Halloween for Hispanics

Picture by Artiom P  under Creative Commons License

You are heating up a pizza, or zapping on TV, when your child is about to ask (or rather: declared that) he needs a costume for Halloween is coming.

For those Hispanics who, like me, prefer their birthday cake with candles that are digits (such as a 3 and an 8 to 38 ) instead of an humiliating pile of individual candles, all these allusions to Halloween are intriguing and perhaps a little mysterious. What is celebrated ultimately during the feast of Halloween?, why the disguise?, why the mortuary and baleful symbols? To answer these questions we need to delve a little into the cultural roots of this festival, and their progressive transformations throughout the multiple sieves of History.

Halloween is celebrated on October 31, that is, the eve of the Christian holiday known as All Saints' Day (in fact, the word Halloween is a somehow distorted and difficult to recognize contraction of the words All Hallow's Eve ).

Now, besides the undeniable Christian heritage noted above, the feast of Halloween is fundamentally a product of pagan Celtic traditions previous to Catholicism, such as the  so called Samhain. That festival marked the end of the harvest season (hence, the use and collection of the famous pumpkins, known as Jack-o'-lanterns) and the beginning of the dark cycle of the year (the darker half). Conceived as a time of change -and possibly culminations- the advent of autumn was considered a propitiatory event for the souls of other worlds (angels, fairies, spirits and other beings already gone) return to the world of the living.

Jack Santino says "the sacred and the religious are a key to understanding the context of Halloween as seen in Northern Ireland, but there (as in the rest of that country) there is a rather uneasy truce between the customs and beliefs from Christian worship and those associated with pre-religions Irish Christianity. "[1]

It might not be unreasonable to infer that, just as Carnival originally represented a challenge to the worldly power of the ruling classes [2] , the earliest versions of Halloween also constituted a challenge to the supernatural powers from beyond the grave. This hypothesis would explain the use of costumes with ease and without reverential mood; the evocation of ghostly figures, vampires, undead and demons (all characters that presumably should strike fear and, presumably, an attitude of respect and away).

In short, whatever the underlying collective unconscious to this celebration might be, the truth is that Halloween is one of the most sophisticated popular celebrations, with its complex web of games and liturgy (consider all the little rituals connected to it, such as trick -or-treating (search of goodies), carving the Jack-o'-lanterns (carving pumpkins), costume parties, gatherings to hear tales of horror stories, etc., etc).

And yes, I would say it is worth getting the costume for your child... ¨

---

1 Santino, Jack. The Hallowed Eve: Dimensions of Culture in a Calendar Festival of Northern Ireland . University Press of Kentucky, p.95

2 According to Mikhail Bakhtin , the carnival, in its medieval version was a time when caste differences relaxed and satin people defied the status quo masquerading as the ruling classes, while the powerful get drunk on the streets as vagabonds, and finally, a time of truce in which social relations are subverted.

Bakhtin, MM [1941, 1965] Rabelais and His World . Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.