Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.news From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Mexico's day of the sacred and the scared Date: Sun, 1 Nov 92 20:06:09 EST Message-ID: \SE A;WORLD \SS (WS) \HD Mexico's day of the sacred and the scared \BY William Cormier \CR ASSOCIATED PRESS \DT MEXICO CITY MEXICO CITY - Freddy Krueger of "Nightmare on Elm Street" fame and fellow movie bad boy Chucky prowl the streets. Boo! Mexico is being spooked by an all-out assault of American style trick-or-treating on the Day of the Dead. And cultural purists like writer Homer Aridjis are aghast. "The Day of the Dead, or Dia de Muertos, is one of the most sacred days in the Mexican indigenous calendar. It's the day we eat, drink and dance at the tombs of the dead - to honor our ancestors," Mr. Aridjis said. "Regrettably, we are now facing an American cultural invasion." Street vendors, who haunt Mexico City's streets by the thousands, have donned red devil horns and Batman masks. One vendor hawked them at an intersection in a mask of Chucky, the homicidal doll featured in the movie "Child's Play." One Mexico City radio station put a "Frankenstein" disc jockey on the air Friday. "The fourth caller wins a mummy costume," the monster said. A bank distributed candy as a ghost cackled and jiggled on a string above the tellers' cage. And a Freddy Krueger mask stared out from one of many shopping mall displays of witches, pumpkins and motorized skeletons. Many parents seem unsure what to make of it. "Kids here sure like this horror stuff, but I'll have none of that Freddy," said Rosario Gallardo, 23, as she sought a costume for her 2-year-old son at Sanborns department store. How about a rubbery vampire mask? The executioner's hood? The Frankenstein visage? Just $4.75 apiece. "Isn't there anything nice?" she complained. At the discount retailer Gigante, children pawed through mountains of monster masks in a "Haunted House" of black cloth. Fake claws, plastic bugs, plastic fangs - even a $3.15 cassette tape, "30 Weird Minutes of Horror Sounds" - rounded out merchandise being snapped up. "I really like Halloween a lot," said Oscar Francisco Martinez Lerma, a gleeful 11-year-old, as he picked out a toothy vampire mask. Asked if he knew the meaning of the Day of the Dead, he shrugged. "Children are already coming to my house trick-or-treating," lamented Mr. Aridjis. "And yet this is just a superficial and commercial import from the United States, like the horror flicks they're showing on TV this week." Halloween, or All Hallows' Eve, is the raucous night of the spirits that precedes All Saints' Day, or Nov. 1., on the Christian religious calendar. But the Day of the Dead is a tradition predating the 16th-century Spanish conquest, when the Aztecs honored their ancestors with feasting and their gods with human sacrifices, Mr. Aridjis said. The sacrifices stopped after the Spaniards arrived, but the feast days were moved to coincide with Christian observances on Nov. 1-2, he said. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM