Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 110: Altars of Resistance!

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Episode 110: Altars of Resistance! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: So tonight we're gonna be talking about Villa de los Muertos.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm calling this talk Alters of Resistance because despite the common or the more popular narrative surrounding Villa de los Muercos or what you hear about it, it is a tradition very much rooted in resistance, in defiance, and of subverting popular ideas, popular concepts, and making them our own as indigenous people.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to start off by uh asking a basic question, right?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like what is Día de los Muertos or Día de Muertos in Mexico?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: When you're in Mexico, they call it Día de Muertos.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: In the Southwest, I call it Día de los Muertos.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Both are correct.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Some indigenous community, the Nahuac communities that I descend from, refer to it as Champolo.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then in the United States, we just call it Day of the Dead.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, what is Diaz de los Muertos?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I could start off by telling you what it is not.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: It is not Mexican Halloween.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because as we know, Mexican Halloween is actually on May 5th.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Dia de los Muertos is actually Mexican Ghost Independence Day, which is September 16th.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bad joke.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: My wife advised me not to open with that joke because nobody would get it.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: She was right, but you know what?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Fortune favors the both, babe.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if we get online and we start poking around about what day of the dead is, right?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: We start getting fed these common uh tropes, these common ideas about what is the day of the dead or the other little square.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: So here we see this from Wiki Day of the Dead was a holiday we traditionally celebrates about November 1st and 2nd.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Though other days, such as October 31st or November 2nd, maybe included depending on the locality.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's all true.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's very well and good.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: If we poke around a little further, we find out that in 2008, UNYESCO recognized Villa de Muertos as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, praising it as a living tradition that continues to bind families and communities across generations.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: So all of this is very good, all of this is very accurate.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: But if we start poking around and asking people, so what does it mean?
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Where does it come from?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: We usually get the same narrative.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: We start being told the same things over and over again.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So this is from history.com.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the way they put it is once the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire in the 16th century, the Catholic Church moved indigenous celebrations and rituals honoring the dead throughout the year to the Catholic dates commemorating All Saints Day and All Souls Day on November 1st and 2nd.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: So this is from history.com, and this is kind of the mainstream narrative that we start seeing as we start asking what is Diego de los Muertos.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is from the University of Kansas, and it says when the Spanish conquistadors invaded America, they brought Catholicism with them.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's true.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: They forced many of the indigenous people, they conquered to convert, also true.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: But then it says, after witnessing the Aztec celebrations of death, the Spaniards began fusing Aztec tradition with Catholic holidays of All Saints Day and All Souls Day.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So these narratives kind of get on my nerves.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Can anybody see what might be wrong with these narratives that are being spread?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: So to me, they kind of imply that this was purely a Spanish endeavor, right?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is purely a European thing that was imposed on indigenous people, stripping native people of our agency and reducing our ancestors to recipients of the Spanish imperial ambitions, right?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like we just sat there and accepted everything that the Spaniards came up with that they decided to impose on us.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, in my opinion, this is a very superficial rendering of what actually occurred.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Or as Captain Kirk for Atrech fans out there might have said, but that's not the way it happened.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, to really understand Vienna de los muertos, I want to go back a little bit and start.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: I want to discuss Mesoamerican, Central Mexican Mesoamerican concepts of death and the way that my ancestors looked at the world and how we conceived of life.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to start off with this really beautiful, it's an excerpt of a poem, and I'm gonna read it to you in English.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: But it was written by Netzavarpollo, and if you know who Netzavalkoyo was, he was the Flachwani of Texcoco, he's considered this great poet, king, flachwani, ruler of his people, but he was a deeply philosophical cat, right?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he's famous for the poems that he left behind.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of my favorite poems, or an excerpt.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it says, Truly do we live on earth, not forever on earth, only a brief time here, even jade fractures, even gold ruptures, even ketzal pumes tear.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: So not forever on earth, only a brief time here.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: So this is very profound.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is a way of questioning our reality, questioning our mortality, the ephemeral nature of life.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And here's another poem.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: This is probably one of my favorite poems.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know who actually originally wrote this.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's an unknown author, but I'm gonna read it to you with Nawa because I think it's a very beautiful and powerful poem.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this poem is called Nonanskin.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Nonan Sin means my beloved mother or my precious mother.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a poem, as far as we know, that was written by a woman to her mother.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, and it goes like this Nonan Sin, Ikwak Mimikis.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, my my precious mother, my beloved mother, when I die, bury me at your heart.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And when you go there to make tortillas, cry to me there.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: So very powerful imagery, guys.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if somebody asks you, siwa pile, play kakichoka, my precious woman, why are you crying?
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Answer them.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: This wood is green and it smokes.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: So she's covering up why she's crying.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody comes and asks her, you know, why are you crying?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it's because this wood is green and it's smoking and it's making me cry.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I really love this poem.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: I love both of these poems because they illustrate that Mesoamerican people were thinking about these things, right?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: There was this philosophical tradition of questioning the purpose of life.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Why are we here?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: What happens to us after we die?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And these are very, very human things to do, right?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because basically, what this is saying is life is short, life is ephemeral, we're not here for long.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then in this poem, we could see we just want to be remembered by the people who love us and the people that we love.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: These are the things that are important, very common human characteristics.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: And in the Central Mexican concept of death, there's this idea that after you die, after your body ceases to function, that you proceed to go on a four-year-long journey.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And throughout these four years, you travel through nine levels of Miklan.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Miklan is called the place of the dead, and we associate that with the northern direction, Miklampa, the region of the dead.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the first of these nine levels, and this is like a hard journey.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: So for four years, you're basically going through some shit.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: So like it doesn't end after you die.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: So the first phrase is Itzkuitlan, and this is an underground river that the dead must cross with the help of a sacred solo itzquintli, one of the dogs.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's Sepekli Monamitlan, which are these two massive mountains that collide with each other and then pull back apart and then collide with each other again.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so that you must you have to time it out.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: You have to sit there and wait and time it out so that you can run through these colliding mountains.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's Ixtepe, the obsidian mountain.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a path covered in sharp obsidian knives that spread your flesh as you go along this path.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's Izehuekan, which is a desolate, freezing landscape.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a what we're getting at there is the nine levels of Miklan are just filled with this hardship, right?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it finally ends at Kikna Miklan.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where your journey ends after four years.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it ends when you meet Miklan Techri and Miketsiwa, right?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: The Lord and Lady, the Lords of Death, the Lords of the land of the dead.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's there that you finally find rest when you're in Miklan.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: So there's this four-year-long journey that you go through after your death, and it's filled with hardship and it's just a really, really hard thing to go through.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Our ancestors had no chill.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so this idea of the way that we venerate death, the way that we look at death, the way that we honor our dead, was actually spread over a 40-day period.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't just like Dia de los Muertos is November 1st and 2nd.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: There was a 40-day period that was filled with feasts, with fasting, with dance, with setting up ofrendas, with singing, and just all these different ways that remember we remembered our dead.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: And these were two separate months of 20 days.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: The first was called Mita Ivi, which means the feast of the dead, or Klashochi Mako, which means when flowers are offered, because we would have these images of our teteo, which you know roughly translates to as gods, but we don't really call them gods, we call them teteo, and we would decorate these symbols of our teteo with flowers.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we would offer them flowers during this time, and we would venerate the dead.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then this spilled over into a whole uh second set of 20 days called, which is the great feast of the dead.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And this is also known as when the fruit falls or shokowetsi.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: And during this time, there was a ceremony where a tree would be pulled down and it would be shaved, and the pole would be set up, and young men were expected to try to climb to the top of the pole and gather agricultural implements from the top.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: So these were all of these ways that we celebrated and remembered the dead.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: In the Codex Teleriano Remesis, Remensis, they talk about these thieves.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so they say during this feast, and this is about Mika Yui, they made offerings to the dead.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: They placed food and drinks on their tombs, which they did for four years, right?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: So during that four-year period that your spirit was making its way to Miklan, your descendants would place food and offerings out for you to help you on this journey.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: For they believed that during this time the souls had not yet gone to their place of rest according to their belief.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: And thus they buried them, dressed with all their clothing and shod, for they believed that until they arrived at the place where their souls went, at the end of four years, they had much toil, cold, and weariness because they had to go through places full of snow and thorns.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that is why when an important person died, they also killed and buried a servant at the same time so that they can serve them.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: I can just imagine the servants when the person they were serving would get sick.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, God damn, I hope this guy doesn't die.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: They were next.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, and then we see Wei Mita Iwi, and it says, during this month, they once again celebrated the feast of the dead.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it was even bigger than the preceding one, for the name We Mita Iwi means the great feast of the dead.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: The last three days of this month, all the living fasted in honor of the dead, and they went out to play in the country as a way of celebrating.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Each year, when they celebrated the feast of the dead while the priests made sacrifices, everyone, each in his own house, and I love this part.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: They climbed onto the roofs of their houses and they looked towards the north, the region of the dead, right?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: At night they recited prayers to the dead, each one to your ancestors, and they spoke out aloud and they said, Come quickly, we are waiting for you.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: So these were the traditions that were carried on.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: So when you take all of this together, we can see that Central Mesoamericans had a complex system of traditions, of world views and systems for honoring and remembering the dead, as well as philosophical traditions that questioned the meaning of life and what existed beyond this material world.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: We had traditions tied to agriculture, and that included ceremony and ritual and cosmovision and songs and food.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was all very beautiful, it was all a very intact, complex system, the way that our ancestors lived.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: It was everything was going great.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then these apples showed.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's all very dark and grim stuff.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And to help with this, Ednan Cortez immediately wrote back to Spain and he requested 12 friars.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: So why would it be 12?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Does anybody have any ideas?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because of the 12 apostles, right?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's all got a match, it's all got to work together.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: So these 12 friars show up and they immediately get to work, doing everything they can to actively destroy indigenous ceremony, ritual, beliefs, everything within their power to destroy what we had.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: So here, this is a very famous image.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is from the Lienzo de Pashtala, and we could see the 12 friars, and they're raising the cross, and up here you could see all the demons, right?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because in their eyes, our teteo, our sacred beings, were viewed as demons, as demonic, as satanic.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how they would depict them in their drawings.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you have this one guy in particular, Diego Durán, and he wrote this book called Book of the Gods and Rites of the Ancient Calendar.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: And when he introduces this book, this is from the intro of this book, he's one of these first guys that shows up.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I am moved, O Christian reader, to begin the task of writing this work with the realization that we who have been chosen to instruct the Indians will never reveal the true God to them until the heathen ceremonies and false cults of their counterfeit deities are extinguished and erased.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: So this guy was an asshole.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: But luckily for us, he wrote down everything he ever thought and said.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it helps us when we're studying this era, right?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Here I shall set down a written account of the ancient idolatries and false religion, and which the devil with which the devil was worshipped until the holy gospel was brought to this land.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the most crazy part.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: Fields of grain and fruit trees do not prosper on uncultivated rocky soil covered with brambles and brush, unless all roots and stumps are eradicated.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: So when we look back at those common narratives that I pointed out at first about, you know, what is Dia de los Muertos?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Where does it come from?
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they paint this weird picture of like, well, the Spaniards just took the Aztec beliefs and fused them together with Catholic beliefs, and it was all cool.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: But we could see that this was not their intent at all.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: They did not want any fusion of these beliefs, they did not want to incorporate them together.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so when it comes to rooting out the brambles and bush, they got to work.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: So here we see the destruction of sacred spaces.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: These are Teopali's pyramids, they call them.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: We call them a Teophali.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: Teopali literally means like the house of Teop of the house of the Teo, who they call, you know, they say that we had as gods.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you could see them setting them on fire and driving the demons out, the devils out to the different directions.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And this image is called the burning of the idols.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: And this was written as part of Diego Munoz Camargo's description of the city of Plachala.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And here you can see the idols of the Teteo, the images being set on fire, our books being set on fire, and everybody just kind of chilling.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look closely, you can make out, you know, there's there's a hek that there's lalo up there.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: So they just went to work destroying everything that they could.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Fusion was not their plan.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: This one is called the Great Justice for Five Major Caciques and One Woman who returned to idol worship after becoming Christians.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: So these are people who, whether legitimately or not, at least feigned to become Catholics, right?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: They pretended to become Catholics so that they could avoid the destruction of everything they had.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: But then it was found out that they hadn't actually converted, so they were set on fire.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: So again, fusion wasn't part of the plan.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the way a lot of this happened was that the Spaniards were very smart and that they immediately began indoctrinating the youth.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: They immediately began indoctrinating the kids so that the kids would be the ones to rat out the elders and say, Oh, I saw my grandpa doing this, or I saw so-and-so doing this, and they would know who to take to task.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it brings me back to this.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: This was not the intention.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: They were very deliberate in how they viewed indigenous cosmovision, how they how they viewed the indigenous ways of life.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: And these are ideas that continue to this day.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote a book recently called Never Will It Be Lost: Ritual Remembrance in the Aztec Calendar, and in it I talk about the maintenance of these traditions and how we can use the calendar to stay in touch with our culture and continue to maintain these ways.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the first uh responses I got, uh, and I blurred out his face and hand.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: But it says, by the way, tell us what was so great about the Azteca committing demonic human sacrifices to false gods.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm 100% sure the sun or the moon don't talk to you.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: And initially I wanted to respond and be like, bro, your grammar sucks.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I took the high road.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: I uh I was like, well, I'm 100% sure the sun, the moon, or real fucking dork.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: But so thank you.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: So did it work?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: Did this eradication work?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: Was the attempt to eradicate the roots and stunts of indigenous worldviews successful?
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: Did the Spaniards simply Fuse Aztec tradition with Catholic holidays and somehow trick us into creating this new holiday known as Diego Los Muertos.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we're gonna go back to Diego Loran, and he's it's good that he wrote everything down because this quote is I'm sorry for all the text, but it's very, very telling.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, I wish to refer to something I have seen take place on the day of all hallows and on the day of the faithful departed.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: In some towns, offerings are made on all hollows, and further offerings take place on the day of the faithful departed.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when I asked why offerings were made on the day of all hollows, I was told that it was in honor of the children, it being an ancient custom which had survived.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: So he seems very concerned.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: I inquired whether offerings were also made on the day of the faithful departed, and the answer was yes, in honor of adults.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: I was sorry to hear these things because I saw clearly that the feast of the little dead, Mika Iuli, and of the adults, We Mika Iwi, were still being celebrated.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: On the first, I saw people offering chocolate, candles, fowl, fruit, great quantities of seed and food.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: And on the next day I saw the same thing.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: Though this feast fell in August, he's talking about Mika Iwi.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: I suspect that if it is an evil simulation, which I do not dare affirm, the pagan festival has been passed to the Feast of All Hollows in order to cover up the ancient ceremony.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: So he's saying very clearly, we don't want them to still do this.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: We do not want them to still practice their traditions.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's wrong that they're doing this and we need to root it out and stop it from happening.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he's very clear.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: So this idea that it was this Spanish idea to fuse the two things together in order to trick Native people to follow their religion, it just on its face.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's wrong, and it robs indigenous people of our agency and it replaces it with this very superficial detailing history.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: And this resistance didn't happen in a vacuum.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: So these are crosses.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: When the Spaniards were trying to get crosses erected, they didn't have enough stoneworkers to do the work.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: So they hired an indigenous artist called Tejki.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the Tequiti would make these crosses, and they would place in them obsidian mirrors in the center.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: And obsidian mirrors have a very deep and profound place in Mesoamerican cosmovision because they represent to us Teska, they represent to us one of our sacred Tateo who we venerate in our rituals.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: But what they told the Franciscans was, well, because the Franciscans wanted to know, like, why is there a what's up with all the obsidian?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: So they told him, well, it symbolizes the pure light of God.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a mirror.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it it represents divine introspection and the spiritual mirror of the soul.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so the Franciscans believed this.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: And some pasted, you could see this is one of the few, this is in Hidalgo, this is one of the few crosses that actually maintains the obsidian mirror in it.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: Here you could see another one where the obsidian mirrors have been removed.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: But they basically, it was the reverse of what the common idea was.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't the Spaniards imposing their things on us and being like, oh, we're gonna we're gonna hide their beliefs and their beliefs.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was indigenous resistance.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was, okay, we'll make you a cross, but we're gonna put it, we're gonna put our symbols right there.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: So when we kneel and we prayed at this cross, we're venerating Piscatipoca.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is something that kept happening.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite examples of this is in 2022, there was this earthquake in Teposlan, near Teposlan.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: Has anybody been to Teposlan?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's really beautiful out there.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's a convent in Teposlan where they would take indigenous women and train them up to become nuns.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: And there are all of these paintings, these murals of the Virgin Mary on the walls.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: But when this earthquake happened, it caused some of the suckle or the uh the whitewash to crumble and fall off, and they saw that there was another mural behind it.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so they were like, Oh, this must be another image of the Virgin Mary, and we should get people to restore it and see what's behind this, right?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so they got to work, and in 2022, what do they find in this convent?
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: Archaeologists discover a mural of an Aztec god of alcohol in a Mexican convent.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hell yeah, right?
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: This was Teposteco.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: Teposteco is the teteo of Pulque.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: And if you saw my Pulque talk, maybe you remember how important Punque is still to this day in ceremony and what it means to our people.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so the idea that they had painted this sacred image and then covered it up.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I like to think, man, what happened?
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what if they like did they hang a cross on that wall so they could be like, well, we gotta pay for the cross, right?
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then they would like direct their prayers to the cross, but in reality, they were venerating the Fosteco.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: So this resistance, this way of constantly subverting Catholic symbols, of subverting Catholic places and turning them indigenous, indigenizing them, is something that happened over and over and over again.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it maintains so Dia de los Muercos pee out of this indigenous resistance.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I call this talk Altars of Resistance, because I really wanted to push that idea and get that across.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: So this photo is from Oaxaca, this is from Michoacan.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: This new tradition of Dia de los Muercos remained, it stayed alive, and it's this blend of indigenous traditions with these Catholic trappings, right?
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure a lot of these people are now Catholic, but the way it started was as a form of resistance to this conversion.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it stayed this way for a long time, but it wasn't part of mainstream Mexican society.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: In order to see these kinds of kinds of traditions, you had to go to Michoacán, you had to go to Indigenous Pueblos in Oaxaca to see this for yourself.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: So then, how did it arrive in the United States?
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like how did it come here and how did it turn into what it is now?
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, in doing this, indigenous communities asserted their identity, they maintained a form of cultural continuity, and they kept it alive.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 1972, two organizations, two Chicano organizations, La Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco and Self-Help Graphics in Los Angeles started practicing Day of the Dead traditions.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the way this came about was during the Chicano movement, a lot of Chicanos and Chicanas were inspired because the American Indian movement was going on at the same time, and a lot of allyship was made, and a lot of work was done together.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: Lakota people, like Leonard Crodog, were calling Chicanos up and telling them you need to stop referring, you need to stop letting people call you mixed rugs, this mestizo thing.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: You need to reclaim who you are as indigenous people, you need to assert your indigenity, you need to assert your identities.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so these traditions were passed along, and and Chicanos were like, okay, so how do we do this?
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: How do we assert our indigenity?
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: How do we reclaim who we are as native people?
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: So at Self Help Graphics, some of the founders were from México, and these people from México were like, Well, you know, there's this really amazing indigenous tradition in México that's not very mainstream, it's not very well known, but it involved, we call it the muercos, and it involves the veneration of the dead, and it has the indigenous roots.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so people like Antonio Ivanez and Carlos Bueno, who were from Mexico, they needled the tradition.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: And Karen Bocolero, she was familiar with the tradition, they started teaching chicanos about the Adoles Muertas.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to take a moment to pay respect.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: She's still with us, so don't keep us like an immemorial photo.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: But Ofelia Sparsa, she's the OG.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: They call her La Maestra Alteras.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you make an altar in your house to this day as a Chicano, the way you do it is heavily inspired and drawn from the work that this woman did, and she maintains it to this day with her daughters and her grandchildren and people in her community.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: So respect to her for keeping these traditions alive.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: And here's some of the examples from the loss.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't find one from 1972, which was the first one, but here we have 1979 self-help graphics, and then this one is the 10-year anniversary.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: So 82, this this was done by Gronk.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if y'all know who Gronk is.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's a badass.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he's very contrarian, so he's like, ah I don't know.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I I put the the calaveras up there, but I need to look like peanuts.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: So like I'm not biting everybody else's shit.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't want my I don't want it to look like everybody else's work.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: So these Chicanos started drawing from imagery of Guadalupe Posada, right?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: So he was a famous artist who did a lot of this imagery around death.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: So these Chicano artists started drawing from this.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the things they were learning about Dia de los Muercos from Mexico.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the things that we associate with modern Dia de los Muercos traditions comes from the Chicano community.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so this act of having these processions and marches that are big and festive with paper mache and face painting, that comes from the Chicano community.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: The face paint in particular, so this is from 1977 self-help graphics.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: In Mexico, they weren't doing the calavera face paint.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a thing that happened until Chicano started doing it.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite things to come out of this, another act of resistance, was that lowriders started becoming part of these marches, part of these processions.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: They would invite the lowrider community out and they would have them cruise down the boulevard as part of these processions, and then that evolved into the lowriders themselves becoming ofrendas and altars to the point where they take over seven blocks every year in downtown Ventura and they set out all the lowriders and they make ofrendas out of the lowriders, which I think is amazing.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Another innovation of this came with COVID.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can see people started making ofrendas and offerings to people who died during COVID, especially to first respond first responder workers and immigrants who lost their lives during COVID.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: Another innovation was taking it out beyond your family, right?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: And celebrating and honoring our collective ancestors.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: So political figures, migrant workers, immigrants who died in Iced custody, all of this, it became very political because a lot of these Chicanos, when they were presenting these altars to the public, they weren't being done in churches, they were being done in secular spaces.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: So they politicized them, they made them less about religion and more about honoring and remembering people who struggled and died for their communities.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: So you see this blending of these traditions.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: So another act of resistance.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: And this happened here in Albuquerque during COVID.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: My wife came up with the idea to create a flamanali in Civic Plaza because everybody was stuck at home.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: So she contacted a friend and elder and teacher of ours named Mamma Pitsnik, or Paz, and he created this beautiful public flamanali in civic plaza, with the idea being you can just show up on your own time, you know, and stay away from each other and set out offerings and pictures of your loved ones and still hold this tradition as community, even though we were all separated from each other.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: So here's some photos.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: Here's Paz and his daughters, they're erecting the Poko Swomi in the middle.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: You have the Sholo It's Quinkli on the side, which are the dogs that guide you through Miklan.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: And here are some of our ancestors that were venerated in this public space.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: So from its very beginning, from its very origins, Villad de los Muertos has been rooted in resistance, in submerging these ideas and making them our own and making them about community and making them about taking care of each other.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the idea that I really want to get through with this talk.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: In Albuquerque, the very first that I know of, Villad de los Muertos Gathering happened in 1992.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was the Raramuri Center.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: Jorge and Sandra, they put together this beautiful event, and then it was carried on by somebody who's here with us today.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not gonna point her out, but yeah, they had two women with us today.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: So give them a hand.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: So if you were interested, Muertos Imergold is back November 1st.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have another procession.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is like the first time in a long time, right?
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: That the procession has been public as a big parade, the way it was done back in the day.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so if everybody wants to participate, check it out.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's at the Westside Community Center, and it's gonna be a beautiful event.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I just want to end this by saying, you know, we as native people, they weren't able to take it from us.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: We exist, we persist, and we resist.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, Plascalmatti, thank you very much.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for coming out.