Nun’s Contributions to Chicano Heritage Recalled at Festival

It was a strange crowd that gathered at Calvary Cemetery on Saturday afternoon to honor the memory of a Franciscan nun who devoted her life to God and to the artists of East Los Angeles.

Out on the grassy lawn, there were 12 skeletons, two papier-mache Satans and a walking seashell.

But to organizers of East Los Angeles’ Day of the Dead celebration, the costumed celebrants were an appropriately colorful tribute to Sister Karen Boccalero, who died of a heart attack in July at 64. It was Boccalero who turned the Mexican festival that evokes the memory of the departed into an annual East L.A. tradition.

The event embodied Boccalero’s passion for the spiritual and artistic heritages of the Chicano community in which she grew up--a love that prompted her to help found Self-Help Graphics, a center for local artists, a quarter-century ago.

“She was witness to the [Chicano] struggle,” said Tomas Benitez, director of Self-Help Graphics, who assisted the Italian American Boccalero at the center for six years.

“Part of her mission was that through art and culture the community would be advanced, that there would be a triumph of cultural identity and pride.”

As Franciscan nuns led prayers at Boccalero’s grave, about 40 people prepared outside the cemetery gates for the mile-and-a-quarter procession from the cemetery to the arts center.

Some smeared on black and white face paint, transforming their heads into living skulls. Others drew white collarbones and ribs onto their black outfits.

Then, to the beat of a drum and the whistle of a piccolo, the crowd began to make its way up Downey Road.

Lucia Rivera of Eagle Rock was dressed as a skeleton, her straw hat crammed with marigolds. Her parents, she said, came to Los Angeles from Mexico and tried to assimilate. To their generation, the ancient Day of the Dead festival was better left behind. “When they came to the United States, they wanted to adapt themselves. But the second and third generation, like me, are looking back to their roots.”

Looking for those roots includes a dialogue with ancestors.

In Mayan culture, the celebration was the one chance in the year for the dead to rejoin the living. It was also a chance for the living to embrace the idea of death and to laugh at it.

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“People in death are not afraid to die. They mock death,” said Ann Murdy, who lectures about the festival and visited Boccalero’s grave Saturday. “The indigenous people feel that it’s the responsibility of the living to welcome back the dead once a year.”

Today, Rivera and her family plan to visit her grandfather’s grave and, in the spirit of the festival, bring some of his favorite Jack Daniel’s--sustenance after the long journey to meet with the living.

Boccalero organized the event not only to help build bridges between people and their departed loved ones, but to connect Chicanos with their heritage.

She founded her art center in 1972, as Cesar Chavez’s farm workers union was beginning to win landmark victories to represent California workers, and the loosely defined Chicano movement--focusing on U.S. inhabitants of Mexican descent--was gaining momentum.

At the time, Boccalero and others were encouraging local artists to express themselves and their heritage through their work, said Benitez.

The Day of the Dead festival was a perfect way to bring artists together with an audience to celebrate the ancient and modern in Mexican culture, the artistic and the spiritual.

On Saturday, three months after Boccalero’s heart attack, a packet of her favorite Benson & Hedges cigarettes and a cup of coffee adorned an altar in the art center, left to tempt her back.

Meanwhile, friends celebrated the life of the loud, sometimes gruff, but always compassionate nun. And they recalled how hard it has been to cope with her death.

“It was tough,” Benitez said. “It was tough.

“But Day of the Dead isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It’s got to be felt emotionally to completely understand that life and death are part of the same continuum, and that even as you mourn the death of loved ones, you celebrate their life.”