I heard a commentary on NPR last night about the spontaneous shrines to the victims that have popped up in New York City in the aftermath of September 11. I’m talking about the the little piles of crucifixes, teddy bears, memorial cards and what-not that symbolize people’s grief over the tragedy. In the past decade or so, these seem to be a pretty common response to sudden deaths from traffic accidents (thus the roadside shrines previous thread you see along the freeway) or shootings or accidental deaths. I don’t seem to remember these shrines appearing, say, twenty years ago, at least in this part of the country.
Anyway, the NPR commentator drew parallels between the NYC street shrines and traditional Mexican Day of the Dead shrines. That started me a-wondering if there is a direct connection between these two. So my question is:
How did these spontaneous public shrines make their way into contemporary American culture? WHere did they originate? When did this happen? Is it connected to the Day of the Dead shrines? Or, possibly, is this phenomenon connected with the DC Vietnam War Memorial, where vets leave momentos of their tour in Vietnam?
FWIW, my first memory of these displays is from the 1980s, seeing flowered crosses on the side of the interstate where fatal accidents had occurred. This would have been when I was in college, 1986-1990. I feel relatively certain that I understood what I was seeing intuitively, but I remember thinking it was very weird.
Now I see them on regular city streets and the only thing I think is weird is, “How did somebody work up enough speed here to get killed in an accident.” I know it’s not that simple, but that’s what I find myself thinking.
I heard the same piece on All Things Considered, and was quite suprised when the commentator said that she first saw roadside shrines in Mexico. I’ve seen them all over the place, though my earliest recollections are from the mid-ninties.
KneadToKnow, a shrine appeared at a sleepy corner in our town where a woman was hit and killed by a bus.
I’ve seen a lot of those here in Los Angeles, for at least 20 years, and had always assumed they were carried over from Mexican culture; I suppose I thought that because of the style of candles and decor. However, witnessing the example of Duck Duck Goose inspired me to do some searching.
It seems that such shrines are relatively common in largely Catholic populations, and have been seen in Mexico for at least 40 years. They first started in the United States in the Southwest, where there are large migrant populations; thus the Latin American connection. It has since spread throughout the country.
I didn’t find any definitive articles or scholarly opinions, I regret to say, but a number of personal websites and human-interest newspaper articles. (And thus the difference between myself and DDG.)
SuaSponte: Thanks for the bump. It’s also the first time I’ve gotten a compliment on my question-making ability, too.
KneadToKnow: Your recollection of seeing these displays matches my own; I first remember seeing them along roadsides in the late-eighties timeframe. In the past few years, these memorials seem to be cropping up at the sight of any accidental death, automobile-related or not. For example, when the local paper reports on the (thankfully occasional) kid-caught-in-the-crossfire drug-related killing, the article invariably has an accompanying picture of a pile of teddy bears and handwritten notes in front of the kid’s house. I’m not sure if this extension to non-auto-related deaths is a more recent phenomenon, or whether I just didn’t notice this before.
seawitch: Great site! The artist who did the documentation actually lives near me, so many of the roadside markers he depicted are close to where I live. Also, from his artist’s statement:
Not the most conclusive source, but he suggests that this practice has been around in America for a while. I was hoping that there would be a professional contemporary American anthropologist in the audience that would have a definitive answer to this question, but I suppose that’s too narrow a specialty to hope for…
First, a little background about anthropologists: you want definitive answers, try physics. The best you’ll get from an anthropologist is “maybe.”
So here is the answer of a non-professional, Senior in Anthropology (and Math): Maybe.
There are some references in the literature to a parallel between roadside markers and the day of the dead.
It may be that Mexico was the source of this tradition, and it migrated eslewhere. Reid and Reid (2001) report some sources as saying
While a newspaper article is not exactly the best source for academic information, Reid and Reid cite some information which is not necessarily contrary to this view:
There are some occurrences of this marking phenomena which Reid and Reid cite, which don’t fit the pattern:
Since no treatise on anthropology is complete without a MPFC reference, I would just like to add my own observed instance of this behavior: England apparently had a practice of marking “accident black spots” in the late sixties. One such black spot made an appearance in the source of all wisdom Monty Pyton’s Flying Circus. I think is was in the episode “the royal philharmonic orchestra goes to the bathroom,” but I might be wrong.
Conclusion:
The marking of accident sites does seem to have some antiquity, and relation to the Mexican tradition of the Day of the Dead, the link is not conclusive. It may be that one source of this tradition is Mexico, and the tradition has migrated around the world, or the practice of marking accident sites may have more than one origin.
Works Cited
Henzel, Cynthia 1989 “Cruzesin the Roadside Landscape of Northeastern Mexico” Journal of Cultural Geography11 pp93-106.
Reid, Jon and Cynthia Reid 2001 “A cross marks the spot: a study of roadside death memorials in Texas and Oklahoma” Death Studies25 pp341-356.
To further the field, I also found these in Greece along roadsides as shrines to loved ones who died (usually in car crashes). I saw them in Italy as well.
The best recollection of my Nanna is that small dedications (wooden cross and/or a bunch of flowers) to people who had died in road accidents existed in the NSW country town, Narrabri, in the 1970s.
As far as southern suburban Sydney is concerned, they became widespread in the late 80s IIRC.
So the question from the Aus point of view is, were they a simultaneous invention in different parts of the world, or an import from the USA?
Hey, a qualified “maybe” is much better than an “I dunno,” which is all I had to work with before. And, considering how much I’m paying you, I’m willing to relax my requirement of “professional.” Great research; I appreciate it. This leaves me with two almost embarassingly minor questions, though:
Based on my personal recollections, it seems that these shrines are much more common today than they were twenty, or even ten years ago. Are these shrines indeed more popular (or, alternatively, more geographically widespread)?
Assuming the answer to (1) is “yes”, is there a reason for the spread of shrines into contemporary American culture?
The usual practice in my state is for the local jurisdiction to remove these spontaneous shrines when they appear, on the grounds that they distract drivers and can actually cause additional accidents. I’d have a problem with that if they were simple markers, but so many of them are mainly a stack of teddy bears cruelly tied to a utility pole that they really are distracting.
White, roadside crosses have been a common sight in Montana from the early 1950’s that I can remember. A quick check on yahoo reveals this informative site: http://www.flash.net/~leimer/spont.html
These shrines in the U.S. may well have a Mexican origin. However, the practice is widespread in Latin America. Here in Panama roadside crosses or shrines are very common to mark the site of a fatal accident.
