As Mexico celebrates the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos), I'm reminded of a visit I once made with a Swedish friend to the Museum of Mummies in the picturesque colonial Mexican city of Guanajuato. The perfectly preserved corpses of babies and adults were brashly displayed amid neon lights, fake cobwebs, and other cheap Halloween-esque adornments. Confronted with this seeming lack of respect for the dead and vulgarity of the displays, I explained to my shocked companion that Mexicans have a peculiarly different relationship with death to other cultures. As the Nobel prize-winning Mexican writer Octavio Paz explained in his seminal work Labyrinth of Solitude:
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