I was super excited to visit Mexico City during the days leading up to the Día de los Muertos (‘Day of the Dead) and soak up a bit of the festive vibes. And luckily I can say that I have not been disappointed indeed!
The Día de los Muertos tradition originates with the ancient cultures of the Americas, who used the festival to honour their ancestors as well as recently deceased children and adults. In order to do so, everywhere little ‘ofrendas’ (offerings) are erected throughout the country.
In Mexico City the streets, homes, shops and restaurants were colourfully decorated indeed. You just felt festivities were in the air in the days leading up to the big day: November 1. Comparable to London in December with Christmas perhaps.
So “It’s beginning to look like Día de los Muertos” indeed.
A lot of friends and family asked me whether we’d see the ‘big parade’. Funny enough this has something to do with James Bond. Yes Bond, James Bond. The opening scene of ‘Spectre’ is set in Mexico City. You see Bond walking all nicely dressed up through the skeleton-like crowds doing his cool thing, before ending up in a hotel with the unknown mistress and having this very unrealistically helicopter fight with the Día de los Muertos crowds beneath him (oh my god, what a horrible scene that is by the way haha!).
Anyway, that parade Bond’s a part of is actually a fictional one. Mexico City paid something like twenty million USD (according to The Guardian), to be the chosen one for the setting of the opening scene. Twenty million!
All this in an attempt to attract more tourists ánd to get rid a bit of that criminal image the city is suffering from. And it worked.
Ever since the movie has been released foreign tourists flock to Mexico to celebrate Day of the Dead and to see that fictional parade. So therefore Mexico City invented one. Nowadays on the actual Día de los Muertos a huge event is organised in downtown Mexico.
However, that’s not the one we visited! We went to another parade that’s a little older: La Calavera de Catrina. This year it was held on Sunday the 21st of October (2018) in preparation for Día de los Muertos and it started on the Paseo de la Reforma near the Angel de la Independencía.
All the pictures in this article are snapped during that parade. Heck, we even joined it ourselves!
The parade requires a bit of an explanation. When it comes to Día de los Muertos, one particular icon has become strongly associated with the festival: the one of the ‘La Calavera Catrina’ or the ‘Dapper Skeleton’.
La Calavera Catrina was an illustration created by the Mexican political printmaker Jose Guadalupe Posada, somewhere around 1910. Guadalupe Posada depicted a skeleton, dressed up in very fancy clothes, and wrote next to it:
“Death is democratic, because in the end, the mother, the brunette, the rich or the poor, all the people end up being skulls” – José Guadalupe Posada.
Yes, 'Coco' was there too!
His message was that, whatever you look like, don’t think you’re any different than the rest. Death will be the same to all of us. Memento mori, basically.
Guadalupe Posada intended to mock Mexico’s eurocentric elite with that. Around the turn of the 20th century, some Mexicans were a bit ashamed of their indigenous heritage and tried to imitate the fashion and traditions of Europeans.
For some reason this Calavera de Catrina image took off, resulting in the Calavera de Catrina parade.
And it’s fun indeed, seeing all these women and their companions 🙂 who carefully created their outfits. Expect lots of bridal dresses, oversized hats, feathery eyelashes, flower crowns and of course beautifully painted faces!
Many folks paint their faces at home, but to those who have less experience doing so and prefer not to look like a big panda afterwards, you can also paint your face at the festival! Around the Paseo de la Reforma, on a corner next to the Angel de la Independencia, you’ll find quite some professional make up artists. For 100 to 200 MXN ($5,- to $10,- USD) they’ll paint you in whatever style you like.
It might take a while to get this done though. We had to wait for over an hour before we finally were able to get our faces painted. We arrived rather late on the square, somewhere around 5pm. Since the artists are already over there at 11 in the morning, I’d suggest you to go a little earlier in the afternoon. There’s enough entertainment around, so don’t worry that you’ll get bored or anything.
Prepare yourself though. Do your research and bring an image of how you more or less want to look like. I didn’t really knew that would be easier for everyone, so when the artist asked me what I wanted I just replied ‘something colourful’ and I ended up looking like a drag queen. Nothing wrong with that by the way, but it just wasn’t the exact look I was hoping for.
Apart from that, it was nothing but a very fun afternoon and evening. Including lots of petting of the (dressed up) dogs :).
The procession took quite a while and ended near the Palacio de las Bellas Artes. Over there tons of stands were waiting to feed those hungry skeletons.
I hope you love the outfits as much as I did. Enjoy the rest of the Calatrina snappies – and keep an eye out for some gringos in between!
Recognize these gringos?!
