A foot in the grave, and loving it

AGUASCALIENTES, Mexico -- The house of the dead awaits your arrival.

Just off the courtyard of a former Carmelite convent here, half a dozen clay sculptures of the dark Aztec underworld lord Mictlantecuhtli fix you with voracious grins and hollow eyes. In a next-door gallery, scores of miniature skeletons strum instruments, cavort in beery fiestas and enlace their bony limbs in fervid lovemaking.

If the mood at Mexico’s 2-month-old National Museum of Death feels more celebratory than sepulchral, that’s hardly surprising. Although most Western cultures tend to treat death with fear and loathing, Mexicans prefer to embrace it.

In Mexico and other Latin American cultures, death isn’t merely a depressing curtain-closer but rather a passage into a kind of parallel reality whose inhabitants enjoy the same pleasures and suffer many of the same tribulations as the living. Mexico’s spiritual iconography and its folklore, expressed in popular festivities such as the Day of the Dead, bear witness to a fixation that extends back into the dream-time, centuries before the Spanish conquistadors’ arrival.

“For the Mexican, it [death] is very natural, as natural as to be born. It’s not a tragedy,” says Octavio Bajonero Gil, 67, one of the country’s most esteemed graphic artists, who donated 1,500 death-related art and artisanal objects to the Autonomous University of this midsize city, spurring it to create the museum this summer.

Bajonero’s collection now fills six galleries of an elegantly restored 17th century convent in this city’s historic center, about a six-hour drive northwest of Mexico City. The museum’s holdings, which were assembled by Bajonero over 50 years, encompass pre-Columbian sculpture and pottery, reproductions of ancient Indian codices depicting human sacrifices, colonial-era artworks, hundreds of whimsical skeletons and toys made by artisans.

In an adjoining modern building that connects with the convent through a tranquil plaza, visitors inside a red-tinted exhibition hall ponder the satirical calaveras (skulls) of master engraver José Guadalupe Posada and works by other Mexican masters such as Manuel Manilla, Francisco Toledo and Leonel Maciel. Others linger over a bronze death mask of President Benito Juárez and a traditional Tzompantli skull fashioned from Coke-bottle labels.

Today, Chinese factories crank out plastic knockoffs of many of these items. But every object in the museum was made “by Mexican hands,” says Jorge Heliodor García Navarro, the institution’s director general, and there is at least one piece from every state in Mexico plus the Federal District (Mexico City).

Organized and operated by the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, the museum is “like tutti-frutti, a collage of everything,” García says. This inspired mishmash of fine art, historical artifact and popular craft, grouped around a common theme, is unusual in the hierarchical world of Mexican museum curatorship, García says, and it reflects the pervasiveness of the memento mori as a central trope of Mexican culture.

“Many foreigners ask: How can there be skeleton boxers or skeletons drinking? Isn’t it a lack of respect?” García says. “For a Mexican, it’s not. It’s part of our reality. We share this, all us human beings.”

An early fascination

A gentle, jovial man with a full head of white hair and the long, graceful hands of a concert pianist, Bajonero says his fascination with death began when he was only 2 years old and his father died of a heart attack, at age 38. He can remember being intrigued by his mother’s ritual devotions to her late husband and having a growing interest in “the ceremonies of death.”

“In this case, the theme chose me,” Bajonero says at his art- and book-crammed home in a blue-collar Mexico City neighborhood.

While he was studying at the National School of Plastic Arts at the National Autonomous University in San Carlos, he began acquiring death-themed objects, often while traveling to far-flung parts of the republic.

Rummaging through flea markets, he found fantastic, one-of-a-kind pieces. A sculpture of Cihuateotl, the fearsome-looking symbol of Indian women who died in childbirth. A skeleton carousel from Oaxaca. Nahuatl masks. A ceramic clay banquet of skeletal Mexican Revolution soldiers, hoisting their rifles toward their leader, Pancho Villa. A 19th century, life-size wooden carving of a dead child, tenderly rendered. Wooden crosses depicting souls foundering in purgatory. A beautiful sculpture of the Virgin of the Good Death, who gently cradles a human skull in one hand.

Many of these objects are no longer being made, and the generational know-how that shaped them is steadily being lost too, Bajonero says. “There are types of artisans that have disappeared. The mentality of the people has changed because many people have gone to the United States [to work], and when they return, they don’t like these traditional things.”

Though he didn’t think of himself as a collector at first, Bajonero says, he gradually developed more sophisticated tastes. Friends, noticing his obsession, began bringing him more objects as gifts. “When I realized I had an important collection with 1,500 objects, I thought, ‘What am I going to do with all this?’ ”

In the past, a few Mexican museums had hosted exhibitions on artistic depictions of death. But there was no institution with a permanent collection devoted to this theme, Bajonero says. His first thought was to establish a museum in his native village, but Michoacán state officials didn’t have the resources to back such a project.

Then in 2000, an exhibition of Bajonero’s work in Aguascalientes put him in touch with the National Autonomous University, where there was immediate enthusiasm about hosting the collection. The university envisions the collection both as a major regional tourist attraction and as a rich trove of research and teaching material for academics and students working in history, sociology, literature, anthropology and art.

This educational function is especially important, says José Antonio Padilla Pedroza, who oversees the museum’s cultural promotion, because when the museum-going public lacks understanding of art’s cultural and historical context, “the art dies.”

“Many university students don’t know the saints, the demons. They ask, ‘What demon is this?’ ” Padilla says. “The people aren’t accustomed to being cultural consumers.”

Officials expect the collection to keep expanding as other donors come forward. The museum already is displaying four death-themed pieces given by Carlos Monsiváis, the Mexican author and intellectual.

This prosperous city of about 630,000 makes a fitting locale for an institution devoted to the consideration of mortality and eternity. Aguascalientes is known for its annual Festival of Skulls during Day of the Dead week. Posada (1852-1913) was born here, and a nearby museum is devoted to his life and work. Next door to the Posada museum, the Temple of Encino contains a black statue of Jesus that is rumored to be miraculously growing, a portent (the faithful believe) of a coming global calamity.

But as far as Bajonero is concerned, the world to come can wait. He’s still glowing with memories of the museum’s opening in June. “I couldn’t sleep,” he recalls. “I said, ‘God, don’t let me have a heart attack!’ ”

He laughs at this acknowledgment of the absurdist black humor that shadows all human existence.

Then he pours his guests a shot of Herradura tequila and puts a recording of “La llorona” by Óscar Chávez on his old hi-fi. Pleasures, by their nature, are short-lived he says, and he believes that’s how things should be.

“My contact with death has allowed me to enjoy life more,” he says, “because after death there is nothing.”

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reed.johnson@latimes.com