A Death So Sweet : Art Good Enough to Eat Is Displayed at UCLA’s Mexican Days of the Dead Exhibit

Through Nov. 7, UCLA’s Museum of Cultural Histowill be full of skulls and skeletons. Many of the skulls are made of sugar, others of bread.

They are part of an exhibition, “ Vive tu Recuerdo : Living Traditions in the Mexican Days of the Dead.” The Dias de Los Muertos (Days of the Dead) is the Mexican observance of two Roman Catholic feast days, All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, and All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2. Rather as the early Christian missionaries to England superimposed the festival of Easter on that of the pagan goddess Eostre, and that of Christmas on the end-of-year festival Giuli (from whose name the word yule is derived), the early Spanish missionaries to Mexico tolerated some fusion of Roman Catholic ritual with pre-Hispanic rites, though they were outraged when the Aztecs interpreted the Crucifixion as simply another example of human sacrifice.

Robert V. Childs, the museum’s collections manager and joint curator of the exhibition with Patricia B. Altman, admits that he first became interested in pre-Hispanic culture when he was in elementary school because of the sinister fascination of human sacrifices. But his interest soon broadened to reading books about “the conquering Cortes.” He also made a serious study of Central American Indian philosophy about the nature of life and death in the universe--”the notion that they are in fact part of the same complex, an endless cycle: the natural world, the world of men, cannot exist without the sacrifice of the gods; likewise the gods can’t exist without human blood. Both sides of the equation feed each other.”

Childs, 44, describes his background as “a WASPish community in the San Fernando Valley” (his father was a U.S. naval officer, then a real estate agent), and he is sensitive to “the typical WASP response to the (UCLA) exhibition, that it is macabre and ghoulish. It is not. It is a family occasion, which is the core of the holiday, designed to bring the living and dead members of the family together for a feast. It’s a kind of combination Memorial Day and Thanksgiving. It is a fiesta of good will. People enjoy it. It is positive and fun. The art is not intended to be ghoulish at all; it is very friendly. One of the things you do with a sugar skull is put a friend’s name on it and give it to that friend, almost like a valentine--a gentle reminder that ‘you too will die,’ keeping things in perspective.”

The two main rituals of the Days of the Dead are the building of a household altar and the decoration of relations’ graves in cemeteries. The altars, adorned with candles and offerings, are visited and admired by neighbors, rather like Christmas trees. On the graves are placed elaborately fashioned breads and other foods, on the Aztec principle that spirits need sustenance.

Robert Childs has been collecting these edible arts, together with toys, papier-mache figures, paper cutouts and calaveras (printed satirical broadsheets “ribbing” public figures as skeletons) since the 1960s, especially in the city of Oaxaca. The sugar skulls and bread artifacts are not as perishable as you might think. “The skulls are cast out of sugar and decorated with colored icing, which fades,” Childs says. “As for the sugar itself, I’m not quite sure why it lasts. It may have something to do with its degree of refinement--or what’s in the water when they dissolve the sugar. It begins to mottle; but by and large, as long as you keep the skulls dry and free from insects, they don’t decay. We have in the museum collection two life-size sugar skulls that were originally part of an exhibition of Mexican art that traveled to Europe in the 1950s. They were made at the latest in 1957, and they are in pretty good shape. There’s no color left, all the decoration has faded to white and the sugar is a little . . . unappetizing; but there they are.”

When Childs first bought elaborate creations of bread in Oaxaca--including figures of young women and animals, and heads of Christ with glitter halos or crowns of thorns--he wrapped them in plastic to protect them from weevils. It was not a good idea; condensation caused a greenish fungus that would have given Sir Alexander Fleming endless opportunities for research. But of the breads Childs brought back later, “most are in pretty good shape, though a couple have started to crumble a bit.” U.S. Customs has been pleasantly tolerant of his eccentric collections. Realizing that the sugar skulls were not going to be eaten, they advised him to classify them not as candy (which would have to be tested for impurities) but as “toys, not stuffed.” There was no duty to pay, and the 2,000 or so Days of the Dead items in Childs’ collection were bought at what was, in North American terms, negligible cost.

Childs’ interest in the fiesta, in all its aspects, has broadened. What began as a dilettante collecting passion has become a professional study. He visits cemeteries and photographically documents the altars. “Unfortunately, my control of the Spanish language, while quite sufficient in the market, is embarrassing for a potential scholar.” He thinks that if his Spanish was up to it, the people who celebrate the holiday would have no objection to talking about it.

“There are two classes of people that, if I could speak to them properly, I would pursue: the people who just do it (everyone produces art of some kind for the fiesta; everyone makes an altar; everyone decorates a grave) and the people who sell in the markets. I would ask them where they get their inspiration, why so many of the figures are of young women--are they meant to be virgins?--and how topical, politically, they get and why.”

The UCLA exhibition includes a collection of life-size papier-mache figures made in Mexico City. Toys are displayed in a series of picture-box windows--”crypts” in a “mausoleum” wall. More didactic displays illustrate altar building and grave decoration. In the final section of the show are things that have been made in Los Angeles’ Latino community to celebrate the Days of the Dead. These include a print of President Reagan as a skeletal cowboy, riding a missile and facing a skeletal Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It requires considerable artistic license to convert Margaret Thatcher into a skeleton. The anonymous artist has given her a Union Jack skirt.