Todos vamos a dar al final
al lugar donde viven los muertos
Algo debe tener de bonito si nadie regresa
Cada día se nos pudre algún pedazo
Amanece y se nos va escurriendo el tiempo
Todos somos ollitas quebradas, ollitas quebradas
Ha llegado al final la partida
lentamente me iré, lentamente
Al final todos somos
sólo un montón de tierra
Al final todos somos
sólo un montón de tierra
—Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe—
Mexican culture has gone through a series of cultural mashups. Mexica culture is partly based on the peoples they conquered and traded with, which were in turn partly based on older cultures (namely, the Olmecs). Then came the Spanish conquest, which added some European culture to the mix (greatly in the form of the adoption of Spanish language, which itself has its roots on Greek, Latin and Arab). We're part of North America with the United States of America and Canada, but we share more or less the same language with Central and South America. We've accepted a few communities of expatriates (at least Italian, Spanish and Korean).
Even though there are horror tales, stories and characters throughout Mexican folklore1 like chaneques and naguales, Death both as an event and its anthropomorphic persona, is often a strange character: she often gets the short end of the stick, is mocked and outwitted by clever characters and is usually not taken as something to be avoided2.
If these attitudes towards Death are unorthodox in Western culture, it's even stranger to find poetic beauty in it. Montón de Tierra ("A Handful of Dirt") is a unique example of it.
I first heard this song on an album by Regina Orozco's album Rosa Mexicano, sung with piano and cello arrangement. I immediately fell in love with it.
We all will end up going
to the place where the dead live
There must be something nice about it, since no one comes back from there
Every day a bit of us rots away
The day dawns and time keeps draining away
we're all small broken pots; small broken pots
At last, the parting time has come
I will go slowly, slowly
In the end we are all
only a handful of dirt
In the end we are all
only a handful of dirt
Back in 2008 my uncle finally lost the battle with cancer. He was one of the greatest fatherly figures in my childhood. Also the biggest. I recall him being at least half a head taller than me, with a belly big enough to label him as 'fat' but not big enough to stop him from being physically active (after all, he was a civil engineer; the hands-on kind of manager that cannot be contained behind a desk)
Her wife decided to cremate him and store his ashes on a crypt, next to other members of our family. It was my first time attending a funeral service in which the deceased was cremated. It took me a while to process how small his urn was. My uncle, a typical gentle giant, fat and tall, was now a small box in the hands of my aunt, considerably smaller than him.
He was nothing but a handful or two of ashes.
The song appeared originally on Liliana Felipe's 2005 album "Tan chidos"
Footnotes
1: If such a thing even exists. I think that terms like "Mexican culture" and "Mexican cuisine" are an umbrella term, a generic name for a number of categories. The illusion of homogeneity comes from putting several things under the same political flag, which is a recent and more artificial construct. I believe this to be true for many other countries, but I can only attest about mine.
2: Fear of death is a relatively new concept in our culture and I'm willing to bet it comes from Europe, but don't quote me on this
References
Lyrics accessed at JSTOR's archive of Debate Feminista, Vol 42, October 2010. Clicky
Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage; University of Texas Press, Jun 23, 2010; p. 222, accessed through Google Books clicky
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