On Good Friday, 1519, Hernán Cortés with 11 ships, 500 men, and 16 horses, landed in the New World on the shores just below Quiahuiztlán, founding Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, The Rich Town of The True Cross.
81 year old Cadmael Canul gazes wistfully at his wife's long brown hair and remembers how she brushed it with such care when she was still alive. He then returns to cleaning her skull and every bone that she left behind.
There are still a few places in Mexico where the people painstakingly clean the bones of their loved ones each year in an annual reunion with their dead, even as they struggle to hold back the flood of painful memories and the loss of life companions.
"I was talking to her," Canul, a widower of five years, recalled as he lifted his dead wife Magdalena's fragile pelvis from a pile of brittle bones and carefully dusted it off with a small brush. "She lowered her head into her arms, and that was it."
Women in beautifully embroidered huipiles chatter in the the local indigenous language as they fuss over the bones of long lost mothers and the skulls of babies who barely lived a day. Between songs and stories the families watch over the bones of the dead for a few hours, "to give them some sun and fresh air."
Cerro de los Metates rises dramatically above the coastal plain of the Gulf of Mexico dominating the surrounding landscape. A steep ascent on a winding and rutted dirt road leads to an ancient necropolis known as Quiahuiztlán; a citadel, a fortress, a place of stone steps and terraced plazas, ball courts, and ancient pyramids. One thousand years ago this was a city of 16,000 people.
And just as the living need places to inhabit, so do the dead. 78 stone tombs are clustered across the landscape here. From a distance they look like villages or a collection of temples with stone steps leading up to an entrance. But as you move closer you realize that the enormity of the landscape distorts their scale and that these structures are only about four feet high with an entry that can be measured in inches. These are temples, memorials to the dead, mausoleums of sorts but there are no bodies here, these temples once held only the cleaned and anointed bones of the dead.
Four temples stand apart from the rest, prominently lined up like sentinels on a high bluff with spectacular views of the turquoise waters far below where eleven ships from another world first arrived in this one.
Quiahuiztlán is a sacred space, a place where the veil between the living and the dead is nearly transparent. According to local tradition life is not separate from death. These people once lived together with their dead. There is a ritual known as Choo Ba'ak based on the Maya worldview that the dead have more than one life and there is a passage from the underworld that returns to the world of the living. In communities along the gulf coast the indigenous people would bury their dead by digging a hole in the earthen floor of their home and laying the dead to rest where they coexist with the daily lives of loved ones. After three years when the flesh had returned to dust, the bodies would be exhumed, the bones carefully cleaned, placed in an open box lined with a white cloth embroidered with the name of the dead, and placed in a prominent place of honor in the home.
The 78 stone temples at Quiahuiztlán are shaped like the traditional thatched roof homes of the village, but the temples here are more than reliquaries. The bones interred here are a communal memorial to honor the lives, the deeds, and the sacrifices of their most prominent ancestors: kings and nobility, warriors and peacemakers, shamans and storytellers, poets and stargazers. In Mesoamérican culture there is a belief in a life beyond death that binds us all. The dead are known to have the power to intervene before the gods on personal matters, to bring rain, and ensure a successful harvest. These temples are an acknowledgement that the past defines the present and is essential to the future.
It has been said that we erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget. Monuments commemorate the myths of beginnings. Memorials ritualize remembrance and mark the reality of ends. Quiahuiztlán is both. It is only at the end that beginnings become important.
Pomuch, a small town in Campeche is one of the few places in the country that still cleans the bones of the dead. Today Gabor Canul is cleaning the bones of a friend, Chaac Tuyuc. “It helps us to still feel close. We don't need to let go of our friends because they're dead". says Gabor, "I have known Chaac for many years. He passed away ten years ago but he is happy because for ten years now we have not abandoned him. It's a way to honor their memory. To celebrate their life."
“First we clean the feet,” says Gabor Canul as one by one he carefully places the cleaned bones of his friend back in the small box, “then the arms, then the ribs and the hips. The skull always goes on top. After that we grab a little rock or a piece of stone so that the top of the box doesn’t weigh on his skull, so that he can smell the wind.”
Burying the dead beneath the floor of a home was not only a way to remain close to loved ones and safeguard their bones, it was also to safeguard their souls. The Pixán is an eternal and indestructible soul or vital force that animates and outlasts the body. After death the soul may go on a journey to somewhere else or stay near the grave for a period of time, but eventually it will return home and be placed into the body of a child subsequently born in that house to give life to another individual.
There is a belief here that all things have a soul; the animals and plants, water and fire, the forests and the streams, even the homes and monuments they built. But despite the absolute power of the gods, the number of souls is not limitless. Only a finite number of souls exist, hence the concept of reincarnation, the endless cycle of death and rebirth, a concept the Maya called K ‘ex. In Maya belief, we are but a few who have ever walked this earth. Perhaps it's no wonder that we experience fleeting memories of past lives. Perhaps it's no wonder that we see reflections of our grandparents in the faces of of our children.
Headstones, in the Spanish world, were originally intended to keep the dead in the ground, to keep them from returning to the world of the living. The people of this New World viewed death very differently, they invited the dead back to the world of the living. But in 1519 with the arrival of Hernán Cortés on the shores below Quiahuiztlán all that changed. In the New World the land of the living had now been claimed by someone else, and the dead were no longer welcome.
In Maya cosmology one soul crosses over and another soul is reborn but no soul ever leaves a family or a place forever. Family and place are inseparable here. New bones pile on the bones of long-dead ancestors in the same house for generations. The souls of the dead drift from one body to another over time but remain tied to the same land. The Spanish now claimed that land, the Church stripped the indigenous people of the ability to worship their own gods, imposed European customs of death and burial, and erased the ability of the native people to share their homes with the bones of their ancestors.
The world that the dead left behind was now gone and the dead had nowhere to go. They could no longer return to their family. They could no longer go home. The indigenous people were deprived of a connection to the past. Reincarnation, the endless cycle of life and death, was interrupted. Under Spanish rule the dead and their bones were no longer welcome in the land of the living, and with the arrival of the Franciscans, the church also claimed the land of the dead.
Cerro de los Metates, the peak that towers over Quiahuiztlán receives it's name from the enormous number of metates found there and that continue to be revealed after heavy rains. A metate is the flat volcanic stone used to grind corn into masa and to make mucibpollo, the sacred food prepared for the dead in an annual celebration. "Mucib" means "that which must be buried" and its origins lie in ancient mythology and sacrificial rituals that have evolved to a celebration known as hanal pixán or "meal of the souls". Captured warriors and sacrificial victims are no longer part of the celebration, mucibpollo is now made from cornmeal or masa filled with tomatoes, peppers, chili, and chicken or pork wrapped in a banana leaf, and cooked in an underground earthen oven. Mucibpollo is representative of digging up a body from a tomb.
In the Popul Vuh, the creation story of the Maya, people are made from corn and earth and it is where they will return when they leave this world. Recovering the bones of the dead is a ceremonial harvesting of the souls. The Maya bury their dead and harvest their bones in the same way that they plant corn and harvest new life as well as the seeds of future generations.
All the objects around us help keep in our memory all the moments that we have ever lived. The bones of the dead and memories of personal and communal loss provide the deceased with a powerful presence within the here and now, they are a bulwark against the terror of forgetting, a way of keeping the past a part of the present. The bones of the dead have now been replaced with other remembrances, a faded photograph, a teacup, a favorite hat, a hand-written poem. As Gabriel Garcia Márquez once said, "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers." Without memories we slip into an existence that has no past.
In his novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, Gabriel García Márquez depicts the plight of Macondo, a town struck by the dreaded insomnia plague. The most devastating symptom of the plague is not the impossibility of sleep, but rather the loss of "the name and notion of things". In an effort to combat this insidious loss of knowledge, José Arcadio Buendía, “marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan”. “Studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.”
The temples at Quiahuiztlán have no inscriptions. The use of this place now resides only in the lost memory of those who once lived here. Gone are the narratives, the songs and dances, the prayers and incense, the rituals and masks that connected these temples to communal memory. Gone are the orators and the chorus, the priests and shamans, the community of souls who informed the Maya how to live, how to honor their gods, and to how to remember. Gone are the stories that were told here, the bones, the memories, and the connection to the sublime.
In our brief walk on this earth, time does not make loss forgettable, only bearable. Even across generations there are still memories, however faulty, however vague, that time has not yet erased.
Rosa Maria Xochime who specializes in making the embroidered cloths in which the bones are laid to rest says that the souls will come to visit each year at the end of October, in the cemetery now rather than in their homes, and the families want to ensure that their bones are ready for the return of their spirit. That means bringing a new embroidered blanket or burial shroud to replace the old one. “It’s like changing the dead’s clothes,” says Rosa who has been doing this for 60 years. “If it’s beautifully embroidered they like it better because they feel like they are elegantly dressed.” She sees her work as an offering for the pixán, or souls, in exchange for their blessings and protection. “I haven’t been sick in years because I offer what I can to the dead, and I pray. You must do all this with great love, so they do too. When they give you their grace, you receive it".
Maria Ix Cuat Chel lovingly cleans the remains of the mother-in-law she never met and the twin girls who died with her forty years ago in childbirth. "She is not dead to me, she lives in my heart," her husband says as he carefully arranges his mother's bones on the altar and wonders if his children will do the same for him. "I can't make them do it. Life is different now", he says, "but if they don't, I don't know where I'll end up.”
Memory is an intricate and fragile tapestry of our lives woven across many generations. The worst part of holding memories of lost loved ones is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared. When memory is lost we become untethered from this world. We are reduced, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez reminds us, to living in solitude. When we lose the past, we disrupt our ability to live in the present, and we lose our ability to confront the future.
The home of Hernán Cortéz still stands here on the shores below Quiahuiztlán… sort of. Seashells and blocks of coral used in its construction are now laid bare like the bones of the dead protruding from the crumbling stucco-covered walls, and it’s difficult to tell if the twisted ceiba tree roots are swallowing the complex or holding it upright.
There is no monument or memorial to Hernán Cortés in Mexico, only his everlasting legacy. His bones rest without sorrow or glory nearly forgotten in a small corner of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Mexico City marked only with his name.
Sitting in the tiny Ermita del Rosario, the oldest chapel in the New World, built by Hernán Cortés, I find myself thinking about all the people now dead who once sat in these pews and lit candles at this altar and whispered their hopes and dreams to these saints one rosary bead at a time, and the realization that we too will have been, and that the sum total of our prayers and passions will one day be no more than the pale wisps of smoke rising from a votive like those in front of me.
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Bill Sheehan
Quiahuiztlán, Veracruz, Mexico - January 2024