Day of Dead Puts Different Face on Meaning of Life

THOUSAND OAKS —  The scene seemed a bit macabre at first.

A dozen youngsters--dressed in skeleton costumes, faces painted in ghoulish black and white makeup--took part earlier this week in a mock funeral procession.

Heads bowed, they lumbered toward a stage, letting out mournful wails for a recently departed man as well as for their own deaths.

“They’re mocking their own life,” said Javier Gomez, founder of Teatro Inlakech, an Oxnard-based nonprofit group that put on the performance at Cal Lutheran University. “Death mourns its own death.”

The event was a prelude to Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, which will be observed Sunday and Monday.

During the holiday, which melds Aztec and Catholic traditions, death is mocked, celebrated and honored as a way of giving meaning to life, said Patrick Oviedo, who organized the play.

“Life is easier to live if you’re not afraid of dying,” said Oviedo, dressed like a skeleton and holding his 5-month-old daughter who wore a matching costume. “We poke fun at death and say it’s OK. It’s natural. It’s part of the world.”

The holiday is celebrated in Mexico and the United States. Nov. 1 is the day to honor the souls of children, and Nov. 2 is a day to remember all of the dead.

The holiday borrows from the death rituals of pre-Columbian times, but also melds together the Catholic All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.

At the Cal Lutheran performance, the costumed skeletons sang ballads and clanked machetes together as audience members sipped hot chocolate and ate specialty breads shaped like humans.

“That’s also the humor that is captured in the Mexican culture,” Gomez said. “We don’t fear death. We’re not going to try to run away from it.”

Gomez’s theater group will hold a procession Sunday at 6 p.m. at Oxnard’s Colonia Park, 224 Juanita Ave.

The next day, Gomez’s group plans to begin a similar procession at 5 p.m. at West Park in Ventura, 454 Harrison Ave.

During the holiday, many people create altars at their homes or at cemeteries, where they lay flowers, photos of the deceased and trinkets that remind them of their loved ones.

The favorite foods of the dead are also laid out so that the deceased can consume the fragrance while the living consume the food.

At Oxnard College, students on Monday plan to place an altar in the Learning Resource Center at the school’s administration center. Students will be encouraged to place pictures of departed family members at that shrine.

Gomez is creating his own altar at his Oxnard theater. He wants to honor his grandparents, aunts and uncle and mother. He plans to place a photo of labor leader Cesar Chavez at the altar. There will be another photo of a 14-year-old student who died this year in a car accident while coming back from Magic Mountain.

He will place a hamburger on the altar for the boy.

“You’re enjoying with them, partying with them and praying and talking with them,” Gomez said. “They are there with you.”