Becoming an Ancestor: The Isthmus Zapotec Way of Death

Epilogue

205 BECOMING AN ANCESTOR PUBLIC ASPECT OF DEATH Death is never solitary.3 In dying, a person is surrounded by family and friends. Those intimates become multiplied at death, concentric circles of intimacy that expand beyond family, friends, and relatives of the departed to include those who are related to anyone close to the person who has died to people living outside the city to the professionals who practice the crafts necessary to make the rituals surrounding death effective and pleasing. The marks of mourning worn by women and men—black clothes or black armbands, announce the death to the community at large. Their more cloistered presence in the home and altar room and their absence from happier celebrations are a sign that death has touched them. The processions, of course, are a public statement of relationship and obligation —burial processions from the house to the cemetery, forty-day, one-year and seven-year Masses for the dead processions from church to home, the pilgrimages involved in Stations of the Cross, and all the processions of Holy Week. The Day of the Dead, one of the largest, predictable commemorations of death, involves only the processions of the spirits of the dead to their former homes. The public nature, however, is clear in the symbols of death that mark the entryway to every house with an altar for its recently dead. Huge arches of banana stalks frame the doorways, and they are hung with green cocos, marigolds, and the bread of the dead. No one can miss these green invitations to the returning spirits. In a similar way, the reciprocal visits of the living to the tombs of their relatives during Holy Week are a public statement. The cleaning, repainting, and plastering of the tombs or the newly woven palm walls that replace the dried ones, the filling of the tombs with flowers, and fresh glasses of water announce that here are people honoring their relationship to the dead and the living. The cemeteries become hugely communal sites of visiting, remembering, exchanging food and drink, and listening to music with people settling in for the afternoon and evening . Those who do not remember their dead in this way face the opprobrium of the community. No one wants to think that they will not be remembered, that they will cease to be part of the memory of family and friends. EQUALITY IN DEATH No matter what one’s standing is in Juchitán society, one’s treatment in death will follow the same progress and rituals of commemoration. The first death I experienced was Don Silain’s, an old man who had been Ta Chu’s apprentice 3. The social nature of death may well be why suicide is so horrifying for Zapotec. It is the ultimate act of exclusion, a selfish drawing away from those closest to you. The Roman Catholic church defines it as a sin but that is not the source of the distaste most Juchitecos feel about it. Suicide denies relationship and one’s obligation to community. It is not common in Juchitán. 206 BECOMING AN ANCESTOR and who had no living relatives. The whole structure of required observances was followed, and people pointed out that the community needed to see that Silain had friends who cared about him. He had tried, even with very reduced economic means, to maintain his social obligations and relationships, and that meant that people were bound to honor him in death. After the first rituals of burial, nine days, and forty days, however, the fact that he had no family meant that the other observances that fall to family were attenuated. The burial and subsequent observances for Na Berta followed exactly the same form only with vastly greater numbers of mourners and participants, flowers, and bread. Her family still remember her each week with fresh flowers. In the case of individuals who are disadvantaged economically or in terms of family, all those who were maintained by them in the rounds of reciprocal giving, remember their obligations when it comes to acknowledging the death. The obligations to community are perhaps most clearly enunciated in the domain of death. Why this should be so is important to consider. First, unlike every other change in status except birth, death comes to everyone. In birth, the newly born member of the community has no history of relationship other than that to the parents. Even as recently as twenty years ago, the infant mortality...