At night, Madero Avenue heaves with people strolling with shopping bags under the halcyon

lamps. The pedestrian passageway, brimming with shops selling cottoned frocks and cantinas

serving high-proofed mescal and Modelo cerveza, empties onto the roundabout circling the

Zocolo. The crowd moves in a tamed fashion, beholden to the rules of polite society, with the

westward and eastward traffic keeping to their respective side of the street. They are raucous yet

reserved. They only wish to enjoy a Saturday night without incident. A buffet advertises its

special in a three-storied colonial apartment block beside a kiosk selling daily periodicals and

individual cigarettes from opened Marlboro packs. A team of lighters hangs from pieces of

thread and sways in the light breeze. The night sky holds a few stars.

 

Steel fences have cordoned the great square; police officers mill about at each corner.

The middle section is vacant; the flag has been removed and safely stored until tomorrow, with

the hope of better breezes. The cathedral glows under bursts of phosphoresce; the bell towers

glean in orange. People on cellphones follow the steel line around the square, unfazed by the

slight disruption, accustomed to the regularity of the city’s eccentric and unpredictable changes.

They stroll past the palaces, the local government buildings, the police stations, all lit up by

strobes of luminance. All the old things are affixed with the comforts of modern sensibilities.

There is nothing to fear.

 

At the plaza’s southern end, however, looking toward the cathedral, something, some

structure, stares into the night, sitting right beneath the bare flagpole atop a wooden platform. It

is a calavera, a giant plastic skull. It has the shape of a lightbulb, dressed with two big, black, and

emptied eye sockets and two rows of a dozen teeth. The skull rests atop a white half torso, whose

ribcage has been painted. The neck is slightly too long, as if the skull were stretching to see

something. The entire design is easily the size of several men. It grins there in delightful

mischievousness under the church naves. It is a dead thing, skinless and organless, yet how alive

it seems there, smiling and gleeful in the night. How animated it appears in the shadow of the

church, which groans in deadened solitude. No one pays the skull much mind. After all, it is not

scary, nor is it gruesome. It is merely a fact of life.

 

During the Day of the Dead festivities, calaveras and other skeleton costumes and floats

and marionettes invade the cityscape. They come to remind the faithful, the good Catholics, that

just because someone, or something, is dead and gone does not mean they are no longer worthy

of veneration or adoration. Ancestors, souls, gods, whatever they may be called, have a distinct

ability to interrupt the lives of living; they must be placated, and they must be revered. Death is

like birth, just on opposite ends. What lives is indelibly shaped by what has died. Death and life

are inseparable. They are both to be celebrated. And what is remembered, even if buried under a

mountain of stone, is never truly dead.