La muerte

Voz: Through luck and friends, I was able to attend a Cervantino event. Every night at 8pm, outside of El Alhondiga (throughout history a grainery, a fort, a jail, and now a museum), the entertainment alternates between music, theatre and dance. In the bleachers, the entrance is free but fills up, depending on the event, between an hour or several hours before 8. On the ground, people with tickets or press passes can sit or stand, como gusten. And well, it helps to be friends with the employees of a bar for many reasons, I suppose, and in this case it was that we got free tickets to see Oscar Chavez, a great Mexican folk singer who sings of love and (mostly) leftist politics. A huapango band opened the show, singing powerful stories about the sierra and, of course, also about love. The guitarist and bassist were mellow and the singer, a grand story teller. The violinists were frantic, moving the feet of a woman who stamped and kicked to the music causing the pink and green and yellow of her skirt to swirl madly around her. The songs that talked about the uselessness of the government recieved wild applause and shouting, and one song was especially moving because it talked about the repressiveness of the Mexican government, referring both the the student massacre in Mexico City and the harsh repression that occurred in Oaxaca last summer. The song was sad and my friends shouted, "Oaxaca no se olvide!!" Oaxaca will not be forgotten. No one was bothered by the rain at all, especially when Oscar Chavez came on stage.

Oscar Chavez sat very distinguished, his deep voice flowed without effort, and he gave each song a uniqueness that could only come from a voice like his. Songs ranged from slow and somber, like La llorona (the weeping woman), to a homeage to Comandante Che Guevara (the anniversary of his death being so close), to Macondo, a quick and lively song that we tried to dance to despite the small piece of cement we were standing on. Oscar Chavez also sang about politics and government, something he's known for, especially his leftist leanings and condeming indictments of government and politicians. Later, the opening band joined Oscar Chavez for more huapango. The best part was the last song, when Oscar Chavez and the other band sang verses back and forth to each other about each other's musical abilities, in a friendly competition that ended in Oscar Chavez comparing the other band to the momias of Guanajuato.

But the end of the show was probably my favorite. The woman who had danced and sang in the beginning returned, this time with the mask of death on her face, a bright pink scarf tied around her head, a large sickle and a basket. She passed papers back and forth between Oscar Chavez and the singer of the other band, which told of the deaths of (mostly) the various politicians and political institutions of Mexico. The current president, Felipe Calderon, clearly was targeted and the crowd roared. Vicente Fox and Martita (as Mexicans call his spouse) received harsh treatment even from death herself. Corporate media, the governor of Guanajuato and even Oscar Chavez all recieved their summons. The mix of politics, hilarity and death is something that I doubt would take place in the United States. But here, death is laughing and mocking us and we are laughing and dancing with her. Octavio Paz talks about this as Mexico's way of avoiding serious contemplation of death, that by eating sugar coated skeletons and skulls and dancing on graves, they close themselves off to death and therefore to life. This is similar to the way in which in the United States, he says, people often behave as if death doesn't exist. Mexicans bring death, in all her colorful glory, into their lives, but never close enough to see it as more than a dance partner, a lover, or a friend. By mocking death, Mexicans are really mocking their own lives, Paz claims, and this leads to a pessimistic view of life that permeates throughout Mexican life. It's hard to say at what depths Paz is right or not, but his view is interesting, as is the different ways in which people celebrate, abhor, or ignore death.