La Casa Azul and Día de Muertos

Yesterday I went to La Casa Azul, the family home of the famous Mexican female painter Frida Kahlo. My friend Patrícia took me as a tour guide to the house. It's a pretty typical colonial house, built in a large square with an interior courtyard. The main difference between it and a typical colonial house was just how damn big it was. After examining the rooms and the expanse of the house, I thought to myself "Damn, these guys must have had a lot of money."

While it is uncertain whether the Kahlo family was actually wealthy, it seems certain that they were at least pleasantly above the poverty line. Carl Wilhelm Kahlo, who renamed himself Guillermo Kahlo when he emigrated from Germany to Mexico at the age of 19, worked as an accountant before becoming enamored with photography. He ran a studio as part of his practice. Later in life, when Frida Kahlo was immobilized due to an accident on a city bus, Guillermo encouraged her interest in painting and was able to support the habit. In the house Frida developed a taste for self-portraits. The bed where Kahlo spent most of her recovering days is located in a tiny room next to an open door, so she could enjoy the sunshine and participate in family conversations taking place in the open courtyard. Atop the frame of her bed is a large mirror, which she would use to reference herself for her compositions. Now her death mask resides on the bed.

The house is filled with Kahlo's paintings, and a number of Diego Rivera's paintings as well, the husband with whom she had a passionate and often tumultuous relationship. Another room on the opposite side of the building contains "retratos de milagros," small paintings on pieces of metal or wood commissioned by Mexican peasants to celebrate and remember prayers that had been answered for them. This folk art caught me by surprise and intrigued me far more than Kahlo's or Rivera's work. Kahlo and Rivera obviously found them special as well, as the ones displayed were from their personal collections. Inside each painting is a short story describing the miracle. It is immediately obvious that these were not pieces of "high art," as they range in quality of draftsmanship and usually contain many grammatical and spelling errors.

One such painting caught my attention. A very simple picture showed a body resting underneath a pickup truck, with three women kneeling over it. The story told of a man who had been run over by a truck on a road near a peasant town. The man laid there, seemingly dying as his mother, wife and daughter rushed out and began praying over him. A saint in the upper right corner of the image came and saved him, granting the wishes of the three women.

The Casa Azul is located in the obscenely pretty neighborhood of Coyoacán (the "Land of Coyotes"). After the Casa Azul, we caught a taxi to the "centro," where the neighborhood's main plaza is located. The place was hopping this Wednesday afternoon, for it was November 2nd, the second day of the Mexican national holiday "Día de Muertos."

"Día de Muertos" originated from traditional indigenous celebrations, believed to be Aztec in origin, and usually in honor of the goddess of the dead, Mictecacihuatl. The indigenous pre-hispanic peoples believed that the souls of the deceased resided in Mictlan, the land of the dead, and could be coaxed back at a certain time of the year with ofrendas, or offerings. When Spanish conquerors came to Mexico spreading Catholicism, they found many similarities in customs and traditions between All Saint's Day and the indigenous traditions. The assimilation of the two holidays in Mexican culture became the "Day of the Dead" we know today. The goddess Mictecacihuatl the Aztecs once prayed and offered sacrifices to morphed into the modern day "Calavera Catrina," seen almost everywhere around Mexico during these celebrations.

What I was not aware of is that Dia de Muertos tends to be celebrated with much more gusto in smaller towns. In Mexico City, there were certainly celebrations, but nothing as elaborate as I have been made to understand I would see in a place like Mixquic, where apparently family members will spend all night around the grave sites of their families, remembering them in fond stories and even picnicking on their tombs.

My own experience of the Days of the Dead was rather different than I expected. For instance, I went with a friend of a friend to meet his family in the largest cemetery in Mexico City. While I got to see the graves of many famous Mexicans with elaborate tombstones (including Diego Rivera), we got rather lost in the place and ended up not being able to find the family plot. We left shortly after to get some tacos. As we walked I saw little children taking up the more American Halloween traditions, donning store-bought ghost and skeleton costumes and trick-or-treating. A lot of Mexican children were waiting at the turnstiles of the subway, holding tiny pumpkin baskets out and asking for candy as commuters rushed past them. In contrast, the plaza of Coyoacán (where I was visiting after seeing La Casa Azul) was certainly in full swing, with young ladies in Catrina costumes, skeleton sculptures created by various schools or organizations on display and sidewalk art in the shapes of ancient Aztec symbols being made out of ground-up cornmeal flour of many vibrant colors. There was even an "Occupy Mexico" camp in the main square (perhaps a topic for a future post). People were standing in line for ice cream and sitting in cafes eating lazily and happily. The whole affair felt like a welcome respite from work for most of the people in the streets, in the same way city-dwellers in San Francisco might treat the Fourth of July: taking their children out, enjoying the sunshine, taking a moment to relax.

What is really striking to me about my short time in Mexico so far is just how colorful everything is. Houses are painted brightly, the memories of the dead are laughed at instead of somberly respected, and people have a general air of helpfulness. Also striking, however, is how much American culture seeps into the lives of the people here. I hope that those aspects that make Mexico unique, like the Casa Azul or Día de Muertos, can remain intact for some time to come. I for one would like to make it to a smaller pueblo next year and laugh myself silly as I drunkenly pass out on some dead Mexican's grave.