Xayacatlán de Bravo

In Xayacatlán de Bravo the Day of the Dead is spent not at the cemetery but at home. The ofrenda works as a meal served to the souls in courses: in the morning, coffee and a pozole of ground pumpkin seed with hierba santa, with totopos; at midday huaxmole, a mole of dried goat with guajillo chile, avocado leaf and guaje seed that starts cooking days ahead; in the afternoon xatos, triangular masa tortillas, and for supper enfrijoladas, known here as dìtànduchi. There is red sugar-dusted bread, clay jars of water, aguardiente cured with wormwood, fruit from the milpa, copal and candles, and the dead are believed to leave at two in the morning, when the food is shared among the living.

The village, seat of its municipality, had 1,079 people in 2020 and stands at about 1,250 m in Puebla's lower Mixteca. Its Nahuatl name joins xalli, sand, and yacatl, point or corner, with the locative tlan: "near the sandy corner". The municipality was founded in 1930, covers about 60 km² and had 1,570 residents in 2020; it borders Santa Inés Ahuatempan to the north, San Jerónimo Xayacatlán to the west and Acatlán to the south. Some six hundred people speak Mixtec or Nahuatl. The 17th-century parish church of the Virgin of Ocotlán keeps the style of its period, and the municipal brass band is part of village life.

The landscape is hills under dry tropical forest, which covers almost 70% of the land, with pasture on a quarter and very little farmland. The climate is semi-warm, averaging 18 to 24 °C with 700 to 900 mm of summer rain, and the water drains to the Acatlán River in the Balsas basin. Every part of the goat is used: the dried meat goes into huaxmole and the hides are laid out in the sun. Local hands paint gourds and gourd toys, weave reed baskets and, less and less, palm hats, mats and tenates, and carve stone metates and molcajetes; black or navy rebozos are still worn. Besides mole, pipián and tamales there are fruit preserves and palanquetas, jobo infusion and aguardiente.