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The Mexican Cult of Death in Myth and Literature
... Sin embargo, actualmente dicha fecha y festejos asociados, muestran un mestizaje fruto de la colonización. En tiempos precolombinos las prácticas similares se remontan hasta la presencia misma del ser humano en las américas(Brodman 1976, Coluccio 1968, Bascopé 2001, Gutiérrez 2006.En el siglo XX y en particular en las últimas décadas, los cementerios patrimoniales e históricos fueron sufriendo una suerte abandono y degradación debido, en parte, a un cambio global en la mentalidad de las nuevas generaciones respecto a la muerte y memoria de los fallecidos y en parte, o derivado de ello a causas económicas(Otero 2015). La conservación del patrimonio funerario como lo conocemos hoy responde a un proceso de concientización mundial originado a mediados del siglo XX y consolidado en la primera década ...
A lo largo de la historia del ser humano, los cementerios y la cultura asociada a ellos ha acompañado a su desarrollo social. Como consecuencia, ha manifestado diferentes tipos de atracción a dicha cultura. Actualmente, se reconoce a los cementerios y sitios similares como parte importante del paisaje cultural y del
patrimonio tangible e intangible de los pueblos, aportando identidad y sentido de pertenencia a los mismos. Este estudio muestra, como expresión de diversidad tipológica, tres estudios de casos de sitios patrimoniales asociados con la muerte en Bolivia. Uno de la cultura aymara (Chullpas), otro vinculado al alma animal ó
“ajayu” en un yacimiento paleontológico (Cementerio de Tortugas) y finalmente uno asociado exclusivamente al alma humana (Almitas). Estos estudios conducen a repensar concepciones previas de la temática y ampliar los horizontes de lo que realmente implica el término cementerio. Se discute el rol de la investigación como
generadora de insumos para la puesta en valor y consecuente activación del patrimonio a los fines educativos de promover el sentido de identidad y pertenencia. Asimismo, como parte del paisaje cultural y como recurso turístico especializado. La falta de investigación como insumo de la educación es planteada como uno de los
principales factores de erosión del sentido de identidad y pertenencias y del deterioro y pérdida del patrimonio material e inmaterial involucrado.
... According to Brodman (2011), religious beliefs led to ancient Mexicans adopting a fatalistic attitude towards life, and for many the manner of death was more important than life's events. Following the Spanish conquest (1521), Catholic assumptions of heaven, hell and purgatory were added to the concoction, resulting in a fusion of notions that resulted in a process of trans-acculturation (Báez-Jorge,2012) that has morphed into what Brodman (2011) labels the modern "Mexican death cult". ...
Purpose The Euro-centric nature of dark tourism research is limiting the perspective and restricting the scope of contemporary theory. Hence, this paper aims to explore how dark tourism consumption differs in a society apart from the Anglo/Eurosphere. This is done by testing Stone and Sharpley’s (2008) thanatological framework in Mexico, a country whose residents are renown for having a unique perspective on death, to assess whether Mexican dark tourism consumers undergo a similar, or different, thanatological experience to that proposed in the framework. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a qualitative approach in the form of a case study. The opinions of Mexican dark tourism consumers were gained by using the technique of semi-structured interviewing in four separate dark tourism sites within Mexico City, with coding serving as the form of analysis. Findings The findings show that due to the non-existence of an absent/present death paradox in Mexican society, the research participants experienced a thanatological process that contrasts with those from Western societies, which indicates that the thanatological framework is unsuitable in the context of Mexican dark tourism. At the same time, the study contests the common perception that Mexicans have a jovial familiarity with death, and demonstrates that in this case the thanatological process confirmed an acceptance of death, rather than any kind of intimacy. Originality/value The research is valuable in that it is a response to recent calls for research in geographical locations not previously considered in a dark tourism/thanatology context.
... According to Brodman (2011), religious beliefs led to ancient Mexicans adopting a fatalistic attitude towards life, and for many the manner of death was more important than life's events. Following the Spanish conquest (1521), Catholic assumptions of heaven, hell and purgatory were added to the concoction, resulting in a fusion of notions that resulted in a process of trans-acculturation (Báez-Jorge,2012) that has morphed into what Brodman (2011) labels the modern "Mexican death cult". ...
Purpose
The Euro-centric nature of dark tourism research is limiting the perspective and restricting the scope of contemporary theory. Hence, this paper aims to explore how dark tourism consumption differs in a society apart from the Anglo/Eurosphere. This is done by testing Stone and Sharpley’s (2008) thanatological framework in Mexico, a country whose residents are renown for having a unique perspective on death, to assess whether Mexican dark tourism consumers undergo a similar, or different, thanatological experience to that proposed in the framework.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopts a qualitative approach in the form of a case study. The opinions of Mexican dark tourism consumers were gained by using the technique of semi-structured interviewing in four separate dark tourism sites within Mexico City, with coding serving as the form of analysis.
Findings
The findings show that due to the non-existence of an absent/present death paradox in Mexican society, the research participants experienced a thanatological process that contrasts with those from Western societies, which indicates that the thanatological framework is unsuitable in the context of Mexican dark tourism. At the same time, the study contests the common perception that Mexicans have a jovial familiarity with death, and demonstrates that in this case the thanatological process confirmed an acceptance of death, rather than any kind of intimacy.
Originality/value
The research is valuable in that it is a response to recent calls for research in geographical locations not previously considered in a dark tourism/thanatology context.
... 5 As Jean Franco argues, the drive to modernize provoked decades of state-sponsored violence in twentieth-century Latin America (2013: 2). While the 'massification of death' in Porfirian and Revolutionary Mexico (Lomnitz 2005: 378) can be understood within these violent trajectories of L A T I N A M E R I C A N C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S 1 3 4 modernization, critics have long argued that death has a privileged relationship to constructions of Mexican nationhood (Paz 1993(Paz [1950 ;Brodman 1976). Scenes of political assassination formed an integral part of the cult of Revolutionary heroes, and violent death was heavily cultivated as a theme by the popular printmaking workshops and muralist movements that flourished after the Revolution (Sánchez 2010a). ...
One of the first box-office successes of Mexican cinema, the 1919 ‘El automóvil gris’ (dir. Enrique Rosas) fictionalized a case that exemplified a national crisis of political legitimacy – a series of robberies committed by the ‘Grey Automobile Gang’ with the complicity of military officials – using the narrative and visual conventions of French and North American crime film. Evoking cosmopolitan iconographies of crime cultivated in the police blotter, serial literature, and cinema, the film casts criminality as a thrilling and threatening sign of local urban modernity, glossing over the problem of corruption by distorting real-life events. Capitalizing on cinema's claims to topicality and authenticity, even as it extends the use of visual reproduction technologies as a means of social control, ‘El automóvil gris’ exemplifies a sensationalistic visual culture fueled by the dissemination of photochemical images and the expansion of the popular press. By incorporating ostensibly unstaged footage of the real criminals' execution into its fictionalization of the case, ‘El automóvil gris’ throws into relief the political uses of the cinematic image's reality effects. The film foregrounds visual reproduction technologies' role in registering the violent costs of industrialization, urbanization, and civil war, processes that defined the contested trajectory of modernization in early twentieth-century Mexico.
Overlooking the town of San Gabriel in Mexico stands a monument which attracts fans of Juan Rulfo's novel Pedro Paramo. San Gabriel inspired the creation of the fictional Comala, a deserted town haunted by past residents. The main objective of the paper was to explore, from the conceptual perspective of lieux de imagination (Reijnders, 2011) whether some fans of the novel imagine that San Gabriel is Comala. Furthermore, considering the dark characteristics of Comala, the possibility that specific visitors undergo thanatopsis was also considered. A qualitative approach to the research was deemed the appropriate methodology to answer the research questions and accomplish the overall aim, hence twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted over the course of two days at the monument. The findings demonstrated that all of the participants were attracted to San Gabriel (and the monument) because it was the childhood home of Rulfo and the inspiration for Comala, while the vast majority imagined that San Gabriel transformed into Comala. Meanwhile, a smaller but significant proportion of visitors underwent a thanatological experience. It was suggested that this experience was an example of Debordian dark tourism, hence signifying that the monument is a place in which literary tourism and dark tourism occasionally converge.
This chapter reviews texts published on Frida Kahlo over the last ten years in order to assess the simplification of Kahlo and her artistic works, drawing especially on Margaret A. Lindauer’s critique of psychobiographical approaches to Kahlo. Exposing the limitations and colonialist drives in many psychoanalytical studies of Kahlo’s paintings, this chapter considers Kahlo’s politics and the complexity of the artist’s processes. Focusing on her status as a postcolonial and disabled woman artist in Mexico, the chapter offers an engaged critique from postcolonial perspectives of the commodification of Kahlo as a globalized cultural product and the role twenty-first-century critics continue to play in fostering Orientalist interpretations of Kahlo’s art as something personal and not subversively political.
Based on poststructuralist and postmodernist theories, this paper explores myth and narrative as a postmodern quest for identity in Anita Desai's The Zigzag Way, a text that reveals two types of narrative discourse, intertwining " personal mythology " and " historical mythology. " The narrative is " a perfect zigzag " journey into the past to comprehend the present. Desai resists the traditional linear narrative by using non-linear time and discontinuous space to defy Western Culture and its controlling structures. Using the archetype of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, Desai also writes against the postcolonial condition by attributing a dominant position to Spanish and Indian culture. Finally, she writes in English not only to answer back to the colonial discourse but also to challenge the oppressive discourse held by men vis-á-vis women. Using both tenacious and strong male and female characters while searching for space and identity, she redefines the status of women in a male-dominated world. What Desai has in common with many of today's postcolonial authors is their focus on the linguistic hybridity of the national space, the importance of which must be recognized as an asset to postcolonial spaces rather than viewed as a means of dividing the country for the welfare of the ruling few. Drawing on Derrida's " white mythology, " I explore Desai's counter-hegemonic discourse as an example of counter-myth that works to reclaim a space for the subaltern voice.
Mira que te mira Dios. Mira que te está mirando. Mira que has de morir. Mira no sabes cuándo. Popular, La ronda de la muerte. Hasta el rey muere descalzo. (refrán) Dime cómo mueres y te diré quién eres. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad. RESUMEN: El artículo se propone mostrar, a partir del análisis de la película Macario (1960) dirigida por Roberto Gavaldón, el tema de la muerte y su representación en la literatura y la tradición oral en diversos contextos. Además de demostrar la existencia de ciertas variantes o conexiones con otras versiones que aluden al tema señalado. ABSTRACT: The article pretends to show, parting from the analysis of the Macario movie, the topic of death and its representation in literature and oral tradition on diverse contexts, and to proof the existence of certain variants or connections with other versions which refer to the dealt subject.
This ethnographic study explores the relationship between ethnic identity, particularly identification with traditional Mexican values and beliefs, and contemporary Chicano/a adolescents' perceptions of life challenges. Findings suggest that identification with core values and beliefs rooted in traditional Mexican American culture may be a protective factor contributing to resilience among second generation Mexican American adolescents. The authors discuss implications for practice and research based on the respondents' narratives.
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