According to Zapotec belief, the spirits are with us as Daniel and I wander the ruins of Mitla. In fact, we’ve been among them since we landed in Oaxaca de Juárez and they won’t return to the underworld for two days yet. It was easier to believe it in the city, where the air is marigold and copal resin, heady aromas to entice the spirits toward altars offering a feast fit for an ancestor: pan de yema, tamales, and bottles of cerveza stacked between piles of plátanos and mangoes.
These ghosts aren’t the ones I’m used to from the States. Halloween hauntings are nearly always malevolent—demonic possessions, vengeful spirits, restless souls with unfinished business. During Día de Muertos spirits are welcome guests, their presence encouraged and celebrated. Which is why we’re here; I wanted to experience this flavor of haunting first-hand and Oaxaca’s festivities are regarded the most traditional in Mexico, the neighborhood celebrations even more so than the sprawl of bands and vendor stalls in the Centro. We’d stumbled across one of these community parties the night before, following the brassy blare of trumpets and oom-pah of tubas to a parade of costumed revelers. Some wore traditional Viejo del Tiliches guises—faces covered by a strip of burlap hanging from exaggerated sombreros, clothed in colorful strips that fluttered when they danced—while others took more familiar forms: witches, demons, and assorted monsters, some so elaborate they could grace a Hollywood slasher. It was easy to believe the spirits had come to stay a spell, following this raucous procession.
Mitla, ancient as it is, doesn’t feel haunted. Horror movies have taught me that haunted spaces are dark and chilling. It’s probably storming, or at least damp; there’s a smell of rot, maybe an icy draft that carries the decay of a long-sealed grave. The dominant colors should be dusty grays, swampy greens, a splatter of blood red. In contrast, Mitla is hot, bright, and mostly beige, occasionally broken by the muted green of a cactus or a sunning iguana.
The ruins closest to the entrance, the Church Group, offer little relief from the baking sun; the red-tiled domes of the colonial San Pablo Cathedral loom too far overhead to cast shade. This is less of a concern for me—I sun like a lizard—than for Daniel, whose fair skin is already pink from our excursion to Monte Albán a couple days prior. We seek out the slim shadows offered in stone rooms whose roofs collapsed centuries ago. The walls remain remarkably intact, many decorated with intricate stone mosaics. I follow Daniel through a doorway and down a narrow hall that bends around to spit us out on the other side, near a tour group whose guide explains that these passages to nowhere were used during ceremonies. They represented a metaphorical rumbo de la muerte or gruta sagrada—the path into the underworld.
According to local lore, the actual entrance to the underworld is at Mitla, too. Those accounts say the rooms we’re in now are mirrored underground, four halls each with a specific purpose: the first, a chapel for idols; the second, a catacomb for priests; the third, for burial of kings; and, in the last, a doorway covered by a large stone. Behind this stone was the passage to Mictlán, the land of the dead. The first Colonial Spanish account of Mitla also mentions these subterranean chambers. It’s written by Dominican chronicler Francisco Burgoa, who described a labyrinth of “columned rows like streets,” a “frightful concavity” that extended more than thirty leagues. The Spanish didn’t explore far, for “such was the corruption and bad smell, the dampness of the floor, and a cold wind which extinguished the lights, that at the little distance they had already penetrated…they resolved to come out, and ordered this infernal gate to be thoroughly closed with masonry.” Which sounds much closer to my Halloween model of a haunted place. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to feel the spirits on the surface; they’re all relaxing in the cool damp under our feet.
Spirits weren’t the only ones who traveled this rumbo; demons and other denizens of the underworld could, too. The stone, combined with an altar built at the entrance, prevented their escape into the land of the living, save for the nine days every fall that are today celebrated as Día de Muertos. Belief in Mitla as the gateway to the underworld persisted among the indigenous people of Oaxaca, though the official European narrative came to disagree. By the 1800s, scholars writing about the ruins insisted that this underground labyrinth never existed, at least not to the extent described by Burgoa; his account was simply too bizarre to be believed.
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A fence of spire-like cacti lines the path out of the Church Group, which is separated from the next area by a row of vendor stalls. Most sell the same colorful skulls and jaguar noisemakers on offer outside Monte Albán, and in the stores ringing the Zócalo, and anywhere else there’s tourist money up for grabs. At least here the commerce is somewhat contained; at Monte Albán, incognito vendors sold re-creations of Zapotec artifacts right beside the tombs.
We flash our tickets to pass into the next zone, the Palace of Columns. The one tree large enough to cast shade is crowded by a tour group, who fan their faces with their maps and gape at the mosaics adorning the Palace wall—the only example of such stonework in all of Mexico, I overhear their guide explaining. The polished rock fragments are fitted together with such precision that they’ve remained in place for more than two thousand years, despite the best efforts of the Spanish invaders. The spiral designs are snails, a representation of Tláloc, a creator associated with lightning and rain; the cross patterns represent Quetzalcóatl, who bestows the divine breath of consciousness.
We round the Palace into the courtyard of the Columns group. From this vantage, it looks more like the buildings at Monte Albán. The paved courtyard is faced by structures on three sides, the Palace of Columns both the largest and the only one tourists can enter. Daniel and I climb the broad steps to walk the length of the narrow room, pressing our palms to the titular columns, but the only ghost here is the ceiling they once supported. In the courtyard, we edge around open pits ringed in caution tape, which keeps us too far back to see where they lead. They may well go down into the cavern Burgoa described—because it does, in fact, exist. A few months before our visit, a team of archaeologists used seismic noise tomography and ground penetrating radar to scan beneath San Pablo Cathedral, revealing an underground void that aligned with Burgoa’s description. The entrance to this chamber had likely been where the main altar of the church stands today, as though the Spanish took a page from the Zapotec book, putting an altar in place to block any spirits that might try to sneak through. As though someone among them, at least, believed in where the Zapotec said the passage led.
Daniel and I visit the San Pablo Cathedral after we finish touring the archaeological site. The church’s colonial-era architecture is sparing on windows, walls made of thick stone that resists the sun. Inside is pleasantly cool and solemnly quiet. The chandeliers dangle dark, the only artificial light a set of sconces near the altar that make the gold wall behind it shimmer. We make a lap, studying the paintings and statues, some of which are laid flat in glass coffins, a nod to the flesh-and-bone relics I’ve seen displayed in other countries. There are full mummies on display in some European Cathedrals; others have built-in tombs, bodies of kings and saints and priests interred beneath the floor tiles, though I see no signs that was done here. I eye up the stones between the Spanish art, too, looking for ghosts of their past life. Many of them were repurposed from Zapotec structures, a common practice of the Spanish Conquistadors, both practical—why carry in new stones when there are already so many close at hand?—and a visual representation of the new religion they imposed. But if there are any traces of carvings, it’s either too dim or they’re obscured by the Catholic iconography, which isn’t what we’re here to see. I was raised Catholic, Daniel Lutheran; we can be haunted by Christian spirits back in the States.
We turn toward the doorway, a portal of pure light now that our eyes have adjusted to the darkness; I imagine it’s similar to what the spirits see when they’re unleashed on the world each year. Then we’re out in the courtyard, blinking through the brightness. We snag an unoccupied bench and eat the snack we bought in the market that morning: pan de yema and nisparos, which we pop whole into our mouths, spitting the seeds into the cracks of the cobblestones. The colorful Día de Muertos flags flutter overhead and I want to think that’s a sign, a returned spirit touring the grounds, but it’s hard to chalk it up to anything except the dry wind.
•••
The pits in the Column group courtyard may not have been related to the recent underground scans. It’s possible they were excavated tombs, which have been found at Mitla, too, though mostly in the residential neighborhoods built on the hills around the core city. In 2009, excavations of a commoner’s house found 16 different tombs in the floors and walls, between them holding the bones of 21 individuals. Burying ancestors within the home kept them tethered to the living, letting them join their celebrations and comfort them in their suffering. Tombs often showed signs of having been opened, their contents adjusted. One, an adult male, was missing a femur; an offering bowl had been left in its place. It’s believed that a descendant opened the tomb and removed the bone to carry as an indication of his hereditary lineage, a common practice among Mesoamerican cultures. The bone would have been cleaned, and perhaps decorated; carved and gem-studded thighbones have been found at other sites, as well as reliefs depicting leaders wielding thighbones like scepters.
The practice of home burials died out after the Spanish conquest, but not the desire to include the ancestors in day-to-day life. Zapotecs living in Oaxaca today visit family graves when they’re celebrating a major life milestone. Our second day in Oaxaca, Daniel and I were caught up in the crowd following a wedding parade. A few days later, writing in El Llano park, we watched a family celebrating a baptism. In both cases, the celebrations were indistinguishable from what happened at night for Día de Muertos. The crowd spun the same decorated balls over their heads as they paraded down the street, the brass band playing the same songs. It seemed strange in the moment, but now I realize why it’s such a popular time to celebrate life milestones: the spirits are on earth for that precious week between October 25th and November 2nd. You can do more than just visit the ancestors in the cemetery; you can add them to the guest list.
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Oaxaca de Juárez’s official Día de Muertos celebration takes place in the squares and churches of the Centro, where the core streets are closed to cars and decorated for the holiday. One is covered with colorful sand tapestries, a morbid mandala that remains remarkably intact for the entire festival despite the throngs navigating around the ephemeral art. Each work is framed in marigolds, the same flowers that spill out from the altars and cascade in curtains from the balconies above the storefronts, often with skeletons perched as though climbing the vines, calaveras grinning empty-eyed from between the blossoms.
These decorations mimic the funeral customs of the Zapotec. After someone dies, an intricate blanket of flowers is laid on the ground their body last touched. It’s left there for the nine days that family and friends gather to offer prayers, then taken to the gravesite, often an ancestral plot where the new body will rest alongside the bones of their family. The flowers are placed atop the grave and allowed to decompose into the fresh dirt.
Then, on October 25th when the underworld releases its residents for their annual nine days back on the earth, a new altar, called a biguie’, will be erected in their honor. The biguie’ is made with strips of carrizo or coconut trees. Its wooden altarpiece is decorated with fruit, marigolds, and a loaf of pan de yema, often affixed with a plastic image of a saint and a photo or token representing the deceased. Then come objects to guide the spirit home and keep them happy during their stay: lit candles, copal incense, tamales and atoles made by family members.
The Zapotec biguie’ varies slightly in design from the altars erected in just about every store, restaurant, and hotel in Oaxaca for the holidays. Those tend to have seven levels, a Spanish tweak on the tradition, and are mostly decorative, the equivalent of stores putting up a tree for Christmas. But photographs peek out from between the flowers and fruit piles on some of these public altars. It feels invasive to peer too closely, even if they are on public display. I can’t help wondering about them, the deceased’s connection to the space—if they were the original owner, maybe, or a long-time employee, and how the spirits feel when they follow the copal smoke only to find themselves back in a chaotic kitchen stirring an industrial-sized pot of mole.
The largest public altar in Oaxaca’s centro is set up inside the State Government Building on the south side of the Zócalo. There are no photographs on this one, just seven levels of fruits and flower pots, most with an articulated plastic skeleton leaning against them on an akimbo elbow. A row of skeletons links arm-in-arm across the top of the backing wall, which is split into thirds. The outer sides are decorated with marigolds in spirals reminiscent of the Mitla mosaics; in the central third, a floral arch shadows the marigold outline of a Christian cross, a dove and fish to either side to reinforce the Catholic imagery. Reaching this particular altar isn’t as straightforward as walking through the door. In the roped-off colonnade out front, a candle-lined pathway winds through another sand tapestry, molded into skulls with candles set into their eye sockets, other symbols in between them—suns, turtles, spirals, jaguars, all outlined and detailed with marigold petals. Walking this path is meant to mimic the rumbo de la muerte down to Mictlán, the passage ancient Zapotec would have taken at Mitla when they buried their most honored dead; the passage the spirits still are said to take for their yearly return.
This rumbo takes us, not to the underworld, but into the marble lobby of what is very clearly a government building, somehow both austere and grand. The altar is at odds with its backdrop, garishly separate from the space it occupies; even the flowers around it seem artificial, arranged in straight lines at right angles. The air is hazed by copal but I doubt any spirits have settled here. At least, if I were a spirit, this isn’t where I’d spend my brief time mingling with the corporeal. Daniel and I quickly escape back out into the living world, where the flowers sprawl unruly from the altars and costumed children dart from stranger to stranger, holding out pumpkin buckets for coins or candy. Under the babble of conversation I can hear the brass band across the square, playing a now-familiar melody as they accompany a parade past the Metropolitan Cathedral. We’re not close enough yet for me to see what it’s celebrating—the return of the dead or the joy of the living, or just the fact that we’re all here together, right now, sharing the spirit of the night.
