Graveyard Tunes

We were heading out of the cemetery in Oaxaca a couple of days before Día de Muertos, after having spent a couple of hours surrounded by innumerable candles and listening to choirs and a small orchestra perform.  As we were leaving, we heard the unmistakeable call of a mariachi band.  Following the notes we stumbled across them, and a small gathering clustered around a couple of graves.  We had only been there for a minute before a man came up to us offering mezcal.  My boyfriend, the non-drinker, pretending to be tough, accepted although it was fairly horrid.  He was then taken aside to talk to an old man while I watched the mariachi.  Later he told me that the old man had hired the mariachi to play at the graves of his dead family.

What I liked about this was that we had spent so long listening to the polished musicans hired by the city to perform, but on slipping away we encountered this; something that was felt much more real, more important, more personal and much more Mexican.