Jay Salinas stands with vines in Mexico. Normally he and Donna start thinking about the trip in December when the Wormfarm Institute resident artists are gone, the garden is covered in snow, Fermentation Fest is in evaluation phase and the office contracts to a skeleton crew. This year is an off-year for the Farm/Art DTour, so they may head to Mexico for Day of the Dead.
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by Donna Neuwirth
Each January over the past decade, Jay Salinas and I leave the beloved Driftless for a few weeks and wander through another place untouched by glaciers — the cities of Mexico. With no interest in resort packages or beaches in general, we stick to temperate highland cities like Puebla, Guanajuato and Mexico City. During this annual interval of repair we plot, plan and reflect, write grants, reports and an occasional blog, usually in the morning, and spend the rest of the day in the thrall of this endlessly fascinating country wandering not quite aimlessly, as our perambulations usually have an intended destination — very often cemeteries.
We do other things too but the life in the places they reserve for the dead keeps us coming back again and again. It’s art and architecture, nature, religion, history, love and loss, beauty and pain. This ancient culture has a close and often companionable relationship with death, and not only on Nov. 1 when they celebrate Day of the Dead. Year-round, skulls and skeletons decorate little girl’s pink frilly dresses, newborn’s onesies and a vast array of t-shirts.
The densely layered culture is blood-soaked from pre-Columbian ritualized human sacrifice to a particularly vivid iteration of Catholicism up through the current narco-terrorism wars. Newsstands are festooned with tabloids — a bunting of front-page color photos of the latest gruesome executions juxtaposed with images of buxom brunettes in thongs.
Commerce is booming outside the cemetery gates with vendors selling Flores para los muertos (flowers for the dead) and colorful pinwheels with images of Santa Claus, Bob Esponja and Frosty the Snowman. Others prepare fresh mangos or elotes on a stick. On weekends, families gather, fill plastic buckets with soapy water and wash the stone or tiled graves of loved ones, often laughing and sharing food. A strolling musician accepts a few pesos and plays a favorite song. I want to get closer. Jay reminds me these are private moments. Evidence of these visits on Mondays include fresh flowers, mylar balloons, flickering candles and empty bottles.
These sculpture gardens, unlike those in our young puritan culture, allow nature to swallow up untended graves. Flowers appropriately wilt and rot. Favorite foods left for family may be shared with four-legged critters. Vines strangle obelisks and trees split marble sepulchers. Los cementerios estan vivos! (Cemeteries are alive!)
These recurring trips — part vacation, part research, part remote office — are a calculated and necessary part of the rhythm of our lives that is largely determined by a south-central Wisconsin growing season. They also mirror much of our work back home welcoming urban visitors to rural Wisconsin to get closer to food, farming and our culture.
Winston Churchill famously said “nothing is more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.” I feel a kindred though quiet exhilaration after leaving these complicated, beautiful and untidy places that will someday welcome Jay and me (who first?). But not today – we have places to go and things to do.
A familiar rotation includes miles and miles of walking between the zocalo (square), churches, cemeteries, museums, markets and an occasional mezcal bar. And the food — mostly amazing street food — blue corn tortillas made fresh before our eyes by expert hands that wear gloves only when taking money. We try it all — grasshoppers, beetles, ant eggs, corn smut and our new favorite fruit — granadillas. When we return home we crave oatmeal, peanut butter and tap water.
These recurring trips — part vacation, part research, part remote office — are a calculated and necessary part of the rhythm of our lives that is largely determined by a south-central Wisconsin growing season. They also mirror much of our work back home welcoming urban visitors to rural Wisconsin to get closer to food, farming and our culture. Sometimes remarkable connections are made. This year Lalo Angeles, a Mescalero (master mescal distiller) from Oaxaca who we met at his farm will be presenting in Reedsburg for October’s Fermentation Fest.
Normally we start thinking about the trip in December when the resident artists are gone, the garden is covered in snow, Fermentation Fest is in evaluation phase, and the office contracts to a skeleton crew (Donna and Jay). These winter months are the growing season for a large part of the funding for Wormfarm’s public programs.
This year things are a bit different as our most resource-intensive project — The Farm/Art DTour — is shifting to a biennial, so the end of October will not be quite as crazy-busy as years past.
Dia de los Muertos was recently inscribed in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. Maybe this will be the year the skeleton crew will get to see our favorite cemeteries in all their finery.
Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas are co-founders of the Reedsburg-based Wormfarm Institute, which has presented Fermentation Fest — A Live Culture Convergence since 2011. For more information, see wormfarminstitute.org and fermentationfest.com.
