Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the exhibits team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. And I’ll be your host. Today, I’m speaking with Davíd Carrasco, a professor in the Department of Anthropology, as well as the Harvard Divinity School, where he teaches courses on the history of religions in the Americas, specifically Latin America and Mexico. As we are once again approaching Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. I wanted to ask him, not just about the origins of the holiday, but the history and the significance of its celebration at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Here he is. Davíd Carrasco, welcome to the show.
Davíd Carrasco 01:13
Jenny, thank you very much. It’s always good to be part of what the Peabody Museum is doing, and I’m very pleased to be here today.
Jennifer Berglund 01:22
So you grew up in the US but have deep roots in Mexico. When did you develop an intellectual interest in Mexico and the Aztec world?
Davíd Carrasco 01:32
I grew up and was born in the United States. At the end of the Second World War, my father, who was a Mexican American from Chihuahua, El Paso, Texas, my mother was an Anglo woman they met during the war, and they moved back to El Paso after the war. But then, because my father was a Mexican American, he couldn’t get the kinds of jobs he wanted in El Paso and my parents then move back to Silver Spring, Maryland, actually, where my father was able to get a teaching job at the time. But growing up, we often went back to the border, went back to El Paso into what is and I became familiar as a child with this part of my heritage, and the family that was still there, in El Paso, Texas. And then, as a teenager, I started going to Mexico City with my father who was a sports specialist. He was a basketball coach, and it was been invited by Mexican coaches to come to Mexico to train them to teach them so he took me with him. He was a basketball coach, and he was a boxer. And he actually played on the Mexican national team, which had Mexico’s very famous, it’s called the dorados. So the golden ones. And so he was somebody who grew up on both sides of the border, speaking Spanish well, knowing the Mexican culture, but also in Texas. And so during the Second World War, he was a chief petty officer in the Navy, and because of his size, and because he was darker skinned, and he came from very tough circumstances, he was put in charge of training African American recruits, and he became very comfortable with African Americans. And they with Him, and so later, when he became a college basketball coach, he was the first Mexican American to be head of the head basketball coach at a major university, American University in Washington, DC. But at that time, all of the other universities, Maryland, Georgetown, George Washington, Catholic University, they only allowed white people to play in public sports and my father, being comfortable with African Americans and knowing the many gifts that they brought to the, to the country, he recruited the first African Americans to play in public sports in the nation’s capitol. And I grew up in the setting I was 10 years old at the time, not only had this experience of going back and forth to the border, but also seeing how my father was an innovator in relating athletics, to social justice. And so I had a chance to be very close to the teams that were the first racially integrated teams in the nation’s capital at that time. And it was, you know, these were tough times we went to many places where the racial epithets were tremendous. A lot of schools canceled games. But this Mexican American Coach with integrated basketball team, this was a dramatic experience for me to see the young men struggling on courts to not only win games, but to make statements of social justice. So as at the time I was, well, 15 years old, I had some sense of Mexican US certainly sense of the African American presence, even though I was at that time considered racially mixed person. Big word that was used then for someone like me, was miscegenation. And I remember when I first heard this word, I was like, what, what does that mean? And, and so this is kind of the world that shaped me, led me to do the kinds of studies and work that I do now.
Jennifer Berglund 04:55
So you were saying before that your father being a basketball coach was asked to coach the Mexican national basketball team for the Olympics. So tell me more about that and the experience of being in Mexico City with him during that time.
Davíd Carrasco 05:13
Because he was bilingual and bicultural, he was invited by the Confederation deportiva, Canada, national confederation of sports in Mexico to hold clinics for Mexican coaches these over the years leading up to the 1968 Olympic Games. And eventually he became the Olympic Games, attache to the Olympic Games. But when he took me there, I was 13 years old, and I had what I call my first aesthetic moment, which then she really shaped me what happened was my aunt, my Tia, Milena, Sophia took me one day down to the Zocalo, the grid square in the colonial part of the city, and took me to the museum anthropology museum. And when I was in the anthropology museum, seeing these cultural creations of the Aztecs and the Maya and other people, I had a kind of almost religious experience in the sense that looking at the Aztec calendar stone and some of the Maya jades, and images of books that indigenous people had painted, I really began to have this very strong emotional reaction. And I remember walking out of the museum, going into the Zocalo, as a 13 year old, and becoming aware that on the one hand, I realized I felt kind of ashamed of this, this kind of background, because at that time, in schools, civilization was, was the Greeks it was the Romans, the Egyptians, but not not anything coming out of Mexico, not anything coming out of the indigenous Americas. And I realized, Hey, I kind of ashamed of this background, up until this day. So on the one hand, this, this awareness surface to me on the other side of my chest, what surfaced was a feeling of withdrawal, yasai, and even pride, that, hey, there was civilization here, too. And I wanted to learn about it. And as I looked around the Zocalo, I realized it right here on this place that years ago, before Europeans came that indigenous people, indigenous Mexican, the machico, has had, had created a civilization. And I consider this my Aztec moment, not a senior moment where you forget something. But that’s the moment where I became aware, not only of this great story that was unknown to me, about these, these people, the civilization, but I also began to realize more of my own mixture that I was, I was not black, I was not really white I was this, I was this mixture, I was this hybrid, and this was something to be valued. And so this was my aesthetic moment, that and then propelled me forward to the career and the interest I have today.
Jennifer Berglund 07:43
Did you articulate your Aztec moment to your parents at all? Did you share that experience with them?
Davíd Carrasco 07:49
Somewhat? Yes, I did. Because we were in Mexico City at that time, and I went back, I was just so enthusiastic, so amazed, as people are when they go to Mexico today, you know, I often ask my students in class, I’ve never been to Paris, all these hands go up. So have you been to Mexico City? Very few hands go up. And I said, Well, you can drive to Mexico City. And you know, this is a history in a culture that’s really a very big waste close to us. And so of course, I did tell my parents, my father, he understood this already. Because, you know, we also took me to the pyramids, you go to the pyramids today and Mexico, and people come back blown away, they just can’t understand why this isn’t a fundamental story of the Americas. Or if they go to Montiel abandoned well, how can they come back? Why then just amaze. There’s a great story here. And that’s the story that sets I’ve dedicated myself to telling in this variety of ways.
Jennifer Berglund 08:45
Ultimately, you ended up at Harvard, obviously, tell me about your intellectual journey from your Aztec moment to Harvard.
Davíd Carrasco 08:53
Because of my father’s leadership, I’ve been on the university campus since I was 10 years old, first at American University. And I was always going back and forth, even when I was in high school. And then I went to college. And then I went to a terrific graduate school at the University of Chicago. And while I was at the University of Chicago, I was I was so fortunate to come under the tutelage of a number of very powerful intellectuals, who are historians of religions. And these historians of religions. One was a Romanian one was African American, one was Jewish. One was Japanese, I suddenly got a study of religion that was not Eurocentric. It was a study of religion that paid a lot of attention to indigeneity to the indigenous peoples, who were living and creating culture and lives before colonialism, but also I was being introduced to non western religions, the religions of Japan, the religions of India, the religions of the Aborigines in Australia, and this was just this was like another kind of aesthetic moment opening my mind to this and so it was there that the aesthetic moment came back to me because the faculty was very interested in My Mexican side and the knowledge I had. And I began to then study there the rise of the Aztec cities that rise of the Aztec world, because the discovery I made at Chicago that led me to Colorado and then Princeton, and then Harvard, was that Mexico was one of the seven areas in human history where people invented the first cities. That is the first civilizations that first really complex societies were developed in these very few areas around the globe, China, India, Egypt, Peru, and so forth. But one of them was Mexico. So it took me back to my Aztec moment that what I really had discovered as a teenager, was that this really was a civilization, an urban civilization. And in order to create an urban civilization, human beings had to have a tremendous ability to cooperate, to compete to build to imagine. And so Chicago really allowed me to go back into the Aztec world. I wrote my dissertation on the Aztec world, and that drew me to the University of Colorado. But during this transition from Universe Chicago to my first job, I became associated with a great archaeologist in Mexico, named with one of the mottos Moctezuma and Matos Moctezuma became the excavator parks alliance of the great Aztec temple, which was rediscovered in 1978. Right down there in the Zocalo, right where I’d had my aesthetic moment years before and mottos knowing that I was a historian of religion coming out of the Chicago tradition, a Mexican American, invited me to be part of the interpretive team of the great Aztec temple in my first teaching position at the University of Colorado. This of course, allowed me to bring this Mexican story to the University of Colorado, where there were many Hispanic Latino students in Colorado. And because Colorado once been part of Mexico, I brought Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and other Mexicans to the campus. And this elevated my own chances to write and to teach. And it drew more attention to this collaboration that I was doing with the Mexicans. As a result of this, I drew the attention of professors at Princeton, people at Princeton became interested in bringing me to the Department of religion there. But something unusual happened and that is, Princeton, offered me a job. And I said, I would only go for a year, because I felt still, that I was very loyal to Colorado, but I was interested in Princeton. So I said, I’ll go for a year and I’ll return well, I went to Princeton. And an amazing thing happened. And what happened was, while I was at Princeton teaching that year, I met the great African American writer, Toni Morrison, and Toni Morrison, and I began to work together. And we became friends around our common interest in the religions, of marginalized people, African Americans, Mexicans, and as a result of that relationship, I went back to Colorado for a year, Toni Morrison, and people in the department of religion recruited me to come and I moved to Princeton. At Princeton, I strengthened my work in the middle of American story. I had a great time there in the department of religion, but Morrison and I, we became friends. And at a certain point, I invited her to go to Mexico to see the Aztec world of the Aztec moment, as to history. And she agreed, and I took her there. Soon, Harvard called Harvard was at the Peabody Museum and had the Department of Anthropology. And the Department of Anthropology and the people in museum had a much stronger connection to the Mesoamerican world, because scholars in the Department of Anthropology had been working in Mesoamerica, where people at Princeton did not have the connection. And so I came to Harvard. And here we are today talking about this. Fruits, the fruits of this story.
Jennifer Berglund 13:51
Also curious, so help me connect the story of civilization and religion, because they are deeply intertwined civilization and religion. And so explain that in the context of the Aztec world.
Davíd Carrasco 14:07
The scholar who had the greatest influence on me in terms of this idea of the rise of civilization in Chicago, so the scholar who had the greatest influence on me, in terms of this question of the rise of civilization, at Chicago, was a great urban ecologist named Paul weekly and what Pete Wheatley had discovered in the rise of the first cities in the six or seven areas of what’s called primary urban generation. What he discovered was that in every one of these cases, each of these cities, each of these urban traditions, grew out of a ceremonial center, that before there was a city, there had to be a ceremonial center. That ceremonial center was often tied to a marketplace, but you had to have a ceremonial center. That is religion was crucial to the rise of It is because what religion did is it, the people who were in charge of the religion, they developed a ritual tradition that persuaded the rest of the people to collaborate in the rise of a much more complex, socially stratified society. So Religion was crucial at the beginning of each of these urban civilizations. So this really fascinated me. And so my job then became to be, how can I discover what was the role of religion in the rise of the Mexican civilizations. And so this is the project that Eduardo Matos Pope weekly, and others and I embarked upon, if you go back and look at the beginning of each of the civilization, there’s a religious experience. There’s a ceremonial center, there’s monumental architecture that is religiously designed. And this was really fascinating to me, because civilizations, they got it all, they got the good, the bad, the evil, the the wonderful, the violent, the peaceful, all of that is embedded in this story of the origins that come out of somebody’s relationship with a divinity.
Jennifer Berglund 16:07
What were some of the religious monuments, organizing spaces?
Davíd Carrasco 16:14
What the archaeologists were able to find is that around 1500 BCE, before the Common Era, as they call it now, people in parts of Mexico usually identified with what’s called the Olmec people or the Olmecs civilization. They begin to take certain hilltops and either redesign the hilltops. And on those hilltops, they begin to build not only their society, but they begin to make monumental buildings. Its monumentality is crucial to the beginning of urban civilization, they got these pyramids, they got these big palaces, that shows that the rise of civilization not only has a ceremonial center, it has intensive social stratification where what we call class society begins. So in Mexico in Mesoamerica, the first phase of this kind of complex social development is called the Olmecs civilization, which is really in some very difficult to live terrains along the east coast of Mexico, around South of Veracruz and so forth. And they began to find the archaeological record very complicated stories of the rise of these ceremonial centers, that ceremonial centers always have some religious building that’s very big, there’s usually related to a marketplace so that exchange and wealth is a part of that. There’s also signs of, of divinities in the sculpture in the pottery, there’s also in these cases, signs of warfare. Warfare seems to be a fundamental part of, of the rise of these civilizations. But the real powerful example of this in Mexico begins around the beginning of the Common Era, at a place called Tilty, weicon. And DLT. wilcon is the great pyramids outside of the Mexico City, where you have the Pyramid of the Sun, that Pyramid of the Moon. And what these pyramids are, is they’re imitation mountains. And the reason that they’re imitation mountains is because the belief was, and still is, in some cases, but the ancestors in the divinities, they dwell inside the mountains, and they dwell inside the mountains garden, the seeds of life, the seeds of human, the seeds of plants, the seeds of animals, and our relationship with him is to make offerings. And if we make offerings to the divinities in the sacred mountains, which are now inside the city, because they’re the hills or the pyramids, they will released the seeds. So we have fertility, we have new children, this was the kind of the basic idea that we’ve discovered. And at the same time that this is happening in central Mexico, what we call the Maya culture is developing in southern Mexico and further into Guatemala. So you have the rise of these really fantastic, complicated and very diverse type of urban civilizations taking place before the Common Era, and then really flourishing the first 1000 years of the Common Era, and then beyond.
Jennifer Berglund 19:14
So I want to go back to the story of you and Toni Morrison, you very famously introduced two acclaimed writers, Toni Morrison and Gabrielle Garcia Marquez. How did that happen? And what’s the significance of their subsequent relationship?
Davíd Carrasco 19:36
Yeah, I’m actually teaching a course this semester called religion and liberation around Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez lives and writings. So what happens is, you know, I have this other kind of almost as take moment, but it’s kind of a Toni Morrison moment. When I go to Princeton as a visiting professor. I learned that Toni Morrison is teaching a course there. So I go to the Department of African American studies. When I talk to the Secretary and I say, I’m a visitor, I’m gonna take this class. So all you got to ask Miss Morrison, Miss Morrison doesn’t like visitors. So I waited around about 20 minutes later it comes 20 More sit down the hall. And so I introduce myself as Tony Morrison, I’m Professor Carrasco. I’d like to know if I could sit in on your class. He said, they told me a tall, dark man was waiting for me. But you know, I don’t think so I don’t think you can sit in. So I said, Well, why not? And she said, well, because if you’re sitting in the class up there, you’ll be in the back of my mind, it’ll be a distraction. And I don’t know where I had a real good comeback. I said, Well, I understand, but I’ll be a friendly presence in the back of your mind. And she liked this. She liked this. And she said, Well, she was kind of taken away. Okay, well, you can, you can come. And so I went into the class was about 85 students, I set up in the back and she did this great lecture on Moby Dick. And in the lecture, Moby Dick, she said, Well, you know, the whole thing about Moby Dick is that there’s in all these novels in the Americas, in North America, there’s always some black presence, or dark presence or non white presence, and in Novo Riddick, it was quick read the Polynesian or Qunar. And what she said was, the presence of people of color, often in these novels, evokes, in the minds of the white characters. It evokes, in their minds, an evil brew, of insecurity, of competition of hatred, of suspicion, and they project all of that on to the black character. And then when they projected this evil blue on the black character, then the black character can be seen as evil, and dangerous, and all that they’re not. Well, this really fascinated me because I’d studied psychoanalysis, and she was really talking about how unconscious forces and people can be stimulated. And they bring up an uncontrollable, very powerful feeling. So after the lecture, I wanted to talk to her about this connection between what she was talking about psychoanalysis, and she was walking back to her office with an entourage, she always had an entourage. So I got into the entourage. And I sort of slowly made my way up to the front. And she saw me she said, Well, how did you like the lecture? And I said, Well, you know, actually, it reminded me of this book, called the words to say it by this French feminist named Marie Cardinal. Because Marie Cardinal had believe we talked about her own psychoanalysis, and how things that had been hidden in her had come up in her lifetime. And Toni Morrison was really taken aback by this comparison. And she stopped, I remember, she stopped right there on the sidewalk, looked at me, and said, Well, that’s really remarkable, because this series of lectures is based upon my reading of that book. Wow. She says, she says, so she was like, she said, I want you to come see me at my office, make an appointment. And I was like, I was so lucky. I’ve, okay, I’ll come, I’ll go. And that was the biggest. So I went and talked to her, we immediately connected because I was a historian of religion. And she had always had religion was very important in her novels that people she was writing about. And she also realized when I really wasn’t a white guy, I was somebody who came from another part of the Americans. And so in time, we became friends. And later that semester, she asked me if I could help her to do some research for the novel that she was writing at that time was called, which was called Paradise. And she wanted to know, if I could help her do research on Afro Brazilian religions. I said, Sure. So I went ahead and did the research and met with her. And I became in the sense that I made a contribution. That novel, of course, has influences that come from the afro Brazilian world. And then a little bit later what happened and to get the real punchline here, is I invited her to come to Mexico City, to see the great temple to see the racial world and Mexico to be part of, of all of that, and she accepted. But in the meantime, she won the Nobel Prize in literature. And she then became much more famous than before. And so as we were getting close to the trip, about a month or so before, her assistant called me up and said, Hey, Miss Morrison is looking forward to this. But she would like to know, this trip to Mexico. If you could introduce her to Gabriella Garcia Marquez. If I say no, that I don’t know Godsent Marquez, maybe she’ll say, well, once you can arrange that, and let me know we’ll go. And so I said, Well, I said, sure. I’ll take care of that. And I remember hanging up the phone said, My God, what am I going to do? Americans, but I knew very well another Mexican writer, great renowned in Carlos Quintus. So I called up Carlos cuentas, actually, to a friend of mine, a Raymond Williams, who has written about novels in Latin America. I called him up he’s no no Let’s come to Carlos. And so I called up Carlos went this. I said, Hey, Carlos, putting horses wants to come to Mexico but she wants to meet Garcia Marquez, and he said that V you’re in luck. Garcia Marquez is my best friend. We’ll have dinner at my house. And I was like, Well, okay, no. And we did Toni Morrison and her. Her son Ford and I went to Mexico City. We had a number of experiences there. I took her to the pyramids that took her to the great temple. We went to Carlos went to his house. And there was gonna say, Marcus, I thought he come in kind of looking relaxed. He had a three piece suit on, he was very taken with her. And she with him, and there’s a very famous photograph of the gathering of the three of them. And it was an astonishing night. What did you all talk about? Garcia Marquez was there with his wonderful wife, Mercedes Barcia. Of course, it was Carlos and his wife and Carlos Quintus. His daughter, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, the great excavator was there with his wife as well. So it was a seven or eight of us. And the night went on in sort of two parts. The first part, Carlos went this did all the translating, because Garcia Marquez, he really didn’t want to talk in English. And Toni Morrison was not fluent in Spanish. And so the first part of the night, I’d say the first two hours or so were very polite, respectful, but there was no what we call in Spanish, there was no chi spa, there was no real spark. And it was wonderful to see them together and so forth. And but I thought, well, it’s a great thing to see this, but there was no real connection. And I even went to the chauffeur, and I said, Hey, man, we’re gonna leave in a half hour. So by that day, you know, yeah, so it was 1130. So Toni Morrison was in the room, and Garcia Marquez was sitting by himself on the couch, and I got up my courage went over. It said to him, Look, the only request she made was to meet you. And you’re one of the reasons that she came to Mexico. And he’s leaned back and he started to talk about her novels. He, he knew all about her nose. He knew about The Bluest Eye when it was published, who published it? Where were the characters, Sula, where it was published to put what were the characters. And when he got the Song of Solomon, which is the third one, I said, hold it over me. So I said, I went over, I said, Tony, he really wants to talk to you, Tony. Yeah, he really wants to talk to you. And so I got him up. And then in the middle of the room, and there was another translator there. And for the next two hours, they talked, and they started talking. And they relaxed together. And they talked about things that surprised me. One of the things that they talked about was how important it was for both of them, that to have good editors. I never thought Toni Morrison regards to market leading an editor. But in fact, they talked about which publishers had the best editors. And it was just amazing to hear them talk about certain editors. Importantly, do what they were good. They were translators were chosen. And they were quite animated about this. The second thing that they talked about, was William Faulkner, the great American writer of the South, because both of them had been really influenced by we benefit Toni Morrison. I believe her master’s thesis was in part when Faulkner and Garcia Marquez is actually 100 Years of Solitude was influenced by some ways by when Faulkner in the matter of fact, if you go and you look at or listen to Carson, Marcus’s Nobel Prize speech, he talks about William Faulkner, how important Faulkner was. And Garcia Marquez was a very widely read. He was a journalist, and a poet before it became a novelist. And so both of them had this tremendous respect for William Faulkner. The third thing they talked about, at some length, was what it was like to go to Stockholm to get the Nobel Prize. And I remember Garcia Marquez, two of the things he said, which were really funny, he said, one of the best things about getting the Nobel Prize is a master that were the phrase that Spanish is no eye color, is that you never have to stand in line again. He said, It is if you show up at a restaurant, you show up in a movie theater, but no, no, come to the front door. No, look who’s here. It puts you in the front of the line. In Latin America, there’s a lot of colors. There’s a lot of lines, you have to stand it. Yeah. It was no I call it should never have to stand in line. This was great. And then. But the other thing he said, which really it was very moving. He said, You know, when I went to get the Nobel Prize, he said I met with a committee and I said to them, you know, I’m really 100. But in the history of the Nobel Prize, sometimes the committee’s don’t know nothing about literature. Is it because look, look, are they left out? Joseph Conrad roost, he said, How could you leave out these kinds of writers, but the other thing he said was, you know, if I understood him correctly said that people who win the literary prizes, you get the best departments while you’re there. And he said after he got that award, and he went back, and he looked at the bed and he started to think of all the People who slept in the bed who’d won the prize. And he went down the list. And when he got the Thomas Minh, who he admired tremendously, he said, I just can’t sleep in the same bed that Thomas Mann slept in. And he said he went and slept in the couch, because he had such a thing for Thomas Mann. And so as a result of that evening, I remember, it still moves me that when we left the house, they say goodbye. We were going back to the hotel. I was in the front seat. Tony and her son, Ford, were in the backseat. And we were all in silence. It was just silence. We’re all thinking, what we had just been through. And Toni Morrison, she tapped me on the shoulder. And she said, Davi, you saved the evening. And it still moves me to think about that. You say the evening. He was very perceptive. She figured that out. Then sort of the end of the story is that, you know, they became friends. And back at Princeton, I was a teaching fellow and one of Tony’s courses, faculty members could be teaching fellows, it was a great thing. He didn’t just have graduate students. And she invited Garcia and we came up to Princeton University. And Marcus had not been in the United States for a long time, because of the government here was giving him a bad time, but he came up. And so we spent another week together in this course. And they became friends. And I did a book with Toni Morrison at the end of her life. It’s called Toni Morrison goodness and literary imagination. And at the end of the book, I have an interview I did with her in 2017. And she talks a great deal about movingly about her relationship with, with Garcia Marquez and him coming to Princeton that we could, eventually 10 years past. And Tony was invited to go back to Mexico to the Guadalajara Book Fair, which is a huge book fair. And she called me up and she said, Hey, let’s go again. Let’s go because Garcia Marquez is going to be there. So I we set up a meeting between her and Garcia Marquez, and we flew to Mexico City. And Garcia Marquez decided not to go to the book fair because he had to go to Cuba. But we met again, in Mexico City, we had this splendid lunch together by then they knew each other well. I was tremendously fortunate to be part of to be a witness, and to some extent to have been an aide to this friendship for.
Jennifer Berglund 32:26
How did it influence you as a person? And how did it influence your work or did it
Davíd Carrasco 32:33
First of all, being a colleague, friend of Toni Morrison’s, this meant that I was a witness to her writing in her life, at the moment of his greatest fame when she really was tremendously launched. And it allowed me to learn a lot from her and with her one funny story is I remember one day, I was walking across campus, I hear somebody yelling, and I looked across, and there’s Tony, she’s yelling at me. Let me como. So I went over and she said, Look, I’m going downtown, which is just a couple of blocks. I’m going downtown. Come with me because I’m gonna get my pearls. So I said, okay, I’m okay. Yeah. So I walked, we went downtown, and I just gotten my mail. And we went into the jewelry store. And the pearls weren’t quite ready. So I opened my mail. And I had a royalty check. I’ll never forget this. And the royalty check was for $3,000, which a lot that meant a lot to me at the time. But I knew it was nothing compared to what Tony got, knowing that this was going to end up being kind of funny. I said, Hey, Tony, I just got my royalty check. And she said, How much is a for? I said, Well, it’s for $3,000. He said, For how much? How many months, so it wasn’t six months. She said, Well, that’s great. She says I get $8,000 a month for each of my books. So it was just that together, she’s making a lot of money. And I began to be part of her entourage. I was kind of a learning colleague with her. It was almost like a magical realism. Here I was way out of my league with these two great writers, the greatest writers may be of the second part of the 20th century into the 21st century. And I began to read them more carefully. But I also knew that this was part of my destiny, coming out of this experience in childhood, of one going to Mexico and the Mexican border, Latin American border, and to this experience of growing up in the atmosphere of racial justice and racial change, and somehow it manifested itself later in this being a bridge between a great African American writer and a great Latin American.
Jennifer Berglund 34:49
You had a profound experience the first time you witnessed the Day of the Dead in Mexico City. What were your impressions then? And how do you understand The significance of the holiday today.
Davíd Carrasco 35:05
That phrase you think about the phrase, The Day of the Dead, the dead don’t really have days, the dead are really in the underworld, the dead are at a time where there’s no day. You don’t have today you have to have a sunshine every day. You have to light you have to have that is a very interesting, kind of almost a contradiction. And the Mexican writer, Octavio Paz, in his great book, The labyrinth of solitude, actually has a whole chapter called The days of the dead. And he talks about what it means for Mexicans to organize festivals, which they put great energy, colors expense into bringing skeletons, pictures of the dead, flowers, music could eat those cries into public spaces, not just in the cemeteries, not just in the churches where they certainly are. But these of the dinner are celebrated out in the full light of day where Mexicans acknowledge not only a reverence for their ancestors, but the destiny of all of us. It’s a kind of a memory time. And I remember the first time I really saw this in action was in a town on the southern part of Mexico City. I was working at that time with to ethnobotanist, Roberto by then middle in Addis and trying to understand the role of botany and plants. And they said, Oh, no, we gotta go. Go down to Mitch Kwok. Because this quack is where the Day of the Dead really shows itself. And I remember at that time, I took my mother, I took my daughter, I took some other scholars from the University of Colorado, we went to celebrate. And I mean, this was like walking in to one of the theater, rebellious paintings, the color, the energy, the people, the Mestizo the Indians that were there, and native peoples, the odors, the sounds, it was like an alternative world where the dead are only everything’s alive, the living people are in contact with the dead and the dead are in contact with the living people. So this really made an impression on me. At that time, it was a moment where the Day of the Dead always practice in Mexico was actually having a kind of a renaissance it was growing, and the more and more Mexicans have come to the United States, and the more and more Mexican Americans and Latinos look into their Mexican story, they bring the Day of the Dead with them into the United States. And now it’s at the Peabody Museum. One of the great, powerful institutions that the Spaniards and the Iberians bring to Mesoamerica. And, of course, is the Catholic tradition. And the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has a very powerful calendar call cycle, where saints days and holidays and ceremonies are just the way in which time itself is experienced. Even today in Mexico, people who don’t go to churches, on their Saints Day they celebrate their Saints Day, everybody congratulate them on their Saints Day. But they also brought this whole tradition of of All Souls Day of All Saints Day where at the end of October, there is this celebration of people who have died that year to commemoration. The indigenous people also had something very similar. It’s a matter of fact, we know that one of the Aztec months was a month dedicated to celebrating and putting in contact with the building the hills, they would decorate these hills, and they would bring offerings to the dead during that month end. So these two traditions by people who seem to be very different, in fact, in their calendrical systems, about the same time of the year, they were participating in the caring for what is passed and lost in such a way that what is passed and lost, does not defeat them that was passed and lost becomes a seed regeneration, a potential for regeneration. So you have a kind of in both of these traditions, the Catholic tradition, and the indigenous traditions of the machine because there is also a kind of optimism a hopefulness that what is lost as a residue. And it can be brought back to life through certain types of ritual actions. So for instance, in the machico tradition, bones are also understood to be seeds. Bones go into the ground, seeds go into the ground, they see in that a connection to the day of the time of the dead, the dead have a time to recent return, and to reassert their lives and their gifts. So this is the way I see that connection. Some parts of Mesoamerica there’s only two seasons there’s a dry season and the rainy season. And so the dry season is exactly the one this harvest is Taking place in the dry season. And so what do you do in the dry season? Well, you have to plant the seeds, or honor the seeds that are going to come later, though the both of them are very much harvest ceremonies. So for instance, the Day of the Dead when people come to the Peabody Museum, you’ll see all these colorful flowers, flowers associated with harvest time. So it’s a way of holding on to the life, even as you go as a dead goat back into the ground. Yeah, harvest is this idea of regeneration is fundamental too.
Jennifer Berglund 40:32
As you were saying, Actually, each year we celebrate the day of the dead at the Peabody Museum. And that’s actually largely because of you. So how did that celebration come about? And how have you seen it become an important celebration within the Harvard community?
Davíd Carrasco 40:51
What happened was when I arrived at Harvard, at that time at the Peabody Museum, the director was a woman, they will be Watson, Ruby, new through, I think, some of the staff people that they had some very beautiful pieces of pottery, are associated with, they have the dead, they had a couple of trees of the dead or sacred ornaments. They already had the idea of doing something for a day of the day, but they didn’t really understand it. So Ruby asked me to meet with the staff, Sam taker and some others and talk about the of the dead. And so I did, I came in, laid out what I understood to be the Day of the Dead, they showed these wonderful candelabras were made out of clay, beautifully decorated, they had this flowering skull and so forth. So I laid it out for them. And this guy, Sam Taylor, who was a tremendous staff person there, he went over to an art show, or some people in Somerville, East Boston, and he found two Mexicans, artists, who, when I miss I’ll Hernandez and he brought him over we met, Lisa was from area Mexico called mutual con, which had a sort of a variation on Day of the Day. And we send to talk about what we could build up there on the third floor of some sort of altar, some big ofrenda. There’ll be colorful, that would be beautiful, that would attract people to the day of that this guy, Mr. Hale, he went home. And he drew this painting of what it could be, and he brought it in. And the painting right now is next to the big altar. It’s almost an exact model for what’s there. And Lisa, another Mexican artists, that woman and the staff, they built this marvelous altar that’s up there of the third floor. And if you look at it, it’s got all these symbols from the Janus world. One side is all blue for night. The other side is orange for day, the feathered serpent is there, it’s kind of a small pyramid that also has Catholic symbols in it. And it has, you know, the basic symbols of the day of the number one, it’s got photographs of people who have died. Number two, it’s got flowers, especially miracle, know what language it’s simple. So Cheadle are 20 flower, the flower of completion, there’s food, food for that what people liked when they read it, there’s public because of this very vulnerable kind of paper with these images carved into them. This color is a sense of humor to it. And they built this marvelous altar. And the thing about the altar that’s important for the listeners, is that it’s an exhibition, like there’s many exhibitions at Harvard. But it’s the only exhibition at Harvard, and in many museums, that has actually become a shrine, because over the years, people to museum have quietly come in and made offerings, with photographs of people at Harvard, who either were professors or people who worked at the museum. And they have made contributions to what was originally an exhibit. And it’s now a place where people come to honor the dead. And I think that’s a very powerful thing that’s happened at the Peabody Museum quietly, without trying to draw attention. Here you have an exhibition that is actually an example of what we’ve been talking about. And that is the role of religiosity in the creation of a monument.
Jennifer Berglund 44:18
In the creation of community,
Davíd Carrasco 44:20
A creation of community a keeps going on, because, you know, the Day of the Dead is celebrated there has been celebrated and in the last 10 years, we’ve had this wonderful addition of the ANA Sochi Loon, who is Mexican herself, her mother’s indigenous from Morocco. She’s on the staff there, and she is absolutely enlivened. The Day of the Dead exhibits is another big one that’s in the middle during day of the dead and she’s the one who’s brought up certain Mexican artisans to help decorate the altar that’s in the middle, that students are also involved in decorating. What I’m saying is over the years, what began as a kind of collaboration has even grown people like we have fast and anthropology is CO teaches course. With me Moctezuma’s Mexico is a great archaeologist of Mexico and on dudas, the anemone, the staff. And some of the students are all part of this now.
Jennifer Berglund 45:16
I’m curious, after all this, why is Day of the Dead significant to you personally.
Davíd Carrasco 45:24
Because there’s two things I would say about that. Number one is partly because of the word you use community, they have the dentist’s about the community of the living in the dead. It’s a kind of what we call club events. Yeah, you’re living together with not only the people who are living, but the people who have passed on who are in your memory, but also, you experience has really been present in the world. And one of the things about the Day of the Dead at Harvard and the Peabody Museum that’s important to me, is the fact that over the last 10 or 12 years, they’ve invited people to come to the museum to leave notes to people who’ve passed on in their own lives. And I’ve had a chance to look at these notes every year. It’s amazing, any, they’re in all the languages of the world, they’re in Korean, they’re in Arabic, they’re in German, they’re in the Scandinavian languages, all these people, you give them a chance you scratch them, Hey, would you like to write, and all these notes come. And these are notes to family members, these are notes to animals, these are notes to celebrities, and those that people had never met. But they all write these in, I call this the gift from Mexico, at the Peabody Museum, because for that month, all of the ancestors all around the world are welcome to return to the Peabody Museum on the third floor, where there are these ofrendas these offerings. And that’s a kind of a radical sense of community that we need. In the world that we have today, where there’s so much aggression and hatred and killing, we’re here you have a Mexican, traditional Mexican story that is open to everybody. And that’s kind of what my work has been about trying to as a comparative historian of religions, trying to compare in order to be inclusive, not in order to be exclusive. But to compare, in order to be inclusive to find out what we share. What do we share, and this is what is so important about the of the dead. It’s an example of a creative kind of mourning, where you’re not defeated by the death, you understand that death, to have been a part of life, and you affirm it, and you mourn, and you remember, so that you can be ready for the new kind of life. So that’s in a sense, what it means to me and why I think that what goes on in October at the Peabody Museum on the third floor is not only a gift from Mexico, it’s a gift from Harvard, to all the people that come and I think, what better contribution can a museum make? That something like that, that both educate, inspires comfort, and give people a sense of hope.
Jennifer Berglund 48:15
Davíd Carrasco, thank you so much for being here. This has been absolutely wonderful.
Davíd Carrasco 48:20
Oh, it’s my pleasure. Long live the Peabody Museum and all the good that it’s doing. It’s kind of one of the best staffs. I love over the years working with the staff of the Peabody Museum. I think that this museum has not only had a great history, it has a tremendous future, and it’s doing such great educational work in the community, and I’m just very grateful to be part of it.
Jennifer Berglund 48:46
Today’s HMSC Connects! podcast was edited by Eden Piacitelli, and produced by me, Jennifer Berglund and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Special thanks to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and to Davíd Carrasco for his wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts. See in a couple of weeks.