For years now I have recognized the signifi - cance that death holds in Mexican culture, but even so, its total thematic centrality never fails to surprise me. The roots of Mexican fascination with death penetrate deep into the people’s history.

In the state museum in the ex-convent of Santo Domingo, for example, scores of the pre-Hispanic artefacts are funerary pieces, somber yet potent divinities which affi rm for us today the nature of these ancient cultures’ primary metaphysical preoccupation.

From those pre-Columbian civilizations, modern-day Mexicans have inherited a legacy that marks every aspect of their lives – the quotidian, the artistic, the philosophical. Death is a theme that appears just as readily in the comical calaveras, or skeletons, that children collect for the Day of the Dead as in the most profound literary texts of the greatest Mexican and Latin- American writers.

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