This is a follow-up to
yesterday's post. As I was going to get my mail I noticed this lovely
papier-mâché (literally, "chewed paper". Yuck.) sculpture in front of the
Art Junkie across the street from the Post Office. Today I took my camera.
The sculpture depicts
La Catrina (The Elegant Lady) and her male counterpart
El Catrin (The Dandy) flanking a
Sacred Heart of Jesus in anticipation of
Dia de los Muertos.
The thing damn near but doesn't quite block the sidewalk. I will assume they take it in at night. Several people, tourists probably, stopped to look at it during the five minutes I was there.
Click to embiggen
Below is our horny sculptress Ursula working on another Sacred Heart in honor of her grandparents. This is just off our town's main intersection which you can see in the background.
She told me that our local school board put the kibosh on any
Dia de los Muertos references in our schools (which have a large Latino enrollment) because they don't think death should be glorified.
Yeesh.
Somebody should tell those Anglo idiots that the Meskins don't
glorify death, they
accept it as part of life and like to celebrate the day with their ancestors. Family time, like in "Hey! Let's put out some goat tacos for
Tio Pepito! He's been gone a long time and would probly like one!".
To be fair, I hear some school districts are doing the same thing with Halloween because it offends some fundies. I couldn't care less what fundies think but they're on a lot of school boards, to the detriment of schools and kids learning actual stuff.
BTW, I normally don't get carried away with skull/skeleton/death symbolism and can't stand the way they're normally presented by bikers and phony militarists who use 'em to try and scare people into thinking they're badasses cheating death. You can't cheat death, it wins every time. I
did like
Ghost Rider though. Heh.
For a coupla days a year, though, I dig the shit out of the Mexican use of the symbols. Makes a helluva lot more sense than Halloween if you ask me.
