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Clothing the Body in Otherness
each time the human bones appearing and disappearing beneath the
fleshly forms. The young wife was rendered cold and immobile as the
battle waged; she barely recovered later, after days of illness.
Examined against the calavera figure, the nawal wife, at the skele-
tal moment, is an image of death, decay, and metamorphosis, an im-
age that takes on a deeper significance in a time of massive unrest and
both individual and communal denial of violence. Such an image, trig-
gering fear and spurring rejection, creates a holding on to and evoca-
tion of the idealized domestic union, the space of fertility and repro-
duction. It is no surprise that images of death, unrecognized as such,
should be symbolically expressed against the fertile and childbearing
feminine other amidst the disappearance of so many earthly bodies,
the lack of knowledge about where they were buried and angst about
the destiny of their souls, undirected between the layers of existence
without rites of burial, unable to join the ancestors. But reference to
the space of the ancestral generations behind any society at a histor-
ical moment suggests that the role of the woman as nawal may actu-
ally be a manifestation of power at a deeper generative level. Power
tapped from the layers of existence beyond the mortal is dangerous to
those who come into contact with it, but it may also be essential in a
world moving through destructive chaos. The appearance of women
asnawals may indicate ritual symbolic roles arising in a time of wide-
spread violence and need. To argue thus it is necessary to briefly trace
the public performance of male and female roles in both familial and
historical cycles.
Women control the domestic sphere, and their power, while effaced
in verbal interactions with men, emerges in the ceremonial roles that
they take within house compounds to mark life-cycle transitions such
as birth, marriage, and death. They tend babies, weave the cloth, and
prepare the food for daily presentation and for ceremonies; they wash
and clothe the dead for the last bodily journey. Furthermore, the in-
fluence of women expands beyond the domestic sphere as they co-
ordinate the number and status of attendees for community celebra-
tions marking seasonal transitions. Vera stated that it is as a married
couple that the senior members of the Cofradias sponsor celebrations
within the seasonal and sacred cycles, for both husband and wife have
