The Day of the Dead

                                                                                         -         Octavio Paz

Mexicans like fiestas. They provide them chance for getting together. Mexican fiestas are known for strange costumes and dances with fireworks and ceremonies.  Various kinds of fruit, candy, toys and other objects are sold during fiestas.

     Mexican calendar is full of fiestas which are celebrated all over the country. People pray, shout, feast, get drunk and slaughter animals. They forget even the time during fiestas.

     The number of the fiestas the Mexicans celebrate is not countable. The amount of time and money spent on the fiestas is also not known. The Federal Government itself provides money to the local government.

     Mexicans are poor because they spend much money and time on fiestas. The people in the western countries do not do so. They have other things to do. But for a Mexican, fiestas are the only opportunity to reveal himself and to talk to God, country, friends or relations. People drink, eat, sing and have fun together at fiestas. They often quarrel and kill each other because of drunkenness.

     French sociologists interpret fiestas as an expense. But expenditure provides Mexicans the chance to show their abundance and power. Therefore, wasting money and strength in fiestas is an investment.

     But this interpretation is incomplete. The fiesta is sacred and a journey to unusual. It has its own ethic different from everyday norms. In certain fiestas, the social order disappears. Anything is permitted in them, and all social, sex, caste, and trade distinctions vanish.

     A fiesta is not only a ritual squandering of the goods and money but also a revolt. By means of the fiesta society frees itself from the norms it has established. The fiesta is a revolution. In it, everything is united: good and evil, day and night, the sacred and the profane. Everything merges, loses shape and individuality and returns to the primordial mass. The fiesta is a return to a remote and undifferentiated state, prenatal or pre-social. The fiesta recreates the society with its creative energy. The fiesta is social act based on the full participation of all its celebrants.

     But the Mexican fiesta is an excuse to escape from or to exceed oneself. There is nothing so joyous as a Mexican fiesta, but there is also nothing so sorrowful. Fiesta night is also a night of mourning.

     Mexican fiestas are the violent breaks with the old or the established. Mexicans, when they try to be sincere with the help of fiestas, reach to extremes. It shows that they are suffocated and dare not confront themselves.