[D66] [JD: 19] Pandemic Death Narratives of Mexico and the United States

[R.O.]

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pandemic-death-narratives-of-mexico-and-the-united-states/


  Pandemic Death Narratives of Mexico and the United States

By Rafael Luévano <https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/rafael-luevano>

MARCH 11, 2021

MEXICO, AS WE KNOW it today, rose from pandemic. Almost immediately 
after Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors landed in what is now the 
Mexican state of Tabasco in March 1519, the smallpox that they carried 
began its own march across the land. The disease arrived before the 
conquistadors themselves in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, where 
scores had already died, making conquest easier.

Waves of European disease plagued Mexico for the next 20 years. Measles 
arrived in the 1530s, followed by scourges of other foreign diseases. 
Susceptible indigenous people never stood a chance. Although accurate 
numbers are almost impossible to come by, as Mexican American feminist 
Gloria Anzaldúa estimates, of the 25 million who were thriving prior to 
the Spaniards’ arrival, only 1.5 million pure-blooded indigenous people 
remained a century later. All told, scholars estimate that between 37 
and 56 million indigenous people died in North, Central, and South 
America during what came to be known as “the Great Dying.”

The suffering cried for tangible expression. And indigenous peoples’ 
death rituals — which have evolved into what we know today as /día de 
los muertos/ (Day of the Dead) — proved a worthy and enduring 
celebration. Europeans brought the Dance of Death, a jocular and pagan 
response to the Black Plague outbreaks, and All Souls’ Day, a Catholic 
solemnity that offers supplication for the faithful departed. 
Missionaries who were zealous for converts mingled the three into a 
colorful pageant of skeletons.

As the current coronavirus pandemic took hold, the Mexican government 
was torn between saving lives and salvaging its economy, which was 
already in recession. Consequently, President Andrés Manuel López 
Obrador (AMLO) dragged his feet, hesitant to enact lockdown measures on 
the large informal sector (an estimated 60 percent of the economy), made 
up of fragile businesses, street venders, food stands, and open markets. 
In the first six months of 2020, the Mexican economy declined by 10.5 
percent with an estimated job loss of 922,000 — jobs not expected to 
return — wiping out a decade of economic growth. Still, AMLO has 
stubbornly refused to consider any economic stimulus to private sectors.

The Mexican government has also thwarted accurate information. In early 
December 2020, the contagion reached critical levels in Mexico City. Yet 
government officials misinformed the public about this danger, and a 
lockdown was not implemented until the third week of December. Such 
mismanagement further eroded public trust in the government. COVID-19 
cases have overwhelmed the Mexican health-care system, which was 
predicted to collapse from strain in January 2021. As of this writing in 
mid-December, there had been at least 1,313,600 confirmed coronavirus 
cases in Mexico with a death toll of 117,876, though it is understood 
that hundreds and more likely thousands of additional cases and deaths 
remain unreported.

In 2020, the COVID-19 victims joined the spirits of those millions who 
died in the 16th-century pandemics on día de los muertos, though public 
celebrations could not be held. Whether or not public celebration can 
resume this year, the next Mexican ceremonial season of death will begin 
on October 26, 2021, and end on All Souls’ Day on November 2. Then 
residents will construct colorful altars dedicated to their beloved 
dead. These altars traditionally feature images of the departed, their 
favorite foods and libations, ornamented sugar skulls, “dead bread,” 
trinkets and mementos, and a multitude of candles, along with blankets 
of marigolds. In some regions, such as Oaxaca, nightly parades blast 
with trumpets, and locals perform regional cultural dances. Revelers 
coat their faces with greasepaint death caricatures to jest mortality. 
Tequila and tears loosen the mourning passion, the lyricism of tributes, 
and the fervor of the faithful’s prayers. In these celebratory 
narratives, Mexicans encounter meaning and acceptance, transcendence 
over life’s suffering, and perhaps even some relief from the fear of 
death’s future sting, and in this way día de los muertos becomes a 
rehearsal for death. These ritualized narrative celebrations also help 
participants recall, understand, and endure past and present anguish.

Día de los muertos is also a way to keep the dead alive because, for 
Mexicans, one is never really dead until they are forgotten. And this 
helps to fuel one of Mexico’s most gut obsessions: the preservation of 
its past. Darkness and tragedy are not so much to be neglected but 
rather indulged with tequila and mariachi choruses, vehicles that link 
Mexico’s past epic death events with present-day death laments — from 
the thousands who have died from narco-related violence to the many more 
who have either succumbed to poverty in Mexico or perished on their 
migrant journey north.

Death culture evolved in the Mexican consciousness long before COVID-19, 
and its representations are everywhere. José Guadalupe Posada created 
sardonic lithographs of Mexican skeleton characters lampooning Mexican 
politics in the 19th century, and Diego Rivera’s paintings thrust death 
icons into fine art salons. Juan Rulfo’s novel /Pedro Páramo/ (1955), a 
literary journey to his mother’s hometown of ghosts, not only changed 
Mexican literature but also presaged magical realism. Most recently, the 
Disney film /Coco /emerged as the most popular film in Mexican history 
and introduced the death celebration to a global audience.

Yet no one has been more influential in the Mexican death narrative than 
essayist and poet Octavio Paz. The 1990 Nobel laureate identified, 
justified, romanticized, and spiritualized the death fixation into a 
state of celebratory otherworldliness. His words gave every Mexican 
permission to believe, articulate, own, be proud of, and so go out and 
live this national death canon. The Mexican, he wrote,

is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, 
celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast 
love. True, there is perhaps as much fear in his attitude as in that of 
others, but at least death is not hidden away: he looks at it face to 
face, with impatience, disdain or irony.

Paz’s characterization of “Mexican death” also embodies the traditional 
Mexican machismo: “If they are going to kill me tomorrow, let them kill 
me right away.” Just as Uncle Sam represents the United States, the 
death skeleton and skull have become Mexico’s national icon. 
Anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz has argued in his /Death and the Idea of 
Mexico/ that “the skeleton is so pervasive in Mexican popular culture 
that it deserves to be recognized as ‘Mexico’s national totem.’”

These death rituals are constantly refashioned to contemporary events. 
Returning late from a raucous Oaxacan día de los muertos parade, I 
happened upon a quiet /placita/ with the loveliest of memorial altars. 
Encircling a planter were neat rows of /luminaria/, brown paper bags, 
each with a flickering votive candle inside. In the tree above was a 
makeshift cardboard sign that read, “/En memoría de los 129 mígrantes 
Qaxaquenos que murieron en el 2015 en busca del /‘/Sueño Amerícano./’ 
(In memory of the 129 Oaxacan migrants who died in 2015 in search of the 
‘American Dream.’)” Alone now in this ancient place alive with recently 
departed spirits, I prayed wordlessly, not wanting to disturb the 
silence of the dead.

In the last three decades, Mexico has been devastated by narco-violence 
and a rising death toll, transferring Mexico’s death obsession from the 
ritualized merriment of día de los muertos to the bloody city street 
battles and rampant murders in its outlying regions. Now that the 
narco-industry permeates nearly every level of the Mexican way of life, 
what /is/ a narco-related death and what is/not/ has become sometimes 
impossible to determine. Amid this funerary blur, Mexico’s 2019 National 
Public Security System reported 34,500 homicides, setting the record 
high. Since 2007, there have been an estimated 73,000 disappeared 
persons, with 9,000 of those persons disappeared in the first year of 
AMLO’s presidency. Alarm resounds throughout Mexico as bloodbaths 
increase and the discovery of mass graves proliferates. Father Alejandro 
Solalinde, a Roman Catholic priest and human rights activist, once 
whispered to me, “All of Mexico is a graveyard, all the way from the 
southern to the northern borders.” The narco-industry killing machine 
stalks the entire nation, as deaths now prevail not only in the Mexican 
consciousness but also in the quotidian of narco-violence.

 From this milieu rises the macabre /Santa Muerte/ (Saint Death or Holy 
Death) as another present-day manifestation of Mexican death. She reigns 
as a cowled and scythe-wielding skeleton, a death effigy who looks very 
much like a female rendition of the grim reaper. Her seduction began 
sometime in the mid-20th century as an object of devotion for the 
fringe, like gritty street evildoers and narco-traffickers. Though 
condemned by the Catholic Church, this folk saint has become a cultic 
phenomenon with a following of millions, not only in Mexico but also 
around the world. What is Santa Muerte’s allure? Ask what you may of 
Santa Muerte, and she will intervene: for instance, a good narco run 
across the US-Mexico border, the revengeful death of a rival or enemy, 
healing of a physical malady, and even newfound affection from a once 
unrequited love. Santa Muerte makes no distinction between good and 
evil, thus her attractiveness to the underworld community and rank as 
the patroness of narco-traffickers. What Santa Muerte does demand is 
fidelity; once you petition a favor from her, you must remain faithful 
or suffer her eventual revenge. Indeed, the cadaverous Santa Muerte has 
proven worthy fodder for Mexicans’ death fervor. Her devotional shrine 
is located in the infamous Tepito District of Mexico City.

Mexican preoccupation with death makes it particularly curious that in 
2020, not even the coronavirus furiously spreading in the global 
community could seemingly awaken AMLO’s and Mexico’s consciousness. In 
mid-March, AMLO dismissed the health crisis. As he waded through crowds 
kissing children and embracing supporters during a rally, he smiled and 
said, “Pandemics […] won’t do anything to us.” AMLO accused the media of 
exaggerating the situation. “These are my bodyguards,” he boasted, 
showing off his good-luck charms, which included a Catholic scapular and 
a US $2 bill. That day, even as the peso tanked and the threat of a 
global economic crisis loomed, AMLO remained defiantly aloof. Mexico’s 
nearly 130 million people reflected his inattention, packing sporting 
events and mariachi concerts. Finally, toward the end of March, the 
Mexican president began making cautionary recommendations, though with 
blunted conviction. He encouraged residents to continue normal life. 
“Don’t stop going out,” he said. “If you can afford it, keep taking your 
family out to eat. It strengthens the economy.” On January 24, 2021, 
AMLO announced that he had contracted the virus; the next day he posted 
a smiling photo of himself carrying on with his presidential business.

What can we make of AMLO’s response? Was the virus threat just another 
death wave to besiege Mexico and be endured? Or was AMLO’s aloof 
reaction some political ploy to quiet fears and salvage what he could of 
Mexico’s threatened economy? I believe AMLO’s public display reveals 
something about the workings of the Mexican mindset as well as a far 
more penetrating reflection of its preoccupation with death — something 
that cannot be dismissed as either doe-eyed panic or indecision.

Behind AMLO’s allusion to lucky-charm safety, I see both an instinctive 
Mexican spit-in-your-eye defiance and a surly expression of Mexican 
machismo, “If I get it, I get it.” This attitude is not naïve 
resignation to one’s fate. Rather, for Mexicans, it is better to raise 
one’s head and die proud, with one’s boots on and dignity intact, than 
to succumb to defeat — humiliation would be a fate far worse than death. 
When faced with insurmountable odds, self-respect and self-possession 
forge a shield of self-worth. After centuries of living in a society 
born of disease, colonialism, violation, and oppression — along with 
present-day abuses and bloodshed — dignity is nearly the last possession 
that Mexicans struggle to preserve. The other is a raw survival instinct 
that compels Mexicans to always endure.

All of this leaves one to reconsider the inner workings of Mexicans’ 
traditional defiant disposition. Does Mexico’s death narrative function 
as sublimation, that is, as a means of channeling rather than facing 
death? In /Civilization and Its Discontents/, Sigmund Freud noted that 
“[s]ublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of 
cultural development. […] [C]ivilization is built up upon a renunciation 
of instinct.” As the current pandemic descended on Mexico, the voices of 
the tens of millions who perished in the Great Dying so oddly hushed 
into the great silence of 2020.

¤

Mexico rose from an international act of rape. As Paz wrote: “The 
/Chingada /is the Mother forcibly opened, violated or deceived. The 
/hijo de la Chingada/ is the offspring of violation, abduction or 
deceit. […] To the Mexican it consists in being the fruit of a 
violation” — as in rape.

A further complicated twist is at play: although Mexicans might point 
fingers at the historical Spaniards who created them, they can no longer 
point to a single culprit. Mexico’s violation has been disseminated 
within its own people and culture by blood mixing. Conquerors and the 
conquered were joined and rejoined into a new race of people with a 
mestizo identity.

How does a people forged in violation come to terms with past abuses 
that have long since joined assailant and victim in blood? How do the 
children of rape deal with those who begot them — and then become them? 
How are the perpetrators and victims identified, forgiven, and 
reconciled when they now share the same blood and identity? Perhaps 
these matters are too complicated to ponder, too historically distant, 
and altogether too convoluted to deserve attention. Or, in other words, 
denied. But herein lies the source of Mexicans’ present-day death 
narrative. Incestual guilt intertwines with death to create both 
explosive celebrations and submersed angst of the seismic push and pull.

The mestizo “fruit” is also a fount of fecundity and the basis upon 
which the Mexican life-saving narrative rises. The historical and 
cultural encounter between the Spanish and indigenous populations of 
what is now Latin America — and specifically Mexico — represents one of 
the most significant and enduring collisions between two peoples and 
cultures previously unknown to one another. Although they bore the 
psychic scars of their forebears, the bastard children of Moctezuma, the 
defeated Aztec ruler of Tenochtitlán, and Hernán Cortés, the Spanish 
tyrant-conquistador, also coalesced to create an unprecedented 
life-giving mix of blood. This blend of men and women has become nothing 
less than a celebration of polyculturalism and polyhumanism, and on a 
massive human level. Therefore, the evolution of what I have come to 
call /Mestizox/, as a new people, signified not only a turning point for 
Mexico but also a prophetic future for civilizations around the world.

Mestizox is the life narrative. Anzaldúa’s enduring voice lauded the 
mestiza: “She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic 
mode — nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing 
rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, 
she turns the ambivalence into something else.” The character traits 
amalgamated in the Mestizox endowed a will to live that fostered a 
survival ethos based in flexibility. In a related achievement, Mexico 
has folded and refolded the histories of its many peoples into a 
collective narrative. Día de los muertos manifests this cultural, 
religious, and spiritual syncretism as a thread in the complex weave of 
the Mexican people’s evolution and their abounding culture.

Compared with Mexico’s fixations, ongoing US expansion has been grounded 
in a distinguishing national attribute: looking to the future — or 
looking to the next frontier, as Greg Grandin recently noted in /The End 
of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of 
America/. The future holds a cleansing optimism, suggests a 
life-affirming achievement, and implies certain domination and power. At 
its narrative best, the United States has emerged as the new Garden of 
Eden, a prelapsarian realm of limitless dreams that hard work can always 
make true. This vision has rendered the United States a so-called land 
of success, elevated its people to global inspirational status, and 
created a nation of dominant world power.

Yet the United States, like Mexico, also arose from the bloody ground of 
both pandemic and indigenous bloodshed. To overlook this violence, along 
with the systematic stealing of resources, particularly land, and to 
solely blame disease is to deny the genocide that the United States 
committed against its indigenous peoples. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author 
of /An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States/, comments on 
the vast reduction of indigenous people. She writes that presently,

there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous 
communities and nations, comprising nearly three million people in the 
United States. These are the descendants of the fifteen million original 
inhabitants of this land, the majority of whom were farmers who lived in 
towns.

Four hundred years later, we are still at one-fifth of the original 
numbers. Americans have denied this mass death event that foretold the 
present-day society. Compared with Mexico, the national memory of these 
deceased Native American souls has vanished with the bodies that 
littered the landscape in the wake of both pandemics and war. There are 
no mainstream nationwide celebrations like día de los muertos to echo 
the United States’s lost indigenous peoples or carry on their 
traditional death rites. Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “The absence of even the 
slightest note of regret or tragedy in the annual celebration of the US 
independence betrays a deep disconnect.”

There is another key factor that may explain the divergent pandemic 
responses. Native and European blood did not intermingle in the United 
States so far as to establish a new race of people as it did in Mexico. 
In the United States, Native Americans were segregated by corralling 
them onto reservations — rather than assimilated. Mexico’s far more 
widespread indigenous presence serves as a continuing reminder of its 
true origins, but US historical narratives have denied the histories of 
these peoples along with formerly enslaved African Americans and other 
minorities. The United States’s death narrative is a plot line of racist 
violence that is easily, purposely forgotten by mainstream America. To 
live with it in plain view would shatter both the American life 
narrative and its sublimation of death.**

In late spring 2020, George Floyd’s cry for breath infused unexpected 
life into a populace already shaken by the pandemic. A newfound momentum 
demanded police reform and removal of offensive monuments. Whether such 
idealism can reform long-standing attitudes and institutions has yet to 
be seen. However, the veiled indigenous life forces have now been 
unleashed in the United States.

Contrasting these death enchantments in the collective psyche reveals 
more about the COVID-19 responses than any “fact.” In /Civilization and 
Its Discontents/, Freud reminded us that, when referring to the vital 
processes of /Eros /and the death instinct of /Thanatos/, “the two kinds 
of instinct seldom — perhaps never — appear in isolation from each 
other, but are alloyed with each other in varying and very different 
proportions and so become unrecognizable to our judgment.” Paz believed 
that Mexico and the United States were two distinct versions of European 
civilization reincarnated in North America. Those civilizations also 
both brought lethal diseases to the so-called New World, which spread 
into pandemics that decimated millions and weakened the rest, clearing a 
path for European conquest.

Given their parallel paths, it would seem that the New World’s 
re-creations would also enjoy analogous evolutions of national 
consciousness. Yet this has not been so, and in many ways, Mexico and 
the United States remain unintelligible strangers to each other. Now as 
both nations battle the same virus, one might assume that fighting a 
common enemy might bring Mexico and the United States closer together in 
joint efforts. This also has not happened. In the face of the pandemic, 
authentic American narratives are unveiled. Or, as American investor and 
business tycoon Warren Buffet famously said about the stock market: 
“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” 
The sickened groans of Mexico and the United States are sublimations of 
remembering, forgetting, and constantly inventing national narratives. 
These are the collective cries of our shared humanity.

¤

/Rafael Luévano, scholar and theologian, is completing a collection of 
essays for a book titled /Cuentos y Gritos/Stories and Cries from the 
US-Mexico Borderland/. / 
<https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/rafael-luevano/>

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