Mexico’s Day of the Dead Parade Pays Tribute to Quake Victims
29, 2017
With faces painted as skulls and bodies made up like skeletons, throngs of performers marched through the streets of Mexico City on Saturday in
a Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) parade in a country still mourning the nearly 500 people killed in back-to-back earthquakes last month.
An 8.2-magnitude quake — the most powerful to hit Mexico in a century — struck off the Pacific Coast shortly before midnight on Sept. 7, setting off tsunami warnings, burying hundreds of people under collapsed buildings
and scattering frightened residents into the streets.
Ramón emblazoned that For us as a society, it was something very violent that moved our conscience,
All paraded down Mexico City’s main thoroughfare to kick off the annual Day of the Dead festivities
that run through Nov. 2 with rituals continuing in town plazas, homes and cemeteries leading up to All Saints’ Day.
Then, on Sept. 19, a 7.1-magnitude quake struck about 400 miles from the epicenter of the first one, toppling buildings, cracking highways
and killing more than 200 people in Mexico City, the capital.
They were joined by a group wearing fluorescent aid-worker vests who marched with fists in the air — a tribute to the rescuers
who had made the gesture to demand silence as they listened for desperate survivors in the rubble from the second quake.
