Letters, October 27, 2006
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Editor,

As a member of the foreign community here in San Miguel for four years, I’m thinking ahead to the celebration of the Day of the Dead and thinking about how we foreigners participate in this meaningful and most Mexican of holidays. It seems to me there are three levels of celebration. The most public celebration takes place in the Jardín. Altars are erected to humble and prominent sanmiguelenses, some of whom made a major contribution to the town and have passed away in this last year. The Jardín is festooned with decorations above and below, including lovely carpets of flowers and colored sand or other materials. Everyone strolls there in the evenings to pay respects to those who have passed and to share in this time of honoring them. It seems perfectly natural and appropriate for us to be a part of this event, and some foreigners are inevitably honored alongside the Mexicans. 
The totally private part of the fiesta consists of altars being erected in homes to honor loved ones that the family has lost, not necessarily recently, but whose absence they still feel strongly—their muertitos (little dead ones). A number of people have given lectures in English and even lessons in making altars of this kind, using small mementos, flowers, photos and food and drink beloved of the one that has passed, so that we foreigners might understand and participate in this private and personal way of honoring our own loved ones. 

The third, sort of semipublic celebration takes place on both November 1 and 2 in the local Pantheon, and this is the one I would like to focus on. Families stream into the cemetery all day long on these days, bearing mementos of their loved ones as well as armloads of flowers and plants, buckets and water. Here they profusely decorate the gravesites of their muertitos and gather together as a family, eat or pray or play music or reminisce. There is a wide range of beliefs about the practice and meaning of all this. Not all actually expect their dead loved one to join them in this celebratory feast. Some do. 
It seems to me that a much more appropriate and fulfilling way for us foreigners to participate in this part of the fiesta, rather than just coming to the Pantheon with our cameras and intruding—some more sensitively than others, where these families are playing out their annual ritual—would be to participate. We, too, could bring armloads of flowers and other decorations or mementos to decorate the gravesites in the large section of the Pantheon reserved for foreigners. On these days of November 1 and 2, this section has been the saddest of places. It holds the gravesites of many foreigners, some of whom lived in San Miguel for many years and made outstanding contributions to the community, but whose families and contemporaries are no longer here to celebrate them. Why not change that and make our section of the Pantheon glow with remembrance on those days, too? That way, we would be participants in a totally appropriate and inclusive way, and not just observers of the annual fiesta. 

Muriel Bevilacqua Logan