Walking through the streets of Mexico City is not strange to find hundreds of interventions to the public space that give testimony of the life and events of everyday life: graffiti, sculptures, paintings, monuments, or even their counterparts: the anti-monuments. Among all these modifications to space are cenotaphs.
What are cenotaphs?
Cenotaphs are small crosses placed on the sidewalks of streets and avenues that represent and remember the exact place where a person’s life ended. Although their bodies are not physically there, that cross remains as an important reminder of the story of their demise. In Mexico, these are usually visited in the same way as cemeteries.
The origin of this tradition
Like much of Mexican folklore, it is believed that the tradition of cenotaphs was born in colonial times and was adopted by the Mexican people almost unintentionally. It is enough to think that they are crosses that remember the dead, a symbol coming from European religions.
It is thought that the practice of cenotaphs began even before 1828 according to the Historical Dictionary, and its purpose was to honor the death of those who died in the war and whose bodies were not found; to give them a place to rest.
Little by little these ’empty tombs’ began to change their purpose going from the lives lost in the war to those of important historical characters such as the Niños Heroes or Benito Juárez with his Hemicycle, and finally reaching the lives of any person who died unexpectedly in the streets of the city.
Sudden death
It is true that the crosses placed in these places mainly remember the deceased, but unlike the cemeteries, they are also a reminder of the violence and suddenness of deaths in the public space, whether due to car accidents, murders, or other unusual causes.
As Dr. Hugo José Suárez says: “Crosses are not placed where people died naturally, but when there has been some kind of accident, some kind of irruption of daily life. The significance has to be seen on that side: to mark the place of the extraordinary and to become owners of that space.”
This makes the cenotaphs a ‘living’ reminder not only of death but of the history of the city, of its dangers and irregularities, an unofficial archive of the ‘small’ tragedies within the massive city.
Figures and white bicycles
Sometimes you won’t find crosses on the street where a person died. Instead, you’ll come across bicycles painted white as part of an initiative that was born in the United States.
These new cenotaphs began to be erected in 2009 to remember the lives of cyclists lost in crashes or accidents, Liliana Castillo Reséndiz being the first person to whom a white bicycle was dedicated on the corner of Avenida Coyoacán and Mayorazgo.
Together, crosses and bicycles ‘adorn’ the city turning it into another pantheon. And we are not exaggerating when we say that there may be hundreds of these altars around the streets: if one of them is placed for each road death, just from child cases alone there would be three new crosses per day according to INEGI data.
The next time you walk down the street and see one of these crosses or one of the white bicycles, remember that something happened there, something out of the ordinary that ended someone’s life, and even if you didn’t know that person, recognizing the event helps to keep their memory alive.
Photos from: Andrea Di Castro, Wikipedia, El Universal, Máspormás.
Translated by María Isabel Carrasco Cara Chards