Gathering to Dance Amid Tragedy

On a storm-swept street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, this is what post-Hurricane Sandy catharsis looked like Saturday, after dark: A dozen costumed dancers bounced off the sidewalk, each one spinning, then kicking, then spinning again. The dancers moved in a circle, around and around. They yelped. They screamed. They raised their arms toward the sky.

Sweat poured down their faces, down their bare arms, between their bare toes. The wind blew violently. “Some people call these dances,” said Olliniomazatl Cruz, 28, speaking in Spanish after the dance. “We call them prayers.”

This past weekend, New York's most traditional Latinos marked the Day of the Dead (el Dia de los Muertos), the simultaneously joyous and macabre holiday when many Mexicans and some other Latin Americans honor their fallen friends and family. Before Hurricane Sandy, the group dancing on the corner of 54th Street and Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, called Cetiliztli Nauhcampa Quetzalcoatl in Ixac hitlan, had already planned a small series of activities at St. Jacobi Lutheran Church in honor of the holiday.

But when the hurricane hit, those events took on heightened meaning and drew in hundreds of unlikely of participants.

Before the storm, Juan Carlos Ruiz, 42, the community organizer at the church, had expected Saturday to be a small gathering of Latinos around a community altar in the church's basement. But when the storm came, he had helped convert St. Jacobi into a disaster relief hub. On Saturday afternoon, volunteers blanketed the hallways and classrooms. The basement was a maze of donated cans and bags of jackets and blankets. Further upstairs, exhausted Occupy Wall Street organizers dispatched their colleagues to the Rockaways, Broad Channel and Staten Island, laden with supplies. Outside, volunteers from as far as Baltimore unloaded vans with food. They had gathered 20,000 items of food that day, Mr. Ruiz said.

“On the Day of the Dead, we don't just remember the past,” said Mr. Ruiz, speaking in Spanish amid the activity, “but also the present. The way that many of our dreams just die. Today, in the shadow of the hurricane, we see that many lives have been destroyed. The question is: What are we doing collectively as a community to respond?”

The Day of the Dead ceremony began at dusk, when the dance group exited the church, calling on frantic Hurricane Sandy relief volunteers to pause and join them in a procession around the neighborhood. Two drummers beat out a tune. And the members of Cetiliztli Nauhcampa Quetzalcoatl in Ixachitlan began to twist and jump, echoing the sounds and movements of their Mexica, or pre-colonial, ancestors. “Ometeo,” yelled Karen Lopéz, 27, a childbirth coach and a teacher of English to foreign-born students. The rest of the group repeated her call for energy, “Ometeo.”

Three dancers blew conch shells in rounds. Volunteers f ollowed them as they bounced singing up 54th Street.

After nearly an hour dancing outdoors, the group headed back to the church. Mr. Cruz, an immigrant from the small town of Crescencio Morales, Mexico, crept to a nearly hidden attic area and undressed. First, he took off his feathered head dress, or copilli, and then he unfastened the anklets of shells, called ayoyotes, that covered his legs.

His apartment in Bensonhurst had survived the hurricane. But he has lived through other challenges and other tragedies, including a dangerous border crossing at age 17, and the death of many family members at the hands of the Mexican government, he said.

“When I dance, it's for the people there in my country,” he said, speaking in Spanish. “And for all those who have suffered crossing the border.”

His family had taught him to accept the mayhem of the past in order to enjoy the beauty of the future, he said. “One must receive death with open arms,” he said. “Conscious that it will come to us one day. That is the tradition of our ancestors.”