Bread and Bones: Cemetery Celebrations in La Paz, Bolivia
Looming above the steep declivities and cobblestone streets of the world’s highest capital city are thousands of tombs sealed in concrete and adorned in bread and flowers, among other gifts and oblations. But it is not the bones inside those tombs that make this cemetery distinct. Itself overshadowed by the city’s modern cable-car public transit line, the Teleferico, La Paz’s El Cementario General is the site of two annual celebrations of the dead — Dia de Muertos and Festividad de las Ñatitas, Day of the Dead and Festival of Skulls. Despite the morbid monikers (and traditions), both of these festivals more closely resemble celebrations of the living than those of the dead. These pre-Columbian rituals show respect and honor for the deceased rather than mourning or lamentation as one might expect from a funeral or memorial service. Andean cemetery festivals of the dead harken back to a time when primitive men believed that death was not the end, and the skulls in their possession and skeletons in their tombs were not lifeless calcium, not even half-departed spirits of the deceased, but still-living entities that must be cared for, even pampered and celebrated.
On November 2nd, Bolivians celebrate Dia de Muertos, Day of the Dead. The paceña tradition scarcely resembles its Mexican cousin, with its “skulls and skeletons and caskets of all types that has made [it] famous throughout the Western world” (Brandes 182). In fact, there is little morbidity to the celebrations of the dead in La Paz. There is no easy way to the cemetery on this busy day — one must hike uphill through dozens of street vendors and crowds of people to get to the entrance at the top of Avenida Baptista. Ironically, nearly all restaurants and markets are closed on this holiday, yet the avenue is crawling with merchants, selling everything from beef heart and potatoes to kitchen appliances to bootleg DVDs, pornography included. Closer to the cemetery, the merchants peddle more flowers and breads, two of the most common offerings to the deceased. Children play, music seeps from the graveyard, people take photographs — outside the cemetery walls on Day of the Dead, that hilly neighborhood staring up at the red cable cars and down upon the city of peace teems with life.
Security is tight at the entrance to the cemetery on Day of the Dead. Once inside, the atmosphere is quite festive. El Cementario General is a cemetery of tombs, thousands of tombs, and each tomb is a shrine unto its eternal tenant, a shrine that must be maintained with fresh offerings of flowers, fruit, bread, even alcohol. Day of the Dead means celebrating the deceased as though they were living, with food and drink, song and prayer. There are bands and musicians of many sorts: flute and drum bands, guitar bands, brass bands, saxophone players, even mariachi bands. There are prayers and singing before the tombs. There is eating, much eating, and indeed, Day of the Dead as it is celebrated in La Paz is like one great picnic among corpses.
The most common offering on Day of the Dead is bread. There are large bags of bread scattered about, literally tens of thousands of pieces of bread in that cemetery on that day. There are bread shrines and bread figurines, but not the skeletal variety of the Mexican tradition — the faces on paceña breads are more comical than dreadful. Flowers adorn nearly every tomb, and Day of the Dead festivities include cleaning the tombs and refreshing the offerings inside. Day of the Dead in Bolivia more closely resembles Qing Ming (tomb cleaning) holiday in China than Day of the Dead in Mexico. Besides bread and flowers, oblations include water, photographs, fresh fruit, miniature furnishings and soda bottles, actual beer and liquor, figurines of saints and others, greeting cards, and even air freshener.
Among the festivities, however, Death remains, and there is no starker reminder of his presence than among the tombs of children. Often adorned with toys and playthings, they convey a different imagery — more playful and yet more dire. Before one of those tombs, I saw a family kneeling in prayer, and I was overcome with sadness in the midst of celebration.
One week after Day of the Dead is Festividad de las Ñatitas, Festival of Skulls. The mood of the Festival of Skulls is quite similar to that of Day of the Dead, yet noticeably more festive. The crowds and smiles are bigger, and participants parade their skulls around with pride, human skulls gleaned from abandoned cemeteries and passed down for generations (Keating). At home throughout the year the skulls are pampered, and on the day they are celebrated, skulls are given bread, coca leaves, and tobacco. Burning cigarettes protrude from the half-rotted teeth of hundreds of skulls, their owners smoking right along with them. Smoking with the skulls seems an important part of the tradition, for obvious non-smokers were awkwardly but proudly puffing away. The skulls are afforded many of the luxuries of human life, including hats and sunglasses — one does not go outside at 12,000 feet without sunglasses.
It is in the treatment of the skulls that one might find an intimation of the origins of such a folklore. Both celebrations, Day of the Dead and Festival of Skulls, do not treat the deceased as though they were dead and gone. Like the tombs of the pharaohs, Bolivian tombs are stocked with mundane provisions, necessities of the living. On Day of the Dead and Festival of Skulls, families do not mourn the deceased: they sing to them, pray to them, eat with them, smoke with them. The dead are included in the festivities as though they were living participants. They even have names. In prehistory, it is likely that primitive Andeans believed as many others in human history; to wit, residing within the corporeal is the eternal, a mythology engendered by the fears and hopes of human consciousness.
Speculations of their origins notwithstanding, the celebrations of the dead at the cemetery in La Paz are rich in folklore. And like other folklore, Day of the Dead and Festival of Skulls create an environment beyond the confines of everyday society. The cemetery becomes a type of liminal space between life and death. The juxtaposition of the two challenges one’s notion of identity and mortality. This contrast is especially salient during Festival of Skulls — with hats, sunglasses, and even lit cigarettes, the skulls look more like festival participants than fetishes.
The cemetery holidays are communal celebrations — Day of the Dead is even an official state holiday. The tradition is passed down and maintained primarily through oral transmission, and skulls are treated as family heirlooms. The folklore is both modern and ancient — skulls kept as a part of a pre-Columbian ritual are adorned with embroidered caps and sunglasses of the modern era. Folk belief is prominent among these holidays, as religion and mythology, belief in the afterlife and the supernatural, drive the tradition. Most importantly, these celebrations belie the terminality of death — they are celebrations of the folk, the living folk, not the deceased, and therefore exemplify a fertile, active, and living folklore.
Works Cited
Brandes, Stanley. “Iconography in Mexico’s Day of the Dead: Origins and Meaning”.Ethnohistory 45.2 (1998): 181–218. Web. 8 November 2015.
Keating, Fiona. “Bolivia Celebrates Day of Skulls with Graveyard Festivities.” [. . . ] Web. 8 November 2015.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/day-skulls-bolivia-cemeteries-dia-de-los-520876
