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Traditions Collide at Halloween

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Tonight, many children in Tijuana will dress up as witches and goblins and go out trick-or-treating just like American youngsters. A raucous party crowd will celebrate the holiday on Avenida Revolucion.

Tijuana has embraced Halloween for decades, something that might seem inevitable in a region where Mexican children grow up closer to U.S. shopping malls than the wellsprings of Mexican culture. But now, schools and culture officials are fighting back with an aggressive campaign to popularize Mexico’s venerated Day of the Dead.

“We are trying to preserve our own traditions,” said Leobardo Sarabia, Tijuana’s municipal culture czar. “We are far from central Mexico, where traditions are strong. Some people here find the popularity of Halloween alarming.

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“There are fears that this region will denationalize and be left with a very Americanized culture,” he said.

Jaime Chaidez, communications director of Tijuana’s Instituto de la Cultura, said: “Just say no to Halloween. Talk to your dead.”

No one seems to mind much if Mexican and American symbols bleed together, like the Day of the Dead altar for Albert Einstein with its offering of hamburgers. Or the time schoolchildren laid out Kentucky Fried Chicken for Abraham Lincoln. Contemporary innovations--like this year’s altar to illegal immigrants--are not off limits, either.

Rather than aim for the kind of orthodox Day of the Dead that draws tourists from all over the world to tiny villages in central Mexico, officials are attempting to promote its rituals in this forward-looking border city, where Mexicans who came seeking opportunity often seemed to lose touch with the heritage they left behind.

Still, the campaign is encouraging parents to take the family for a traditional Mexican cemetery picnic in which food is set out to invite deceased spirits to join the living. Schoolchildren are learning to write the traditional calavera poems, honoring teachers and principals with darkly comic verses on their demise.

There are special forums for children, like a Thursday presentation called “Silence . . . the Children Are Speaking With Their Dead.”

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In many schools, Halloween classroom parties have been replaced with Day of the Dead festivities. Some teachers are even trying to discourage parents from dressing their children in Halloween costumes or taking them out for trick-or-treat.

No one can recall a time when the Day of the Dead was this widely celebrated in Tijuana.

Twenty years ago, according to Margarita Barba, a leader of the campaign, “there was no Day of the Dead here. Halloween was universal.”

The shift began with the arrival of Mixtec Indians from Oaxaca, officials say. Along with the dreams and hopes brought by most migrants, the Mixtecs brought some of Mexico’s most undiluted folkways, including elaborate Day of the Dead observances that make the annual Oaxaca celebration an international tourist attraction.

Before long, sugar skulls and special Day of the Dead breads began appearing in Tijuana markets, officials say. People--and strolling troubadours--began to flock to beautiful candle-lit graveyards. A funeral home kicked off the first altar contest, and five years ago, the city intensified its campaign.

“Now there’s a boom. The Day of the Dead is in style,” said Irais Pinon, head of the Baja California Popular Culture department.

At one grade school in working-class Colonia Libertad, schoolteacher Carlos Berumen proudly showed an impromptu visitor just how much the tradition is coming alive in Tijuana.

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With startling grace, his young charges perform a Oaxacan dance with broad, multicolored ribbons that are woven together by the dancers to form ceremonial mats for the dead, Moorish eight-point stars, and mirrors like those that helped pre-Columbian souls survive the journey through the nether world.

The children are building an altar for Benito Juarez, a Oaxaca Indian who rose from humble origins to become one of Mexico’s most reformist and well-loved presidents.

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The principal, Alicia Garcia, is a Day of the Dead purist. She has abolished Halloween parties at her school, although she celebrated them for much of her life.

“Halloween is not a tradition of our people,” Garcia said. “Being border people, we have lost many of our values. This is a call to rescue our traditions. We have to work on the parents, and convince them to teach their children Mexico’s authentic traditions.”

Out on the playground, it’s more of a tossup.

Hilda Torres, 25, at the school to pick up her daughter, Xiomara, faithfully picnicked at her grandmother’s grave every year on Day of the Dead in her native Campeche. But now she lives in freewheeling Tijuana, earns her own money at a Japanese electric organ factory, and doesn’t see why her Xiomara should not go out trick-or-treating tonight.

Xiomara, 9, wants to dress up as a beggar.

“For me, it’s not that big a deal,” Torres said. “Let everyone seek their own customs.”

But Roberto Manuel Gallegos, 11, said he and his family don’t approve of Halloween.

“My grandmother says it’s a party for witches and the devil,” he said shyly--echoing a sentiment expressed by one of his school’s educators about the “diabolical connotations” of the holiday.

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“That’s ignorance,” Irais Pinon, the state culture official, said with a sigh. “Halloween has exactly the same roots as the Day of the Dead.”

Like the Day of the Dead, experts say, Halloween is rooted in ancient death rites that the Catholic Church attempted to co-opt.

Halloween is probably rooted in the autumn equinox celebration of Samhain, the Celtic New Year celebration in which the wandering souls of the dead were feted, according to Jack Santino, a respected expert on Halloween from Bowling Green State University.

It was recast by the Roman Catholic Church in a campaign, begun by Pope Gregory I in 601 to Christianize pagan holidays, according to Santino. Celtic New Year’s Day, Nov. 1, was sanitized as All Saint’s Day. When the image of the traveling dead refused to die, the church tried to supplant Samhain again with All Soul’s Day, Nov. 2, Santino said.

Although pagan religious leaders were banished into hiding as witches, All Hallow’s Eve--and its festival embrace of wandering spirits--endured.

In Mexico, Nov. 1 is the day to honor dead children’s souls, and Nov. 2 the universal Day of the Dead. Like many of its rituals, Mexico’s Day of the Dead altars draw on pre-Columbian death rituals. There is the dog to accompany the soul, a rod to drive away evil spirits and a mat to welcome the spirits of the dead for a visit with the living.

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To help people remember everything, Tijuana officials have an itemized altar checklist.

For Irais Pinon, the most important thing about marking the Day of the Dead is the socialization of Mexican attitudes toward death. She said that the Day of the Dead, like raucous Irish wakes, is part of a healthy cultural acceptance of mortality as part of life--not something to be feared or denied.

This relationship with death is frequently expressed with irreverence, like the engravings of Jose Guadalupe Posadas that show skeletons fighting bulls, smoking cigarettes, and dancing the fandango. Or in the calaveras--which means “skulls”--short, rhyming Day of the Dead poems that frequently honor friends and loved ones.

In this spirit, award-winning Tijuana journalist Dora Elena Cortes sent a reporter friend a calavera about her friend’s doomed search for an interview with accused Tijuana drug cartel overlord Ramon Arellano. It ends with the drug lord and his gunmen preparing their own kind of “exclusive” for the reporter, who now “rests in peace.”

Tijuana schoolchildren, competing citywide for the best calaveras, wrote many about their teachers.

“Maribel was studying/when Death came singing,” wrote Christopher Vasquez, a sixth-grader, of teacher Maribel Garcia. “Come and study with me, he said/Maribel died happy/teaching the Dead.”

Another, by sixth-grader Anabel Munoz Rizo, was about her principal: “Death came along and said . . . You’re sitting in my seat.’ Thus died the principal/And the skeleton carried her off/To be principal of the cemetery.”

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Culture promoter Margarita Barba doesn’t mind a little border fusion of the two holidays.

She doesn’t even mind that Tijuana schoolchildren served their American heroes, Lincoln and Einstein, fast food on some of the altars entered in the contests of previous years.

“What were they going to feed them, enchiladas?” she said. “The kids fed them what they thought they liked to eat.”

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She thinks Halloween, too, has been co-opted--by Tijuana. The Halloween street festival on Avenida Revolucion has become something suspiciously close to a Latin American carnival.

“I think we can fuse the valuable origins of Halloween with our own traditions,” said Barba, who is also a lead jurist for the altar contest. “We are a border people. We can experience different cultures without losing our identity.”

“Ideally, the United States would follow our lead, and rescue the true meaning of Halloween from that commercialized, consumerist freak show that has degraded their own cultural traditions,” she added.

It is telling that the Mixtec Indian migrants in Tijuana, though they are credited with reviving the custom, do not enter the altar contests at all, according to culture officials.

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To Maria Baca, 28, a Mixtec vendor, the Day of the Dead is a private time for family and friends to sit by their altar to her grandmother, who died in Oaxaca.

To some, the high-concept altars created by university students--for revolutionary Che Guevara, for the student protesters killed by security forces in the 1968 massacre in Mexico City--evince the more abstract nature of the Day of the Dead here.

For the educated, sophisticated contemporaries of Jaime “Just Say No” Chaidez, 38, the Day of the Dead movement is part of the emerging identity of a generation of border adults who grew up alongside the United States but do not view themselves as Americanized.

“Halloween is celebrated by the kind of kids who go to discos. We’re not all Latin Lite. We don’t all want to eat hamburgers and dance to Michael Jackson,” Chaidez said, inviting a visitor to tour a downtown marketplace where Day of the Dead accouterments are sold.

He pointed to the edible sugar skulls, to the papier-mache skeletons. To the plaster skulls with strings to make their teeth chatter. The little grinning skeleton figures posed on coffins, drinking bottles of beer, dressed in serapes.

Halloween costumes and little plastic pumpkins, used to collect trick-or-treat loot, were also for sale.

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“The Day of the Dead is making a comeback,” Chaidez said.

But some habits die hard.

Chaidez slips off for a personal errand and returns clutching a hefty plastic shopping bag. His groceries? Finally, the truth comes out.

This defender of Mexican tradition has bought a jumbo sack of Halloween candy.

“We’re going to have a big altar at work. A lot of kids come by the office,” he said, laughing.

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