Happy Days of the Dead!
OK, first off, you’re not supposed to say “happy,” despite all the colorful calaveras de azúcar, or sugar skulls, and boisterous street parties. Because the Day of the Dead, unlike Halloween, is not a peripatetic candy festival for kids that has been retrofitted into a costumed beer bash for adults. But a solemn, reflective time of honoring lost loved ones.
And second, as mentioned above, it is “Day of the Dead,” singular, Día de los Muertos. Even though there are at least two days, Nov. 1 and 2, the first to remember lost children, Día de los Angelitos, which is an agony almost too great to consider — heck, it’s hard enough when your children survive, grow up on schedule, excel, get married and go off to live in Washington, D.C., where you hardly ever see them.
And the second, Monday, Día de los Difuntos, or “All Souls Day,” dedicated to adults. For starters. Some mark four, or even eight days, referring to the “Week of the Dead.”
Complicated, right? You can see why a lot of folks ignore cultures other than their own. Once you start to unpack the actual details, there’s a lot to keep track of, and it’s easier to neglect something than to be wrong about it.
Nor is the holiday limited to solemnizing your own family. There is, for instance, a strong political element, usually completely overlooked, lost amid the sugary bread.
We might, for instance, pause to remember all the children who are gone but not dead, those in ICE custody. They are alive, though children, separated from their parents and plunged alone into a nighmarish, unending confinement in a sprawling police state who might easily wish they were dead. They’re not your children; but they’re somebody’s children, and while this might be hard for you to wrap your head around, those children are loved and missed as much as you love and would miss yours, if some performatively cruel government separated you from them to score points with its howling base. Maybe more.
We might also consider the departed who aren’t blood relatives. Especially with Tuesday being what we could call the Día de la Elección — the Day of the Election — most likely, although at this point, we really can’t be certain, can we?
Picking someone at random, I’d go with Dolores Huerta, the labor leader and civil rights icon who died last week at 96. She was given the front-page treatment she deserved. But a life as long and rich as hers, important aspects were given short shrift. The Sun-Times obituary of Huerta mentions voting exactly once, in passing, certainly nowhere near the treatment given her sharing that she had been sexually abused.
So let’s glance at last year’s Fair Elections Center tribute:
“In the 1950s, Huerta co-founded the Community Service Organization (CSO) to help Latino communities fight discrimination, economic hardships, and voter suppression.
“Huerta understood that political power was essential for lasting change. She worked tirelessly to ensure that farmworkers and Latinos had access to the ballot box, despite widespread voter suppression.
“She led voter registration drives, often going door-to-door in rural communities to help people overcome language barriers, intimidation, and unfair literacy tests. She also pushed for the elimination of poll taxes, which disproportionately affected poor and minority voters.
“During the 1960s and 1970s, she played a crucial role in mobilizing Latino voters, helping to elect leaders who would fight for workers’ rights. She worked closely with Robert F. Kennedy, and in 1968, she stood by his side the night he won the California Democratic primary — just moments before he was assassinated.
“Huerta also helped advocate for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting and empowered more Latino communities to participate in elections.”
You get the point.
Everything old is new again, and the efforts of the Trump administration to cast doubt on, undermine and control elections are a rush back to a bad place we were once at and will return to again unless vigorously opposed.
I hear from people who seem to think some moment of liberation is at hand, and to them, I typically deploy a rare sports metaphor: “Don’t spike the ball until you’re in the end zone.”
Freedom is not free, as the vets like to say, nor is it permanent. Someone is always trying to take it away, and maybe one problem is we didn’t really appreciate what we have. What we had. Millions of Americans fought to get us here.
During the Day of the Dead, the barrier to the other world is supposedly thinner, more porous, and if we listen hard, we can almost hear their voices saying: “Don’t squander the treasure we won for you. Make this right.”