebrate the holiday between October 31 and November 2, the period of time established by the Roman Catholic tradition for the celebration of All Hallowsâ Eve, or Halloween, All Saintsâ Day, and All Soulsâ Day, designated for remembrance of saints and loved ones who have passed away.
In watching the film, I was reminded of similar rituals the world over, most commonly found in indigenous cultures, and especially common in South America, which honor the dead in a variety of ritual celebrations similar to the Mexican tradition. For example, I recalled the Haitian Vodou practice of offering animal sacrifices, a chicken for example, to the Gods, or lwa, which include among them the dead who have passed on into the spirit realm (Ramsey, 2011).
On May 5 of each year, the people of Bolivia celebrate DĂa de las Ăatitas (Day of the Skulls), in which family members exhume the bones of relatives three years after their interment. This ritual, dating back to indigenous tradition, allows the family to preserve the skulls of family in their homes, where they are believed to offer protection to the household throughout the year. In November, the skulls are gifted with offerings, such as a crown of flowers, cigarettes, and alcohol (Arguinzoni, 2016).
In contrast, contemporary North American and European practices related to the dead have shifted quite dramatically over the past several centuries. Whereas the church cemetery had once been located in the center of town, burials in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have tended to occur in cemeteries located outside the commercial areas of cities, in more rural and decentered locations, or the practice of cremation has replaced the burial (Aries, 1975).
Prior to the nineteenth century, the family was primarily responsible for care of the dying and dead. The process of dying and preparation of the dead was a highly visible and ritualized process, even to children, which by the twentieth century, with the proliferation of hospitals and funeral homes, was largely taken over by professionals. As a result, preparation of the dead has become increasingly invisible and the relationship to the deceased has become more distant, both spatially and emotionally (DeSpelder & Strickland, 1992; Gordon & Marshall, 2000; Johnson, 2018; OâConnor, 1986). As late as early twentieth century, the living room of the family home was known as the âDeath Room,â due to its role in housing the deceased during the funeral wake. Today, most deaths occur in hospitals, and funerals are held in funeral homes where embalming and preparation of the body occur out of sight and mind of the mourning family. As a consequence, death has become more sanitized, and non-professional mourners are preserved from the encounter with the process of decay and dissolution of the body of the dead. Obviously, there are practical benefits to these arrangements, not least of which is sanitation and protection from potential contagion. But the downsides are apparent, too, since the invisibility of death fosters, in our daily lives, a different, more aloof relationship to death, and enables a social pattern of death denial (Aries, 1975).
The history of San Francisco offers a poignant illustration of the place of the dead in contemporary North American society. During the gold rush, the population of San Francisco 49ers ballooned so quickly, and contagious disease spread rapidly and claimed many lives. Cemeteries in the region quickly filled and were kept far from the living (Brooks, 2017; Trufelman, 2017). By the late 1800s, the demand for land and the desire of the living to distance themselves from the dead led to an outcry to remove the human remains from cemeteries within the city limits of San Francisco. By the turn of the twentieth century, burial of new dead within the city was outlawed by the Board of Supervisors of the County of San Francisco (Trufelman, 2017). In 1814, the city passed an ordinance to begin a process to remove the dead from the city, to be relocated to the town of Colma, roughly 10 miles South of the city. Hundreds of thousands of bodies were disinterred and moved to new burial sites in Colma. For the dead without living relatives, bodies were relocated into mass graves and their tombstones were repurposed for use in the oceans to prevent beach erosion or as masonry along the pathways of Buena Vista Park.
In the transfer of the dead from San Francisco to Colma, a process that took decades, partly as a result of legal battles, many bodies were left behind and even to this day remain buried beneath the cityâs infrastructure (Brooks, 2017). During construction of University of San Franciscoâs Gleeson Library in the 1950s, for example, roughly 200 bodies were discovered in the area that had been the Masonic Cemetery. In 1966, during the construction of the Hayes-Healy residence hall, more human remains were discovered, and in 2011, as builders excavated land for the Center for Science and Innovation, dozens of coffins, skeletons, and skulls were unearthed (Brooks, 2017). In the area that was the Golden Gate Cemetery, workers developing land for the Legion of Honor found somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 bodies. The state of the bodies suggests previous excavators operated without respect for the dead. They âjust plowed through burial sites, and plumbers laid pipes right through bodies and skeletons,â and headstones were callously thrown into the ocean (Kingston, 1997, ...