Halloween is upon us.  So is Day of the Dead.. And I planned to take some time off from the blog and traipse around the city with a costume on…but then I saw something that stopped me dead in my tracks—a piece of civic art used to beautify my neighborhood, which is a rapidly gentrifying zone with rising property values.  Yes, Highland Park is getting a make-over and this is only one of several utility boxes that are getting painted.

My neighborhood is one of those areas that really gets into Halloween, not only because it’s a big holiday for kids, but also because it falls almost at the same time as Day of the Dead, that Mexican celebration where people tend graves and commune with their ancestors.  It’s the time when you make an altar, light candles, and decorate sugar skulls.  Can you see the Day of the Dead imagery on the Virgin of Guadalupe? Yeah, I think that was intentional.

Dia de los Muertos takes place over a stretch of time but it’s highpoint is November 1, the day after Halloween–a totally festive moment.  You might recognize the Day of the Dead by the proliferation of advertisements that cater to a growing Latino population:  painted skeletons that owe a deep debt to the art of the iconic printmaker Jose Guadalupe Posada.

The music starts pumping in my neighborhood at this time of year.  This makes sense because my neighborhood has a predominantly Mexican demographic.  And so Day of the Dead is a time when two occasions overlap–occasions that are almost-but-not-quite the same—occasions that allow you to position yourself up and against the mainstream without necessarily betraying your roots.

Moments like this are rare opportunities.  But it it also brings its own can of worms.

How do you integrate elements of the larger culture?  How do you maintain connections to the past?  How do you use these traditions without exploiting them—turning them into a Coca Cola ad?  And how do you return to a tradition without betraying it?  It’s trickier than you think.

People sell all sorts of stuff with Day of the Dead!

The utility box that was being painted was a civic beautification project that is happening all over LA—a form of graffiti abatement.  And on this box, the two artists were painting scenes of Aztec coolness they had downloaded from the internet—images of a proud indigenous past.  There was a buff Aztec warrior with a head-dress.  There was one image, even, of the Virgin Mary as a skeleton, surrounded by imagery taken from Aztec codices.

This is a detail. There’s always a pure virgin that must be sacrificed to the Gods.

A codex is a record of pe-Columbian civilizations.  They were produced by Spanish priests who recorded the traditions before they came to disappear.  So, they are incredibly valuable because these documents are sometimes the only authoritative record of a language, literature, aesthetic–a whole worldview–that was interrupted by conquest.

Many young Chicano artists return to the codices, not by visiting the archive of a museum, but by downloading them through a digital culture that has sampled, distorted, shifted them.  In fact, there is a utility box just a few blocks up York Boulevard–the “hipster strip”– that simply transcribes pages from a codex.

But if you downland images, everybody knows this:  the colors are not the same and neither is the context…because you see, this imagery is not the imagery of the conquered.  It is the imagery of the conqueror—the map of the things that the B-52 bomber that flies overhead will destroy in a blaze of glory.

Even if you were to travel to the museums that now house these codices, you could never entirely return to the image as it is.  Rather, you would return to an image as transcribed by the hand of a priest.  In that act of transcription is a hundred swirling things lost that surround the image like a halo.

The art on the utility boxes were just as much inspired by the Chicano Arts Power Movement murals–murals that have a long history in my area.  From the 1970’s onward, Highland Park became a stronghold of Chicano arts and politics.  And some of the great muralists–many of whom tried to recapture Aztec pride–reached into the well of indigenous Mexico.

So, the young artists who were working on the piece were doing work that was in conversation with this great tradition—this tradition of Chicano Pride that was also in conversation with the fountainhead of a grand indigenous tradition.  But the trickiness comes in the ways the imagery work–the aesthetic, the worldview, the agenda that they promote.  Put crudely:  Is your re-rendering of a lost tradition a weapon of the people?  Or is it a weapon to be used against the people?  Is it a B-52 bomber or a molotov cocktail?

You could read their painting one way:  that it is about ethnic pride, of heritage. But you could also read it in another more cynical way:  their imagery was attractive to City Hall because it paid lip service to a grand tradition but, also, because it raised property values for the upper class home-buyers that are rapidly changing the barrio and displacing Mexican families from the neighborhood.

I thought about this as I got home to put on my Halloween Costume.  Will Day of the Dead become just another capitalist holiday–a tool of the man?  Will it become used to hock High Fructose Corn Syrup to young children?  Is dressing up as a Day of the Dead skull on Halloween a commercialization of the tradition or is it a meaningful act of remembrance that builds on tradition and renews it?  I don’t know.  It’s food for thought–something to put up on the altar of the mind.

In any case, I do know this:  Happy Day of the Dead!  May you remember your ancestors–your relatives, your loves, your losses!  May someone remember you as you want to be remembered!  May someone someday light a candle and say your name with joy!