In Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead , Stanley Brandes explores a “possible Mexican death fetish” (3) by bringing into dialogue three decades of fieldwork in Mexico with contemporary observations of Day of the Dead celebrations in the United States. He illuminates theoretical and practical connections between long-standing Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico with innovative, culturally syncretic celebrations occurring in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Through a focus on innovation and communication, Brandes traces the transitions between material, verbal, and customary traditions present in Day of the Dead celebrations, and ultimately reveals that these traditions mediate and facilitate relationships between the living and the dead, rural and urban communities, the United States and Mexico, and Day of the Dead traditions and a globalizing world.
In his dynamic synthesis of Day of the Dead celebrations both north and south of the United States-Mexican border, Brandes highlights continuities and discontinuities in and between the traditions of the two zones, connecting Day of the Dead to cross-cultural notions of death, economy, social status, national identity, religion, and tourism. In examining these different themes, Brandes weaves a text that elucidates how Day of the Dead is being refunctionalized both in Mexico and in the United States. By spotlighting different foci in different areas--for example, multiculturalism in the Bay Area and national identity in Mexico -- Brandes shows the reader how both the tangible and intangible elements of cultural production come to reflect their changing contexts and participants with surprising resiliency, and continued potency.
Through his narrative, Brandes addresses popular assumptions surrounding the supposedly “morbid Mexican” and uses these seemingly ubiquitous sentiments as his primary entry point into the boisterously comical and playful Day of the Dead festivities in Mexico. Throughout the book, the author offers the reader the chance to contrast assumptions about morbidity with the reality of celebrations in and out of Mexico, highlighting what he deems the ultimate paradox of Day of the Dead: “…that the very holiday responsible for producing a stereotype of the stoic Mexican, who longs for death, is actually a powerful affirmation of life and creativity” (6). A subtext of his attention to this cultural paradox is an exploration of the potential processes of creativity within rituals. Brandes explores this paradigm by showing that Day of the Dead, as a religious ritual, is also a visual narrative describing cultural contact and globalization as evinced through different political and ideological symbolisms that come to be associated with it in both Mexico and the United States.
Multiple laminated levels of communication remain at the center of Brandes’ discussion. Entering his dialogue through the examination of material objects, the author notes how traditional ofrendas (ritual offerings) incorporate sweets (including sweet bread, edible sugar skulls, and a myriad of other seasonal sweet treats made for the edification of both the living and the dead) as sacred objects and mediators between the living and the dead, the material and ethereal, and more locally between mourners. He extends this discussion into the past by noting historical and popular connections to a pre-Columbian past. This invocation of the problematic concept of “the Indian” (119) is used to allude to a sense of deep history that the reader will later encounter as an integral part of narratives of Day of the Dead used by the Mexican government and Bay Area community leaders alike to contextualize the authenticity and potency of contemporary celebrations through their connection to a sacred indigenous past. In the Mexican context, Brandes elucidates how the conspicuous inclusion of indigenous origins (particularly in light of contentious debates about the influences of American imperialism on Mexican nationalism) provide the festival with a uniquely Mexican sensibility, which is later capitalized upon and highlighted by community leaders as a way to bolster the ideology of a unified Mexican national identity.
This desire for a uniquely Mexican experience through the Day of the Dead brings celebrations into direct conflict with American Halloween imagery and paraphernalia (such as jack-o-lanterns) that are seeping across the porous cultural and physical borderlands between the United States and Mexico and appearing in traditional grave-offerings as well as in local bakeries in the form of innovative sweets that creatively and profitably merge the two traditions. Through globalizing social processes and access to mass media outlets, Brandes shows how government officials view the integration of the iconography of Halloween into Day of the Dead activities as a danger to the integrity of a seemingly fragile Mexican national character, especially in light of the recent activity of NAFTA, which has brought an increased amount of exploitative American business and culture into Mexico. However, these controversial external influences, which are feared to be undermining traditional practices, are actually one of the major catalysts of the popular resurgence in traditional practices, which currently assume a dual role: to address a growing lucrative, foreign and domestic tourist market, and at the same time ground contemporary Mexican identities in Mexico.
Alongside materials arts, Brandes focuses on the nature of written genres, which highlight the multi-sensory engagement of the Day of the Dead across a Mexican landscape. He notes how the intoxicating engagement with sight, sound, and taste creates an environment conducive to civil disobedience, and it is this dynamic quality of the Day of the Dead that has potentially allowed it to persist in public culture despite divisive influences. Active public engagement with these celebrations creates liminal social spaces that allow citizens to engage in discourse, particularly biting satirical poetry ( Calaveras ) lofted against political and religious leaders with contents that challenge the nature of the governmental power structure, yet simultaneously by their ubiquitous public presence also build a sense of a shared political community. Ephemeral sugar skulls made for consumption coupled with a ludic spirit create a performance frame where, much like carnival, social and economic boundaries are ambiguated, and laughter and sadness become epitomized by a vision of smiling-death and chocolate that comes packaged, one and the same, as people indulge in the freedom of the inevitability of death.
Throughout the text, Brandes explains that, while the Day of the Dead in Mexico is a sacred time for celebration and social inversions, it is also a growing business. Here the “commoditization of cult” (71) shows how a growing tourist trade, both of national and international clientele, is a driving social and political force rekindling a national focus on regionally marketed Day of the Dead celebrations. However, at the same time, these engagements with tourists contribute to the way in which local communities and individuals reconfigure their relationship to the state and the celebration itself. Brandes notes that in the town of Tzintzuntzán, Michoacán, among other locales, the Day of the Dead is a coordinated tourist attraction that has been sanctioned and subsidized by the state government. Here one sees the way in which large-scale ferias (fairs), dramatic performances, and images of indigeneity actively become parts of larger social discourses surrounding the performance of Self and Other within Day of the Dead activities, especially those that begin to create distance between the urban Mexican tourist and the local town member-performer.
While Brandes takes the reader through contemporary iterations of festivals in Mexico as commercial enterprises, he points to the fact that despite these new factors surrounding the Day of the Dead, it remains primarily a religious holiday in Pan-Catholic communities across Latin America, and more currently, part of the repertoire of immigrant Latinos living in urban centers across the United States. While elucidating the folkloric tenets of tradition and variation, Brandes highlights the diversity of celebrations in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, showing how different groups organize their city celebrations as actively public and rooted in a sense of building and educating multicultural communities, rather than trying to emphasize unifying national discourses. In American contexts one sees that participation in the Day of the Dead surfaces as an entry point for outsiders into American Latino culture and a general discourse of multiculturalism, which actively distances American traditions from the goals of national identity so strongly evident in the celebrations across Mexico. Examining these customs as they migrate across social, cultural, and geographic borders brings to light the syncretic quality of Mexican and American traditions, further highlighting the author’s desire to illuminate the processes that accompany ritual innovations.
The author ends his text with a return to the concept of the “morbid Mexican,” this time with an eye towards the nature of internal cultural diversity, both in Mexico and beyond. While the notion that not all Mexicans relate to death in the same way or with the same stereotypical bravado is an obvious conclusion, Brandes seeks to bridge geographic gaps by unifying humankind under fundamental, though culturally textured responses to death and dying. This dynamic piece of scholarship has the potential to enter diverse scholarly discourses to facilitate understandings of the way in which social, political, commercial, and more recently global forces are reshaping tradition to create multiple, laminated social and symbolic meanings that defy static interpretations of a singularly authentic ritual, showing readers how individuals and communities make and remake meaning across the globe.
This work represents a valuable contribution to studies in folkloristics, anthropology, cultural studies, globalization studies, and beyond. It is beautifully written with vivid illustrations that remind the reader of the tangible, material reality that intimately accompanies this discourse. Brandes masterfully brings together an amazing breadth of historical and contemporary scholarship on the Day of the Dead and the politics of identity in contemporary Mexico, as well as productively following the discourse as it leads directly into the lives of Latinos in the United States. The multi-sited focus allows readers to gain perspective on the nature and diversity of communities within greater Mexico and the United States through analyses of multiple festival contexts, bringing the contemporary narrative of Americanism and Mexicanism into provocatively close proximity.
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[Review length: 1645 words • Review posted on November 7, 2007]