Wibke Langhorst

”Adios, Señora Muerte, y buenas noches!”

The little girl stretching out her hand to “Lady Death” was very serious. After all, this was the Day of the Dead, and the woman in front of her, in her dress hung with bones and fishing line, the wide-brimmed hat with the big flowers made of tortilla chip bags and plastic shopping bags and the bright orange sash across her chest that advertised “Caution - construction zone” on one side and “Señorita Bahía” on the other, looked suspiciously like the “Catrina,” the laughing skeleton representing death, a central figure in the Mexican “Day of the Dead” tradition. Better make sure you stay on her good side.

In fact, on this particular day “Señorita Bahía,” a character invented by the environmental movement S.O.S. Bahía, who appears at all of their public events and activitities dressed in elaborate “gala robes” adorned with beach trash, was encouraging passersby to visit a somewhat unusual “Day of the Dead” shrine installed by S.O.S. Bahía in the pavilion on the Plaza Municipal. For four days, hundreds of people, the great majority of them local families, walked up the flower petal-covered steps of the pavilion, curious to find out for themselves what all this was about. Puzzled at first by what they found, they soon became intrigued with the exposition and finally realized that the “defunct” to whom they had been asked to pay their respects, in this case were the lost and endangered natural resources of their own town.

More than thirty handmade picture frames - fashioned out of driftwood, glass shards, plastic drinking straws, pebbles, fish bones, rusty metal pieces and garbage typically found on the bay’s beaches - held photos of trees, animals and entire areas affected by pollution or devastated by irresponsible development. Among them were pictures of the mangrove estuary on Playa La Ropa, an important ecosystem and habitat for a great variety of different plant and animal species that has been severely affected by misguided attempts at urbanization; a dolphin that had succumbed to some deep harpoon-inflicted wounds on its back and washed up on a beach in Ixtapa; and hundreds of dead coconut palms in a plantation in Barrio Nuevo that showed the drastic effects of the shrinking groundwater reserves in that area.

A “coffin” made from a discarded refrigerator-sized cardboard box held the remains of an uprooted tree. Candles, string lights hung with little Chinese lanterns made out of soda and beer cans and an upturned umbrella skeleton turned into “chandelier” illuminated the unusual exposition and allowed visitors to read the “obituaries” accompanying the photos of the “dead.” A life-size model of a human skull placed in front of a mirror hinted at humanity’s dire future if we do not bother to protect our environment. Funeral wreaths made out of old tires framed a sign above the entrance to the exposition that read: “Out of respect for our living and our dead, please do not litter.”

On October 30, S.O.S. Bahía, the Movement for the Rescue and Preservation of the Bay of Zihuatanejo, celebrated its third anniversary. Rather than to commemorate the event with a conference or forum on the environmental issues of the area, the organization decided to drive the point home in a much more visual fashion. “We realized that the rather technical information presented at a conference or forum may be too boring and dry for the major part of the population, “said Enrique Krebs, a founding member of S.O.S. Bahía. “We want everybody here to get involved in the protection of our principal tourist attraction and main economic resource, the bay of Zihuatanejo. More than anything, we want our children to learn to respect their environment. For this reason, we set up this altar. Mourning the loss of our natural resources like the loss of some beloved friend or relative makes the experience personal and lets us realize that we are part of nature and that nature is part of us.”

S.O.S. Bahía
Casa Marina, Paseo del Pescador #9
Colonia Centro,Zihuatanejo, GRO.
(755) 554-7227 or 554-4443
www.sosbahia.com
Weekly meetings every Friday at 7pm in Casa Marina

November 2002

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