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<h1 class="article-title white-text"><font color="#ffffff">Pandemic
Death Narratives of Mexico and the United States</font></h1>
<font color="#ffffff"> </font>
<p class="byline white-text"><font color="#ffffff">By <a
href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/rafael-luevano"
title="Rafael Luévano">Rafael Luévano</a></font></p>
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<p class="post-date">MARCH 11, 2021</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>The suffering cried for tangible expression. And indigenous
peoples’ death rituals — which have evolved into what we know
today as <em>día de los muertos</em> (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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Pedro Páramo</em> (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 <em>Coco </em>emerged as the most popular film in
Mexican history and introduced the death celebration to a global
audience.</p>
<p>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,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 40px;">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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Death and the Idea of Mexico</em> that “the
skeleton is so pervasive in Mexican popular culture that it
deserves to be recognized as ‘Mexico’s national totem.’”</p>
<p>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 <em>placita</em> with the
loveliest of memorial altars. Encircling a planter were neat rows
of <em>luminaria</em>, brown paper bags, each with a flickering
votive candle inside. In the tree above was a makeshift cardboard
sign that read, “<em>En memoría de los 129 mígrantes Qaxaquenos
que murieron en el 2015 en busca del </em>‘<em>Sueño Amerícano.</em>’
(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.</p>
<p>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 <em>is</em> a
narco-related death and what is<em> not</em> 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.</p>
<p>From this milieu rises the macabre <em>Santa Muerte</em> (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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Civilization and Its
Discontents</em>, 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">¤</p>
<p>Mexico rose from an international act of rape. As Paz wrote: “The
<em>Chingada </em>is the Mother forcibly opened, violated or
deceived. The <em>hijo de la Chingada</em> is the offspring of
violation, abduction or deceit. […] To the Mexican it consists in
being the fruit of a violation” — as in rape.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
<em>Mestizox</em>, as a new people, signified not only a turning
point for Mexico but also a prophetic future for civilizations
around the world.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border
Wall in the Mind of America</em>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>An Indigenous
Peoples’ History of the United States</em>, comments on the vast
reduction of indigenous people. She writes that presently,</p>
<p style="padding-left: 40px;">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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.<strong> </strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Contrasting these death enchantments in the collective psyche
reveals more about the COVID-19 responses than any “fact.” In <em>Civilization
and Its Discontents</em>, Freud reminded us that, when referring
to the vital processes of <em>Eros </em>and the death instinct
of <em>Thanatos</em>, “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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">¤</p>
<p><a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/rafael-luevano/"><em>Rafael
Luévano, scholar and theologian, is completing a collection of
essays for a book titled </em>Cuentos y Gritos/Stories and
Cries from the US-Mexico Borderland<em>. </em></a></p>
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