The long-awaited final Day of the Dead parade, which, along with the first parade of the Catrinas, fills the sprawling Paseo de la Reforma with rumba skeletons, may have surpassed the millions of visitors this year in 2022, which was a record for them a year earlier celebrations.
There is no country in the entire world that celebrates All Souls’ Day in this sui generis way, where religiosity is present but is not the main feature.
Rather, it is a memory from the time before Christ, when the indigenous people visited the underworld at certain times of the year to converse and seek advice from those who had gone to other places, but without leaving them.
It was a very important reunion, captured in the work carved in stone by these primitive geniuses who managed to leave this imperishable legacy to countless generations up to the present day.
This final parade registered requests more than a week earlier from more than four thousand participants with self-designed costumes, organized in 65 contingents, more than 400 troops and 13 floats or floats, as well as hundreds of puppets. .
Most of these last huge Catrinas, with their luxurious outfits, long dresses that reach the bony hips and the skulls that, contrary to expectations, do not in any way cause fear in children, enjoy them to the fullest together with their parents because, moreover , it’s a family outing where everyone is in costume.
There is no sadness in the parade, but the party has a different sign, it is not what we can see at the end of the year or at carnivals or other dates that involve music and dancing. It is a party where respect, devotion and emotional or spiritual encounter prevail with those who love each other for eternity.
It is complex, but it is so because, as the one who said it said, the confusion of feelings, of longing and nostalgia, of deep pain and fear, is carried eternally in the soul, which, however, has no space for this leaves discouragement and fear.
The Day of the Dead in Mexico is neither a simple ritual nor a religion, because death, although it may seem paradoxical, is an inalienable part of life, and in this respect it is not a heresy, nor does it sound bad that next to the altar, or on the streets like this Saturday, musical compositions dress in a different color and not in mourning, this commemoration.
This is the case with the song of the last century by the Cuban Rafael Blanco Suazo, which began like this between claves and drums: Caballero (Lord)/ that knocks me down and knocks me down/ He barely felt the conga,/ the dead man left celebrate.
npg/lma