From Aztec sacrifices to Day of the Dead, Aguascalientes museum offers insight to Mexican fascination with death
By Chris Hawley
USA Today
Dead men might tell no tales, but death itself — well, in Mexico, the subject fills an entire museum.
The National Museum of Death in Aguascalientes, founded two years ago, explores the country's macabre interest in death and dying, from the mass human sacrifices of the Aztecs to modern-day Day of the Dead celebrations, which begin Sunday.
In its galleries, human skulls encrusted with turquoise grimace at visitors. Tiny skeletons gather around miniature banquet tables, toasting their own demise. The Grim Reaper glares across a room at a case full of bloody crucifixes.
"Mexicans have death imprinted all over their art and culture," museum director Jose Antonio Padilla said. "So why not a museum about it?"
The museum came about because a Mexican art collector had a lot of skeletons in his closet: dozens of tiny calaveritas, or skeleton dioramas, along with hundreds of other death-related artworks he had acquired over 50 years.
The owner, Octavio Bajonero Gil, was looking for a museum to take his collection. Meanwhile, the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, a state college, was looking to found an art museum and wanted something different, Padilla said.
The museum, with Bajonero's donation as its core collection, opened in 2007 in two buildings owned by the university in downtown Aguascalientes. Admission is 20 pesos, about $1.53.
Reaction to the museum among Mexicans has been mixed, Padilla said, partly because the country is grappling with a wave of murders following President Felipe Calderón's military crackdown on drug cartels.
"People from (border cities in) the north say, 'Why do you want to celebrate something that I'm trying to avoid every day?' " Padilla said. "But this is not a museum of drug violence. It's a museum about a certain artistic tradition."
About one-third of the museum's 70,000 annual visitors are from other countries, mainly the United States.
