A nice article on one of the cool cultural traditions here in Tucson. If you happen to be in or near Tucson, the procession happens tomorrow. This article comes from The Tucson Weekly.
To Mourn and to Honor
The All Souls Procession enters its third decade of helping Tucsonans deal with death
by Margaret Regan
On a recent dark night, under the half-light of a waxing moon, gusty winds swept through Tucson.
At the Splinter Brothers and Sisters Warehouse studios, just east of the railroad tracks, a chain-link fence rattled in the breeze. Every once in a while, a train whistle wailed.
The weather had shifted, with October's balmy Indian summer suddenly giving way to a wintry chill. Ghostly November was coming. And a band of brave souls, wrapped up in sweaters and scarves, were outside creating homages to the dead.
Carol Bender was leaning over a giant puppet head of her late husband, David Rowe, dead since 2003. His papier-mâché likeness lay on the ground at her feet, his white hair curling onto his forehead over his big blue eyes.
"It doesn't really look like him," she said with a smile. But it was close enough. "He had curly, dark blonde hair and very blue eyes."
Carol was making a David mask to wear in the All Souls Procession, occurring this Sunday, Nov. 8. For the long, haunting march down Fourth Avenue and through downtown, Carol will have the puppet mounted on a backpack frame. David's head will tower over her own, teetering 12 feet in the air.
She's given him a lab coat—he was a scientist at the University of Arizona until his death from liver cancer at 53—and she herself will be hidden in the coat's white folds. Wearing his head and his work uniform, she'll march to mourn him, and to honor him.
"It feels like the right time," Carol said. "It took me a long time before I could talk about him without crying."
The late David Rowe was not the only loved one whose effigy was under construction in the crowded dirt-floor courtyard. A team from the Center for Biological Diversity was crafting an image of the late jaguar Macho B. The last known wild jaguar in the United States, Macho B was controversially euthanized by Arizona wildlife officials last March.
A collective of Peruvian artists, Entre Peruanos, was busily making condor headdresses for the flutists who will join their band of devil dancers this year.
Susan Kay Johnson honors her mentor, Eldon Danhausen.
A papier-mâché head of Glenda Ward stood poised on a platform, the handiwork of her daughter, Meli Engel. Glenda wore a crown on her head, and her nose was long and curving."My mom was pretty young, 62," said Meli, her own head snug in a gray woolen cap. "She passed away a few months ago. She was a queen," she added, nodding at the regal crown. "It was her way or the highway. But she cooked; she loved people, and people loved her."
Meli had an elaborate procession planned. Two friends will wear different Glenda heads, and still more friends will carry a banner painted with "personal hieroglyphics" about her life.
It might be hard for Meli to act out her grief in public at All Souls, she said, but "my friends will be with me. My girlfriend and her daughter and other friends will help."
Meli and company will have the support of a cast of thousands. Organizers estimated that last year, between those marching and those watching, 15,000 people thronged the All Souls Procession.
Started in 1990 by Susan Kay Johnson, an artist grieving over her father's death, the procession has become a magical Tucson tradition. Costumed marchers bearing homemade effigies of the dead walk to the rhythms of a panoply of music-makers, from Scottish bagpipers to Peruvian pipe players.
They might dress in skulls borrowed from the Mexican Día de los Muertos or Halloween, or, as the Peruvian collective Entre Peruanos does, dress as the devils of Andean lore. Parents push costumed babies in strollers, and giant floats and memorial shrines go by on wheels, often with the help of the rolling-wheel experts at BICAS, the bicycle collective. Last year, a man and a woman carried a coffin representing the borderlands' migrant dead.
Sometimes the revelers dance to the music, celebrating life; other times, they stumble along, overcome by grief.
"What you have here is a festival that addresses an archetypal human experience—death," said Daniel Meyers, board president of Many Mouths One Stomach, the nonprofit that organizes the procession each year. "The body dies, and love continues. What do we do with all that love?"
During All Souls, mourners find plenty to do with that love. They can write a message to their lost loved one and place it in a giant urn that will be set afire at the end of the parade, their words wafting up in smoke to the heavens. Or they can have a photo of their mom or their cat or their favorite jaguar projected larger-than-life on building façades along the parade route.
"Some make a mask of the loved one, or wear a T-shirt printed with a loved one's picture, or carry signs evoking that person, calling them back to be present," Meyers said. "It's a very powerful thing."
A former Jungian analyst, Meyers sees the home-grown All Souls Procession as a ritual that engenders "deep community, deep healing and deep unity."
Mourners in America sometimes have trouble finding an outlet for their grief, he said. "American culture has a bias against it. It expects you to be introspective for a week or two if your mother dies—the person who birthed you. The culture doesn't have a way to express that grief."
Mourners are invited to "be as creative as possible. In a mass public ceremony, we're saying, 'Come and express yourself.' We invite all religions and ethnic groups."
The grand finale is an explosion of talent. Most spectacularly, the fire dancers of Flam Chen soar through the air. And this year, Calexico may appear on the Franklin Flats stage west of Stone, for Flor de Muertos, the indie movie filmmaker Danny Vinik is making. (See the accompanying story.)
Like Nevada's Burning Man, Tucson's All Souls is a modern, invented festival, but it has links to ancient rituals from Europe and Mexico. It's named for the Catholic religious feast of All Souls, still celebrated by the church on Nov. 2, following All Saints on Nov. 1. But these Christian holy days honoring the dead—the saints are presumed to be in heaven, with the souls still struggling in purgatory and needing our prayers—were glommed on to earlier festivals.
In old Ireland, Samhain, the Celtic New Year, was celebrated on Nov. 1, marking the time when the veil separating the dead from the living grew thinner. On Samhain Eve, the dead could return to Earth, and bonfires were lit to guide their way. When Catholics turned up on the Emerald Isle, they tried to Christianize the old pagan feast by moving All Saints—the feast of All Hallows—from the spring to Nov. 1.
Oct. 31 became All Hallows Eve, and some of its traditions—costumes conjuring the dead and demons, lighted candles in carved turnips—were brought to a puzzled United States by Irish immigrants in the 19th century. Over time, the festival's spiritual dimensions were lost, and it evolved into the American Halloween. But even the modern secular holiday has candles lighted in the darkness, and spirits traveling abroad.
Mexico's Day of the Dead goes back thousands of years as well. Indigenous peoples performed masked rituals commemorating the dead. As in Ireland, Catholic missionaries put a Christian stamp on older traditions. Día de los Muertos became associated with All Souls and evolved into "a remarkable blending of Catholic and native beliefs and observances," folklorist Jim Griffith has written.
Despite its ubiquitous skulls and skeletons, the Mexican holiday is a cheerful, even comical celebration of death as a part of life. Families picnic in the cemetery and cheerfully clean up the graves of their loved ones; they return by night carrying lighted candles. At home, they eat pan de muertos and sugared skulls and set up shrines ornamented with marigolds and photos of their dead.
The holiday has stretched into a days-long celebration, and can extend from Oct. 31 through Nov. 2. Nov. 1 is the day reserved for remembering lost children, los angelitos.
Mixed and meshed along the border, these forms have survived or been revitalized in some form in Tucson's arty All Souls. The jaguar Macho B will have a Mexican-style memorial shrine, rolled alongside his dancing jaguar body. His cloth body, incidentally, will be modeled on a Chinese dragon.
The Peruvian arts collective hopes to inject a dose of untouched Latin culture into the festivities.
"I felt the procession was not representing the Latin-American community," explained Roberto Ojeda, one of the Peruvians making condor headdresses last week. So he got a little grant in 2008 and brought the flute rhythms of the Andes—and its folk devils—to Tucson's streets.
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