Children's Books about el Dia de los Muertos

Published on LatinoLA.com: October 28, 2005

Sugar skulls, resplendent altares, images of dancing skeletons, and a procession at Self Help Graphics are familiar features of el Día de los Muertos in Southern California. Regardless of one’s cultural background, however, the meaning of el Día may not be so familiar. Some, for example, may see the idea of celebrating death as a kind of morbid observance. Such an impression can be attributed to the fact that death is generally feared and repressed in American society. Others (like me when I was a kid) might have been taught vaguely and inaccurately to think of el Día as a “Mexican Halloween.” In neither case is one able to fully grasp or appreciate the significance of el Día.

There are several books for children that explain el Día de los muertos. With the day fast approaching, along with celebrations scheduled throughout Southern California (just check the LatinoLA calendar), parents, teachers, and family and friends can use the following titles to inform children, clarify their understandings of the day, and generally complement efforts to keep the cultural practice alive amongst today’s younger generations.


Janice Levy’s The Spirit of Tío Fernando (Albert Whitman & Co., 1995) is a splendidly accessible and engaging story about a boy who uses the Day of the Dead to remember his recently deceased uncle. The careful pace and reverent tone with which Levy depicts the careful preparation that can go into the celebration of the Day of the Dead help readers to register the Day’s importance. In the end, the Day effectively comes across not as a depressing period of mourning—as a child, including the boy in the story, may be inclined to think—but as a valuable opportunity to “remember people who have died, whom we will always love.”


The instructive value of Tony Johnston’s Day of the Dead (Harcourt, 1997) is unfortunately limited by problems with organization and focus. Set in an unnamed town in Mexico, Johnston’s story captures the anticipation with which the Day of the Dead is received via a depiction of weeks-long preparations preceding it. After 18 pages of food being prepared and children trying to sneak a taste of it, the rising action (eventually) consists of families inexplicably forming a procession that “goes walking though the street. Walking over the hill, walking to the graveyard where their loved ones lie.” Without any narrative explanation, the next several pages show families setting candles and flowers on aboveground tombs and proceeding to sing and dance amongst the crypts.


Eventually, Johnston remarks in one line on one page that the singing and dancing families “remember los abuelos,” but this gesture toward explaining what the families are doing is immediately overrun by hungry children being given the green light to feast. Not until the very last page of the book in the Author’s Note do we get an explanation of the graveyard procession and antics. For the sake of explaining the Day of the Dead and putting the ritual that the author depicts in a meaningful context, this Note should have been placed at the beginning of the book. As the book is presently structured, its capacity to introduce the Day of the Dead—which seems to be its purpose—is compromised.


In contrast, Linda Lowery does an excellent job of providing a careful background for and introduction to el Día in her Day of the Dead (Lerner, 2004) book. First, Lowery describes in a child-accessible manner the cycle of life and death to introduce the Day of the Dead as “not a sad time. It is a warm and loving time to remember people who have died. It is a time to be thankful for life.” Then to facilitate a historical appreciation and understanding of the Day, she describes, again in a child-accessible manner, its Aztec origins and the Spanish influence on it. For the remainder of the book Lowery describes the different ways that people prepare for the Day of the Dead and how they celebrate it. To her credit, she makes a careful effort to stipulate that there are different ways that people celebrate the Day in different places in the United States and Mexico. With this gesture toward regional variations, she avoids the homogenizing tendency of Levy and Johnston to imply that the Day of the Dead is celebrated the same way throughout Mexico.

 
One of the most whimsical books about the Day of the Dead is Luis San Vicente’s The Festival of Bones (Cinco Puntos Press, 2002). This bilingual book is a translation of a book that was originally published in Mexico. With gorgeous illustrations, it depicts a host of skeletons who, on the Day of the Dead, come out and play en masse and make their way to the graveyard for their annual festival. With singing and dancing skeletons, and characters such as “La calaca Pascuala,” whom we are told “canta/Sin pena ni temor/Aunque le falte una pata/Y en el sombrero lleve una flor,” The Festival of Bones is at once lively and funny and offers a playfully imaginative treatment of the Day of the Dead. While the narrative does not really explain the Day, there are child-friendly explanatory notes at the back of the book as well as recipes for pan de muertos and sugar skulls. This is of course the same structure that Johnston utilizes for her book. San Vicente’s purpose is different, however. Whereas Johnston’s book seems intended to inform readers about an unfamiliar tradition, San Vicente’s book, written originally for a Mexican audience, is more intended as a fanciful play on a holiday with which his implied audience is already familiar (akin to the ways that rather than provide a primer on the holidays of Halloween and Christmas, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas plays with and on them). For this reason, The Festival of Bones is not the best introduction to the Day of the Dead (Lowery’s book is), but it provides an opportunity to have some great imaginative fun with it.


Going through all of these books, the feeling grew in me that there needs to be a book that talks about the observance and preservation of el Día de los muertos in communities in the United States today. Diane Hoyt-Goldsmith's Day of the Dead (Holiday House, 1994) provided this ten years ago, but this book is out of print already. So, how about a book that tells the meaning of el Día and the celebration of it in Southern California in the year 2005?




About Phillip Serrato:

Phillip Serrato is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University where he teaches classes on children’s and adolescent literature.

Waking Up Aztlan

 Published on LatinoLA,com: June 27, 2002



As Shakira and Paulina Rubio lead a second wave of Latin artists pursuing mainstream pop music success in the United States, La Banda Skalavera and Los Lobos are making Chicano rock that has not been crafted to receive Top-40 airplay. Especially refreshing is the two Southern California Chicano bands’ ability to inspire Latinismo at a time when the two Latina divas are looking more and more like sexed-up real-life Barbie dolls.



Of course, the mainstream, pop-in-English musical directions that Shakira and Rubio are presently taking are, on several levels, productive artistic and commercial avenues to follow. The two women are accessing the kind of profit and popularity that other Latinas/os such as Ricky Martin. Marc Anthony, and Jennifer Lopez have only recently begun to attain. Moreover, their explorations of “non-Latin” musical forms contribute to the expansion of the parameters of “Latina/o pop music.”



Nonetheless, with songs such as “Whenever, Wherever,” “Underneath Your Clothes,” and “Don’t Say Goodbye,” Shakira and Rubio are really only making the kind of non-racially-specific “art without thorns” that Chicano performance artist/critic Guillermo Gómez-Peña says is the only kind of Latino/a art that can be expected to have mainstream appeal in the United States. Like previous hit songs by Martin, Anthony, and Lopez, the latest English-language singles by Shakira and Rubio are catchy and kind of exotic, yet they are ultimately not significantly different from the other Top-40 fare that stations such as KIIS recycle.

 

In contrast, La Banda Skalavera and Los Lobos unabashedly frame themselves as Chicano bands and indulge their affinity for playing with traditional Latin rhythms. Oblivious to mainstream Top-40 popularity contests, the two bands unapologeticaly roll around in Chicanismo/Latinismo.



I saw and heard La Banda Skalavera for the first time at the Festival Latino at UCLA a few months ago. They offered an energetic fusion of ska and punk that got a lot of people to get up and dance “con ganas.” Touches of traditional rhythms, along with a playful horn section, made the performance particularly enjoyable. Because the majority of the song lyrics were delivered in Spanish and driven by Latin rhythms, the band also managed to appeal to the attendees’ Latino pride, and this rendered the performance even more inspiring.



As occurs with many artists, the band?s 15-track debut release, "No Está Mal", doesn’t convey the same energy that the band manufactures live. Nonetheless, the CD offers a fascinating and fun listening experience. It contains animating ska/punk fusions that feature gestures toward cumbia and 80’s-era hard rock. While the title-track comments on finding beauty in life, most of the other songs revolve around the travails of love. Among the more successfully hyperactive songs are “Hipócrita,” “Veinticuatro,” “Cómo Jodes,” “Ya No,” and the title cut. Other songs such as “Vamos a Bailar” and “Cumbia del Loco” are especially alluring because they are built on rich Latin grooves.



“Crushed,” “I Love You So,” and “Tú” are endearing yet by no means syrupy songs of romantic yearning that keep the CD (and the band) musically and thematically interesting. “Memories,” however, comes across as a throwback to overwrought ’80s power ballads. Not as interesting as the other songs on the CD, musically and thematically it stalls the disc.



The horn section gives songs such as “No Está Mal” and “Sueño pa’ Mí” a playful and exhilarating vibe that complements the Latinismo that the songs simultaneously provoke. Electric guitar blazes on “Hipócrita,” “Veinticuatro,” and “Ya No” remind one of anthemic ’80s power rock and reflect the musical playfulness that the band likes to indulge. At times, though, the hard-rock riffs disrupt the musical cohesion of a song. “Mala Cabeza” is a Spanish-language hard-rock rap track that reminds one of Molotov that doesn’t fully fit within the musical trajectory of the disc. It does reflect, however, the band’s investment in exploring various musical forms in a way that suggests the extent to which post-modern Chicano identity and experience have been hyper-crisscrossed by different cultural influences. The post-modern Chicano fun of “Todo Cambiará” is rooted in the shifts between multiple musical genres that can occur in the span of three minutes. As this song documents the band’s boundless love for diverse types of music, it simultaneously invites listeners to share in this love.



At times the vocals and/or music remind one of Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Madness, and Sublime, but La Banda Skalavera mostly manages to maintain an appealing and respectable originality. The dominant impression of this CD is that the guys genuinely enjoy making music and playing with musical forms. In the future they will hopefully maintain their vitality and daring spirit and continue to offer up music that is interesting and exhilarating and that stimulates Latinismo.

 

Los Lobos most obviously signal their unwavering commitment to Chicanismo through the title of their just-released CD. Good Morning Aztlán brings into 2002 a term and concept that activists and cultural workers used during the Chicano Movement in the 1970s to nurture a sense of raza consciousness amongst Chicanos and Chicanas in the U.S. Southwest. By referencing Aztlán, Los Lobos defiantly announce that even in the new millennium, as other Latino/a artists pursue crossover appeal, they will continue to position themselves as a Chicano band from East L.A.



At the outset of the CD it is clear that Los Lobos are not going to offer up formulaic Top-40 fare. “Done Gone Blue” resembles not the polished production of Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever” or “Underneath Your Clothes,” but raw garage rock that grabs a listener on a visceral level. One can easily imagine this song and the other garage rocker, “Good Morning Aztlán,” causing a live audience to explode. Track two, “Hearts of Stone,” is comparatively more cleanly produced, but it follows a slow, funky vibe that distinguishes the song as a product of a Los Lobos jam session.



While “Malaqué” sounds like an indigenous hymn bemoaning the mass flight of migrants from their Mexican homes and mesmerizes the listener with its harp work, “Luz de Mi Vida” and “Maria Christina” engage the listener through methodical percussion work. The Spanglish that is used in “Luz de Mi Vida,” however, feels more forced than an instance of the bilingual code-switching that Latinos and Latinas often perform naturally as they try to express themselves. The electric guitar solo in the cumbia-driven “Maria Christina” teases out wonderfully the sensuality that the sultry Spanish vocals and percussion collaboratively create.



Thematically, the songs on Good Morning Aztlán are not as restricted to East L.A./Chicano Studies concerns as the cover art and the title of the CD might lead one to expect. “Luz de Mi Vida,” “Good Morning Aztlán,” and “The Big Ranch” do depict life in Southern California barrios while “Tony y Maria” narrates the experiences of a migrant Mexican couple in Los Angeles. The lyrics of other songs, though, betray an obsession with human community and the fate of the world.



Some music reviewers have suggested that the themes of love, loss, anguish, and uncertainty that suffuse the CD reflect Cesar Rosas’s devastating loss of his wife. It also seems possible, though, especially since Rosas penned the lyrics for only a few songs, to read several of the tracks as responses to September 11.



“The Word,” for example, voices uncertainty about the current state of world affairs with lyrics such as, “The word’s out on the street/round everyone you meet/Things are not the way they used to be.” Later, in “What in the World,” an apparent nod to John Lennon reveals itself in the form of an appeal cathected with a latent sense of despair: “Imagine, oh imagine what this world/oh what this world could be.?”



Even “Tony y Maria” is less about Mexican immigration as a social or political issue than it is about a couple’s love and commitment to each other. Lines such as, “We promised that we’d care for one another/said his wife/now and for the rest of our lives” render the song just gorgeous, steeped as it is in existentialist pathos. It’s unfortunate that this stunning song is followed by the solid rocker “Get to This,” for the energy of the latter track quickly blows away the appreciation of interpersonal love and commitment that “Tony y Maria” nurtures.



By the final song, though, the listener has another chance to contemplate how beautiful interpersonal love and commitment can be. With a hypnotic background of distorted electric guitars, the song explores the terror that one can experience when facing life alone. Ultimately, the song and the CD conclude with the optimistic idea, “Heart to heart we can’t be wrong/soul to soul in this small corner of the earth/we can be strong.”



Whether the “small corner of the earth” that is referenced is Aztlán, our homes, or the various other spaces we share with the many people in our lives, the song points toward the importance of companionship and mutual support at a time when the world is getting more and more violent and full of hate.

Getting Philo-Tropical: Maria Costa's "Afro-Spic"

Published on LatinoLA.com: June 4, 2001

Since the 1980s and the emergence of Latina feminism, there has been an increasing amount of critical attention devoted to gender roles and expectations in Latino cultures. Led by noted theorists Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, Latina feminists in the 1980s began talking about their personal experiences as women to expose and critique the oppression and abuse that Latinas often endure.

This critical work also initiated the exploration of how masculinity is usually defined in Latino cultures and how the patriarchal organization of the family affects both men and women as well as their sons and daughters. Over the last ten years, there has been more and more discussion about Latino masculinity by both male and female critics and artists in an effort to understand how it works in Latino cultures and how Latino men are pressured to be "real men." One consequence of this increased examination of Latino masculinity is a growing recognition that it can and must take new forms.

The one-woman show Afro-Spic starring Maria Costa clearly follows in the footsteps of the Latino/a gender studies work of the last two decades. Advertised as a "comedic journey of Latina liberation and taming the macho man," Costa primarily attempts to portray the obstacles and anxieties that Latinas must overcome as they struggle to arrive at a sense of self-reliance and, ultimately, self-respect. Toward the end the show begins turning toward an exploration and critique of machismo. Overall, the show is driven by good intentions and is marked by some outstanding features. However, Afro-Spic really does not break any new critical ground, and over the last few pieces its focus gets a bit muddled as it tries to cover too much ground.

Costa is definitely the right person for this show. Her dexterous ability to nail-down the idiosyncrasies of the different characters that she portrays in the eight pieces helps her to convey an appropriate emotional depth for each one. Unfortunately, on the night that I saw the show Costa performed to a painfully small audience that did not provide her with much energy to feed off of. The fact that her performance space was the second floor of a restaurant did not help either, and ultimately it felt like this critical work deserved a different context.

The show opens boisterously with Costa leading a line of four Afro-Cuban drummers. As she makes her way through the audience, she stops to gyrate in front of or with a few people. This is an effective way to begin, for it captures the audience's attention and, as often occurs when Latin music is played, triggers a powerful sense of latinidad amongst those in attendance. By tapping into a Latino consciousness at the outset, a receptive audience gets secured for the first piece, "Libre Como el Viento."

In this opening piece, Costa is Rebecca Gonzalez, a Cubana who invites the audience to party with her because she has just graduated from high school. At first she tells the audience how happy she was strutting across the stage at the graduation ceremony, "waving and feeling sexy." This narrative soon devolves, however, into a confession about her relationship with her abusive husband Pedrito who "has a lot of fucked up shit to deal with." Thus in this very first piece, we meet a Latina who clings to an ethos of "pa'delante" yet is violently prevented from realizing her full potential by a man in her life who clings to an ethos of machismo. The conspiracy of culture and tradition with the containment of Latinas is next thrown into relief when Rebecca relates that in a vision she had her mother basically dismissed Pedrito's reprehensibility by saying that all that matters is that he loves her.

But it turns out that instead of being completely cornered by her lover, family, and cultural tradition, Rebecca -- drawing courage from her perfectly-chosen hero, Tina Turner -- opted to liberate herself and knock out Pedrito. As the drummers burst back into action at this point in apparent celebration of Rebecca's strength, I found myself thinking that the current hit "Survivor" by Destiny's Child would have been appropriate, too.

The next three pieces -- "Diva," "R.E.S.P.E.C.T.," and "Pelo Malo" -- continue to foreground the theme of Latina self-respect. In "Pelo Malo," Costa is a Chicana child named Marisela who, already at her young age, is acutely aware that her dark skin is not "beautiful." "R.E.S.P.E.C.T." effectively uses irony to make its point about the importance of Latina self-respect. In this piece, Costa is a self-proclaimed strong Latina who ultimately is a conflicted heroine. At the same time that this woman assertively yells out to her boyfriend, "Nigger, wait!" she fusses over looking beautiful in an effort to secure a man who will make her feel "loved, desired, and treated like a lady." At the end of the piece she strikes a pose and asks, "How do I look? Beautiful, huh? Something missing?" and she then proceeds to remove her jacket to expose some more skin. Of course, the irony and point is that what is missing is some self-respect.

In my estimation, the smartest moment of the show occurs in "Diva." "Diva" is about a woman who has a feminist consciousness yet is simply unable to escape completely macho domination. As she relates, "I went to the testosterone dark side and I loved it. Yes, me, a strong woman fell for a macho." This piece effectively portrays a Latina feminist who struggles to enjoy a heterosexual desire that does not compromise her politics. It thus captures a vexing issue that continues to be debated within feminist circles. At one point Costa mimics sex with her macho lover. Initially on top and approaching orgasm, she is soon enough brought down, turned around, and entered from behind. On all fours pretending that her lover is forcefully thrusting into her, Costa uncomfortably reveals to the audience that her macho man wants her to be a wife, cook, and the mother of his children. Although this simulation of sex seemed to make a few people in the audience uncomfortable, it was a brilliantly pornographic metaphor for the multi-leveled (re)subordination of this Latina.

Over the rest of the show, the play's focus gets dispersed. Latinos in Hollywood, Latino homosexuality, and Latino machismo are the subjects of the next three pieces. In particular, "Hispanic American Princess" -- which suggests that if Latinos/as want to work in Hollywood they can either bleach their hair and act white or play the parts of criminals -- seemed to swerve too far from the trajectory that the first three pieces establish.

With "Perfectly Fabulous" and "Confessions of a Macho," the show comes back to its emphasis on gender roles and expectations by attending briefly to Latino masculinity. In "Perfectly Fabulous," we are introduced to Lola, a Cuban-Nuyorican drag queen who "tried for years to be the man that [my father] wanted me to be" but years ago liberated himself from compulsory heterosexuality and embraced his queer identity. In "Confessions of a Macho," Lola's aging father reveals how he has been a macho (e.g., he is unsure of how many illegitimate children he has fathered) yet at the very end manages to tell Lola, "I love you."

This understated moment of change sets up Costa's spoken-word poem, "AFROSPIC," in which she talks about the necessity of change in the face of the fear of change. A few factors, however, get in the way of the poem being as inspiring as it could have been. First of all, the call for change would feel more urgent if the play itself had a tighter focus. Because of the dispersal of the play's focus over the last half, the call to change in Afro-Spic feels too general.

Also, the concluding call for change is not unfamiliar. In many ways, Afro-Spic reperforms work that others have done. Many writers have already talked about the disparagement of the brown body inside and outside of Latino cultures, and the Hollywood dilemma/problem is constantly under discussion. Moreover, "Libre Como el Viento," "Diva," "R.E.S.P.E.C.T.," "Perfectly Fabulous," and "Confessions of a Macho" echo a bit too much the performance work of Luis Alfaro and John Leguizamo, especially the latter's Mambo Mouth and Freak.

Of course, it is perfectly possible that for some who see Afro-Spic the show is an exhilarating introduction to the critical issues that for others are not so new.

And makes it worthwhile, no?

Afro-Spic plays Saturdays at 7 p.m.. Hudson Mainstage Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. 323 288-9034. Reservations encouraged. $10.