Day Of The Dead (1940)

Day Of The Dead festivities are in full flow this weekend, so we wandered the streets of Coyoacan, soaking up the atmosphere. From Xoco Cemetery which was crammed full of families tending to colourful graves and vaults, to the Museum of Popular Culture which was similarly chocabloc of crafts and traditional Day Of The Dead food. Talking of which, we had lunch in a cafe in the Jardin Centenario: enchilladas mostly but preceded by an 'interesting' hors d'oeuvres of tacos, guacamole and fried grasshoppers (see left). They tasted of very little really - just crispy & salty.
Ended up visiting Leon Trotsky's house, now a museum, where he and his wife lived as political refugees from 1939-40 and where he was famously assassinated with an ice-pick. The house has been kept as it was all these past 75 years.
I hadn't know that the muralist David Siqueiros had also attempted to assassinate Trotsky three months earlier by occupying the courtyard and raking the surrounding rooms with machine gun fire and explosives. Amazingly Trotsky survived, but not for long.