La Ofrenda: For Papi and Mami

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La Ofrenda
For Papi and Mami

Roberto Romero · 1928 – 1994
Cecelia Romero · 1931 – 1998
que en paz descansen

Bienvenidos

I'm Monica Hurd. I'm forty-one, I'm a court reporter in San Antonio, and I can type two hundred and twenty-five words a minute on a steno machine, so this page went fast. My husband Roger did the technical part and he gets his own say at the bottom.

Every year at the end of October I build an ofrenda, an altar for our dead, in the front room of our house for Día de los Muertos. For the last five years it has been for my father, and since last year it has been for my mother too. This year our kids, Francisco, who is fourteen, and Kelly, who is nine, said, Mom, you should put it on the computer so the cousins in Houston and California can see it. So here it is. I'm planning it right now, the way I do every September, with a list on the refrigerator and Roger asking me what everything costs.

I can't show you pictures yet. Roger's office has a scanner but it's been broken since August, and I am not mailing Papi's and Mami's photographs to anybody. So I'll describe everything. I'm good at describing. I do it for a living.

What Día de los Muertos is

Every year somebody at work asks me if it's Mexican Halloween. No. Halloween is about being scared of the dead. Día de los Muertos is about being glad to see them.

The belief is that once a year the souls of the people we've lost come home to visit their families. We get the house ready for them like we would for any company coming: we clean, we cook their favorite food, we put out flowers, and we light the way so they can find us. It falls on the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls.

November 1 is for los angelitos, the little ones, the children who died. Their souls come first.
November 2 is for the grown-ups.

On the second, after Mass, we go to the cemetery on the West Side where Papi and Mami are buried, and we pull the weeds, wash the headstone, and leave marigolds, and half the families in San Antonio are doing the same thing on the same morning, with lawn chairs and radios and tacos. It's not sad. Okay, it's a little sad. But mostly it's a family reunion where some of the family is invisible.

When I was a girl we just went to Mass and to the cemetery. My grandmother, Mami's mother, built an altar every year in her bedroom, and when she died Mami kept it up in a small way. I started building a real one the first year Roger and I were married, for my grandparents, and Roger has helped me build it for sixteen years now. It has gotten bigger every year. Roger says by the time Kelly's grown we'll need to move.

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Who they were

Papi, Roberto Romero, was a mechanic. He had a garage behind our house on the West Side with a hand painted sign and a radio that only got the Spurs and the Tejano station, and for forty years he kept half the cars on the West Side running. People paid him in cash, in tamales, in favors, and sometimes not at all, and he fixed them anyway. He could tell what was wrong with a car by listening to it from the kitchen. He drank a cold Big Red every afternoon of his life, and he called everybody under fifty "mi'jo," including the priest. He died of a heart attack in his garage in April 1994, with his hands on an engine. He was sixty-five. We all agree he would have picked it that way, but not so soon.

Mami, Cecelia Romero, ran the cafeteria at an elementary school for twenty-six years. She fed every kid in the neighborhood twice, once at school and once at our kitchen table. She was small and fast and she never sat down. Every December she ran the family tamalada, the tamale-making day, like a general: forty dozen tamales, pork in red chile, sweet ones with raisins, and bean and cheese for my sister-in-law who doesn't eat pork. She went through her cancer the same way she ran the tamalada, organized and stubborn and worried about everybody but herself. She died in March of last year, at home, with all four of us kids there. She was sixty-seven.

The ofrenda, piece by piece

Here's what goes on it, and why. Every family does it a little different. This is how we do it.

The table

Three levels, built from our coffee table, two wooden crates Roger nailed together, and a shoebox on top for the photos. It all goes under Mami's white lace tablecloth, the one that only came out for Christmas and funerals.

Cempasúchil (marigolds)

The flower of the dead. The bright orange and the strong smell help the souls find their way home. We put them in coffee cans all over the altar, and on the night of November 1 we pull the petals off a few and make a path from the front door to the altar, so Papi and Mami can find it. Roger grows them along the back fence. This year they're late and I'm worried. If they don't make it we'll buy them at the market like everybody else.

Veladoras (candles)

The tall candles in glass jars from the grocery store, one for every soul on the altar, plus one for the Virgin of Guadalupe, who stands in the middle. They light the way. We light them on the night of the first and keep them going until the second. Roger is in charge of making sure we don't burn the house down.

Copal

A tree resin that we burn like incense in a little clay burner. It smells like pine and lemons and church. The smoke cleans the space and carries our prayers. Kelly says it makes the house smell like a forest on fire. She means it nicely.

Pan de muerto

The bread of the dead. A round, sweet egg bread with strips of dough across the top shaped like little bones, and sugar sprinkled over. We buy two loaves from the panadería where Mami bought hers, one for the altar and one for us, because if you put only one out, the kids eat it off the altar.

Calaveras de azúcar (sugar skulls)

Skulls made of sugar pressed in a mold, decorated with colored icing and bits of shiny foil, with a name written across the forehead. They're not scary. They're smiling. Kelly does the icing every year. Last year she wrote ROBERTO and ran out of room for the O and had to squeeze it in sideways, and I left it, because Papi would have laughed. This year she's practicing CECELIA on paper first.

Water and salt

A glass of water, because they've come a long way and they're thirsty. A little dish of salt, to purify.

Papi's place

His cap, a greasy blue one from an auto parts store that he wore so long it went gray. His tire gauge, which lived in his shirt pocket. And a cold Big Red, opened, with a straw, the way he drank it. (I take it out of the refrigerator at the last minute. He hated a warm soda.) This year we're adding a Spurs pennant. Papi listened to the Spurs on that garage radio for twenty years waiting for a championship, and in June they finally won it, five years too late for him to hear. My brother Jimmy drove downtown that night honking his horn and says he was honking for Papi.

Mami's place

Her rosary, the crystal one she carried in her purse and prayed in the car at red lights. Her name badge from the school cafeteria. And her tamale pot, the big dented enamel steamer that held twelve dozen at a time, which my sister Sandra kept and brings over every October in the back seat with a seat belt on it. In the pot go a dozen of Mami's pork tamales, made from her recipe by the three of us girls, and they're never quite right, and every year we argue about why. Next to it a cup of hot chocolate, the Mexican kind with cinnamon, because she always had one while she worked.

The photos

The top level is for their pictures. Papi in his coveralls, leaning on the fender of a green '57 Chevy, about 1960, squinting because he never once wore sunglasses. Their wedding picture from 1951, Mami tiny in a veil and Papi with so much hair. Mami at the tamalada in 1996, surrounded by grandkids and masa, pointing at the camera like she's about to tell whoever was taking it to get back to work. (It was Roger. She did.) And small pictures of my grandparents and Roger's grandma from Oklahoma, who is new to this, but welcome. When the scanner is fixed I'll put them all up here.

For the angelitos, the little ones, we put a small candle and a toy on the bottom step, for the babies in our family from long ago whose names we only know from my grandmother. Gracias a Dios, we have none of our own to put there.

About grief

I'll be honest. The first year after Papi died, I didn't want to build it. It felt like setting a table for somebody who wasn't coming. Mami made me. She said, mi'ja, that's the point, they are coming. So I built it, and on the night of the first, with the candles going and the copal smoke and the smell of marigolds and Big Red, I swear I felt him in that room. Maybe it was just remembering. Maybe that's all it ever is. That's enough.

Last year, the first year with Mami on it too, I cried the whole time I was building it, and then Kelly put the sugar skull with the crooked O on the altar and we all started laughing and couldn't stop. That's what it's for. You get to cry and laugh at the same time, and nobody thinks you're crazy.

If you've lost somebody this year, you don't need to be Mexican or Catholic to light a candle and put out their favorite thing. Try it. Set a place for them. Tell them what's been happening.

Roger's two cents

I'm Roger. I'm 45, I was born and raised in Lawton, Oklahoma, and I grew up Methodist, where the dead stay in the cemetery and you visit them on Memorial Day. The first time Monica showed me an altar, at her grandmother's in 1982, with the skulls and the candles and the bread with the bones on it, I'll admit I thought it was a little spooky. I was polite about it.

Her dad called me "el Okie" for twelve years and taught me to change my own oil, my own brakes, and a water pump, in that order. Her mother fed me until I gained twenty pounds, and at my first tamalada I spread the masa so thick she took the spoon away and put me on corn husk duty for three Christmases. I earned the spoon back in 1986. I still have it, so to speak.

I figured out pretty fast what the altar is for. It's for saying, we didn't forget you. We kept your chair. We still make your tamales wrong. And when you've got a father-in-law who was nicer to you than he had any reason to be, and a mother-in-law who ran your life for sixteen years and you liked it, you want them to know the porch light's on.

My jobs: build the frame, haul the crates, grow the marigolds (late this year, don't remind her), light the copal, put out the Big Red, and keep the candles away from the curtains. I also did this whole page, so if something's broken, that's me.

— Roger

Write to us

If you build an ofrenda, tell us about it. What goes on yours? Who's on it? And if you knew Roberto or Cecelia Romero, from the garage or the cafeteria or the West Side, please write. We'll put up the photographs in November, after the altar is built, and the scanner is fixed, si Dios quiere.

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Visitors to our altar:

[email protected]
Monica and Roger Hurd, San Antonio, Texas
Last updated September 21, 1999